Your cart is currently empty!
Category: Litbits: excerpts from good books
-
Divisadero, by Michael Ondaatje
I’ve just finished reading the ARC of Michael Ondaatje’s extraordinary new novel Divisadero, which will be published in May. The book begins with a harrowing familial violence on a farm in Petaluma and ends in another country at another time. San Francisco residents will recognize the title, which is the street where the novel’s overriding consciousness, Anna, lives as an adult. I say “overriding consciousness” because, while Anna narrates some portions of the novel, there are also large swaths of omniscience, as well as points at which the omniscient narrator collides, unexpectedly, with Anna’s voice.
Years after the violence that shatters her family, Anna moves to France to temporarily inhabit the home of Lucien Seguro, a famous French poet. After a detailed and arresting account of the lives of Anna, her sister Claire, their father, and a cardsharp named Coop who was raised alongside the two girls, the novel’s focus shifts to Lucien: his upbringing in the French countryside, his affection for a neighbor woman, Marie-Neige, and her husband Roman, his childhood. Slowly and brilliantly, these stories intersect, held together by a man named Rafael, who becomes Anna’s lover in France.
This is a story about orphans, and about events that drastically alter the landscape of family. It is a patient, gentle book. Ondaatje writes truthfully and unflinchingly about desire. One of the most memorable aspects of the novel is his portrayal of parent-child relationships, particularly between mothers and sons. (more…)
-
the feel of the pen
Empires fall, votes are accorded, but to those people writing in the circular room it is the feel of the pen between their fingers that matters most.
E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel -
economy
Here is one of the most economical sentence pairings I’ve come across in a while: He couldn’t remember his wife clearly–only the hats she wore. How surprised she would be at hearing from him after this long while; there had been one letter written by each of them since the boy died. Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory
The exercise:
Compose two sentences in which a great deal is revealed about a character. Like the sentences above, yours should suggest something fundamental about the character’s inner life and/or relationships, as well as revealing something significant about his past.If you think of other examples of this from published works, please post them here in the comments section! (Jordan R., if you’re reading this, I know you can find something that fits the bill! Karl S.–you too.)
-
graham greene on the importance of superficiality
“So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one’s days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends.”
~Graham Greene, The End of the Affair -
selection: the memoirist’s dilemma
“…a detective must find it as important as a novelist to amass his trivial material before picking out the right clue. But how difficult that picking out is–the release of the real subject…Now that I come to write my own story the problem is still the same, but worse–there are so many more facts, now that I have not to invent them.” ~Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
-
What We Are Doing
What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. ~Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
Of course it is a rather stupid thing to spend one’s morning reading a book about writing instead of writing the book one is supposed to be writing, the book that has been paid for, the book that a very kind and conscientious editor is waiting for, kindly and conscientiously but possibly inpatiently, because she has every right to be impatient at this point. But a good book is such a temptation! It is not unlