Recommended: Lands of Memory by Felisberto Hernandez

Felisberto Hernandez is a Uruguayan writer of the mid-twentieth century, often cited as a major influence by other South American writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Julio Cortazar. I heard of him through ‘Bartyleby &Co’ by Enrique Vila-Maltas. Felisberto (as he is known) was primarily a musician, a pianist who performed throughout Uruguay and Argentina, and many of the stories in this collection feature a first-person narrator who is also a touring pianist. Like many writers, his narrator blurs the line between fiction and autobiography and one would have to know much more about him to sift through the differences.

His narrators are often concerned with problems of memory – why we remember certain things and not others, and his memnomic associations of people, objects and events are often quite unusual and striking. Impressions once made are hard to shake and so he cannot recall a certain person without also evoking a specific image, color or scent. These associations lead the reader through a maze of memories, though always returning, when you least expect it, to the original thread of the tale.

My favorite of this collection is “The Crocodile”. Here an itinerant pianist is attempting to augment his meager income with sales of ladies stockings, and finding success in neither endeavor. He voyages from town to town trying to both organize a concert and convince retailers to stock his hose. One day he breaks down and starts crying in frustration, drawing the nearby lady customers over to console him. Their attentiveness helps convince the retailer to place an order, and in lieu of this unexpected achievement, our hero adopts this as a regular practice. Soon he is known as the wandering weeping salesman. Our amusement at his folly is tempered by our sympathy with his plight. As readers we are drawn so far inside the narrator that we cannot laugh at him without somehow offending ourselves!

Some samples of his imagery:

That afternoon she appeared and disappeared like a light rain interrupted by sunshine

But she was the one who was pushing her way into the story as forcefully as if it were a crowded bus

Ghosts’n'Things

We like to make up those kinds of store names, like “Blue Jeans Etc” and “Beverages and More”, only ours are even more stupid, if you can believe that, like  ”Pickles & Stuff” or “Bottlecaps Galore!”. But on the subject of ghosts, I was happy to see one of my “ghost stories” garner a genuine five star review on Amazon. “Hidden HIghway” has been neck and neck in a race for worst overall rating with “Fissure Monroe”, averaging somewhere around 1.8 on Goodreads, so seeing a 5 was a bit of a shock, but a pleasant one. And here it is:

 Roland and Josefa’s Ghostly Gossip Session May 22, 2013

Tom Lichtenberg has written a ghost story with imagination and quirkiness, the approach being two people smoking/drinking/eating and they gossip among themselves about the strange characters that inhabit their world of a motel. Just like the great gossip sessions you’ve attended, the flow of the book runs the same. Imagine someone telling you the characters in a soap opera, the who’s who and the what’s they done. It’s going to get complicated and under the hand of Lichtenberg, the story becomes fun with the revelations of the definite characters and the strange interrelationships. This motel is located in nowhere where nowhere people go to live, strive, and die. The nefarious activities that thrive around this end of nowhere is a ghost house supervised by the ghost witch Eugenia & the television watching and donut eating ghost Sweets. The vicious and jealous Henry watching over his hungry and horny wife Henrietta. The pimp. Potions. Hybrids. The situation is crazy and chaotic, all presented in the great gossip session of Roland and Josefa, employees at a motel found at the edge of nowhere. Hidden Highway is loads of fun with each section of gossip leading to the next and before you know it, you have a complete story, not overly long and enticing you with its charm when the world threatens to overwhelm you. As of the time of this review, the price is FREE. Consider this an invitation to Hidden Highway.

Hidden Highway is a spin-off (personal fan fiction, if you will!) of Secret Sidewalk. It follows the failed cult leader, Sharad LeMaster, as he flees from his cult members and hides away as a night clerk in a most obscure motel in the middle of Nowhere, Northern California. This attempt is foiled when a very dead witch lures him into her haunted house by tempting him with his favorite donut-loving, reality-TV-watching ghost, Beauregaard Sweet.

I’ve tiptoed around two other ghost stories. There was “The Ghost with the Really Big Tits” (included in The Mortal Hole collection) and now Jimmy Cruise, Last Chance, a sort of “dark romance”, featuring some rare adult content (rare from me, that is). My ghosts aren’t much at haunting. If they haunt at all, it’s done awkwardly and ineffectively. Usually they just hang around, bored and bewildered. The whole “ghost” idea has always struck me as too stupid for words, as ridiculous as believing in astrology or tarot cards. Ignorance can be strength, but only in an age of ignorance. It’s taking quite some time, but the movement begun (in Europe at least) with the Enlightenment is slowly but surely dragging our species out of its mental torpor. It’s too bad I won’t live to see this effort fully completed, but then again, who will?

A Personal Apocalypse

I used to think that if I had to classify my fiction in one specific genre, I would call it a literature of personal apocalypse. I’ve always been attracted to stories of peak moments. The climax is the point of the tale, and the rest is mere denouement, required (by most people) but fundamentally inconsequential. I don’t care about the “ever after”. I only care about “the” moment. Everything leads up to it, and I always prefer a story to stop right then and there, without the trickling bullshit that typically follows. I’m told that normal people don’t work that way, but all of us are somewhere “on the spectrum”. It’s a continuum, as my wife likes to say.

I came up with this heady notion while still a youngster, of course. In my early twenties, when I was writing my fingers down to the bone (literally, with pen and paper. I had a callous the size of a peanut on my right middle finger), I wrote a novel in “subway-surface” style that was subtitled “A Personal Apocalypse”. I later completely rewrote that novel, “Phantom of the Mall” and converted it into a personal/robot apocalypse, perhaps the only story I know of where the happy ending consists of androids becoming alcoholics.

I bring this up because I am currently reading an absolute masterpiece of the genre of personal apocalypse, “The Passion According to G.H” by the astounding Clarice Lispector. This is a story of a rich, bored woman who goes into her former maid’s room to clean it up and finds in there, in the wardrobe, a rather large cockroach. Lispector takes this germ of a notion and presents a vision of a person transformed unlike anything else you’re ever likely to come across. There is tremendous depth in the telling but also just some brilliant writing. Lispector says things that stop you in your tracks and make you wonder. I love it.

Turned in upon myself, like a blind man listening to his own listening

I ask myself: if I look into the darkness with a magnifying glass, will I see more than darkness?

I was for the first time becoming drunk with a hatred as clean as water from a spring

I was all acid, like a piece of metal sitting on your tongue, like a crushed green plant

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Recommended: Bartleby & Co by Enrique Vila-Maltas

Bartleby & Co, a book of short essays about writers who stopped writing, and why, has given me the longest “must read” list of other books I’ve ever gleaned from a single source. It helps that so many of his favorite writers are also mine. From Walser to Musil to Melville to Kafka to Calvino to Felipe Alfau and Henry Roth and so many others, Vila-Maltas tells the stories of writers faced with the immpossibility of writing, the insufficiency of words to properly express what they wanted so much that they simply had to stop, sometimes for decades on end. He begins with the great character Bartleby the Scrivener from Melville’s wonderful story (perhaps my favorite short story of all time), the office clerk who “prefers not to” do anything whatsoever. Vila-Maltas scours the annals of literature to find all sorts of variants and variations of this attitude and theme with an abundance of charm and wit and humor. This is not about ordinary writer’s block but rather the tales of those who continue to produce, though perhaps only in their minds! The dreams and fantasies and imaginations live on, but deliberately and consciously uncommitted to paper. There are so many interesting bits in this book. I’m glad the author himself did not suffer from Bartleby syndrome, or at least not yet!

Unfortunately it’s not available as an ebook, but the public library came to my rescue once again.

“Prisoners of Perfection” is here

“Prisoners of Perfection” is here – Nearly two years after the Epic Fail saga began with Entropic Quest, my son and I finally got around to inventing and writing Book Two. It’s not exactly what we originally thought it would be. It’s way, way better.

As with most of the stories I have a hand in, this one is always free, fairly short, minimalist even, surreal, somewhat absurd, rather strange, with more unexplained phenomena than you could shake a stick at, assuming you are the kind of person who goes around shaking sticks at unexplained phenomena. Reviews of my earlier stories suggest there are more such people than you would guess!

I am not and never will be (god willing) a “literary darling”, and in fact it’s a rarity that a reader ascribes any literariness to my stories at all, yet they abound in subtext and unwritten themata. Take, for example, the title “Prisoners of Perfection”. Johnny and I came up with this title months before we had any idea what the story would be about, and somehow it stuck, all the way through, and even works in the context of the tale. To me, the title has several meanings, beginning with the idea that we have all become entangled with the idea of perfection, of perfecting, of improving, of having not just what we want, but wanting the best of what we want, and not only things, but other people and ourselves, to be better, to become better, to be the best, we sharpen our skills, “hone our craft” (hand-signal here, a la pounding certain pontiffs), practice making perfect. “Enough is never enough for the man to whom enough is not enough” Chuang Tzu is said to have said. Nothing is ever good enough. We can have no mistakes, no errors, no commas or hairs out of place, no below-par cover images, no extra white space, no adverbs like “the thief he kindly spoke”.

On another level, there is the perfection of dystopia, which has become more and more refined, especially in the past decade. Where dystopias used to be a sort of “social science fiction”, where politics and social structures were explored and re-arranged for the sake of understanding and improving our own imperfect systems, nowadays they are more apt to be optimized for maximum action and emoting. The dystopia is where the strong survive and display their strength, not merely by sheltering in place for forty eight hours or so, but by overcoming all sorts of impossible odds and explosions. Our books and movies in this genre are engaged in a post-nuclear arms race to jump the shark ever higher with ever younger heroes with ever more unlikely super-powers and skills.

Then there is the perfection of utopia, which is no longer a dream of a better society, but a dream of a better human. It could be only a matter of time when “genetically modified organism” refers not to the crops we sow or the insects we invalidate, but to ourselves, our future generations. It only makes sense. Instead of making the world perfect, why not make ourselves so? We could live forever, and forever be young, and, of course, forever sexually potent. There would be no illness, no decay, no struggle, no further adaptation required. We will work the system from within, and will all be youthful, thin and blonde and spend our entire eternal lives basking in the sun at some impossibly luxurious resort. Why explore the outer space when we’ve barely scratched the inner surface of the potential of our own perfection? This is what I call “blisstopia”.

Finally, we come to the happy ending, and the need to have it all work out just so. There are many kinds of happy endings, and in the Epic Fail series, the happy ending can only come about through utter and total failure. We are happy to have achieved this elusive goal once again. Now that we’re done, we’re scratching out heads about Book Three. This time we don’t even have a title yet! But I can say that this collaboration with my child has been – one more time – a thrilling and delightful adventure. I can’t even begin to say how proud of him I am.

 

Recommended: The Pick Up by Paul Samael

As any contemporary father can tell you, there is a certain caution he has to take around young children these days, much more so than a contemporary mother must. A father, watching his children at the playground, is likely to be among more mothers than other fathers, and those mothers aren’t always so club-welcoming. A man is a suspect around young children, any man, including male elementary school teachers, any male youth sports coach, any man, anywhere, due to the confluent factors of rational probability and media hype. On the one hand, when there are crimes against children committed, a man is more frequently at fault. On the other hand, the percentage of crimes against children versus men interacting with children is not very high, but most of us have been conditioned to think otherwise,. Whether we like it or not, the stories bombard us daily and we cannot help but absorb them all out of proportion to their actual occurrence.

All of this is by way of preamble to the story told in Paul Samael’s new story, The Pick Up, (a free ebook available from Smashwords) which focuses on this issue. A father watching his child and his child’s friend in a playground has a brief and utterly innocent interaction with someone else’s child, but soon finds himself embroiled in suspicion. accusation and scandal. As a father who has spent the last several years around young children, I was easily able to identify with the protagonist and the themes in this story, so it had emotional resonance with me. Also, I think Paul is an excellent writer and every new story of his is an event for me, so I grabbed it from Smashwords and read it as soon as I heard about it, and I’m very happy to recommend it to anyone who appreciates a good story, well told.

Recommended: Immensee by Theodore Storm

My review: “A gentle and bittersweet story of an old man’s reminiscence about the love of his early life, its poignant scenes interspersed with passionate explorations into nature through botany and a charming love of plants and birds. It’s an emotional book that is not afraid to feel. I read somewhere recently that sentiment is no longer permitted in fiction. It’s a shame. I guess we’re only allowed to yell and blow things up, keeping us at a safe distance from the things that really do happen and hurt.”

Even a fairly well read person is constantly coming across “famous” writers they’d never hear of. In this case, 19th century German master of the short form, Theodore Storm. I only heard of him through an article about Cesar Aira defending the concept of the novella (or ‘short novel’, whichever you prefer). So I thought I’d check him out, and found Immensee on Project Gutenberg, the only one of his books available in English there, along with 19 others in German.

feedbooks: where the foreign language readers are?

I put La Acera Secreta (Secret Sidewalk in Spanish) on both Smashwords and Feedbooks for free last week. Total downloads so far:

Feedbooks: 133

Smashwords: 1

Feedbooks is a European company and 68% of those downloads are from Spain, but the rest are mainly from Latin America, where it seems Smashwords doesn’t have a presence.

Some numbers on downloads, ratings and reviews

Zombie Nights is just about to hit 50,000 downloads on Smashwords (3 years in), where it is now the #7 most downloaded ebook from that website, trailing two Smashwords’ user guides, one Islamic baby name book and 3 erotica titles. There have been very few other titles breaking into that top 10 free list over the past two years, which makes me think that fewer and fewer people are following the ‘free’ route towards readership these days, preferring instead to test the cold hard sales waters. That’s all well and good. It’s a thriving new market, or perhaps one that is not all that new at all. A very interesting article on the business of literature provides a lot of history and perspective on bookselling and is well worth reading. Our current era may be more like an earlier time than we realize.

I often come across comments in self-publishing blog posts that numbers are interesting to indie authors, so I thought I might offer some here regarding Zombie NIghts during its 50,000-Smashwords-download-jubilee-day celebration. (Overall downloads for Zombie Nights, including Apple, Amazon and Barnes & Noble, Feedbooks, Obooko, Google Books, Sony, Kobo and Smashwords, are somewhere around 150,000).

On Smashwords.com its overall rating is 3.73 based on 33 reviews – note a mere 33 reviews, only 1 every 1515 downloads.

On Amazon a scant 10 reviews nets it a 2,5 rating, while on Goodreads there have been 107 ratings, including 29 text reviews, for an average of 2.76

As usual, Apple readers are more  generous. 155 ratings on iTunes give it a 3.5 rating, while on Barnes and Noble, 101 ratings give it 3.0 stars. On Sony there’s been only 1 review (5 stars), and on Kobo 3 ratings give it 3 stars overall. On Google Books, 8 reviews give it an average of 4 stars.

I’ve noticed this pattern is typical of most of my books: Smashwords and Apple readers are often a full star more generous than Goodreads and Amazon reviewers. Theories have been offered, but it’s only guesswork. The main thing is, reviews remain sparse as a percentage of downloads. I have not gone out of my way to ask for reviews of this book or done any sort of marketing or advertising for it, other than having it show up on getfreeebooks.com, a site I always recommend to free-ebook-offerers.

Recommended: Austerlitz by W G Sebald

It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last, just as when we have accepted an invitation we duly arrive in a certain house at a given time.

At some time in the past, I thought, I must have made a mistake, and now I am living the wrong life.

who knows, said Austerlitz, perhaps moths dream as well, perhaps a lettuce in the garden dreams as it looks up at the moon by night.

These are a few of the many striking moments in this altogether fascinating book, one which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and certainly doesn’t need my little recommendation. Sebald’s novel is also interesting in the way it’s presented, including actual photographs which the narrator describes and discusses as real, adding to the illusion that this is not a novel but a biographical memoir of a genuine person. The story is alternately distracted and gripping, as it weaves in and out of a story of discovery and loss, of a man raised in Wales by a cold Christian preacher and his ultra-passive wife, who only later in life found out who he really was, who his parents had been and what had happened to them, Jews living in Prague in the 1930′s.

The book is as utterly convincing as Roberto Bolano’s 2666, which I recently read, and which I was reminded of through my reading of this one. Both authors excel at drawing you into a world that feels as solid as the ground under your feet. While so many books these days are directed at a wretched future, there is simply much more believable drama to be found in stories of our very real and wretched past.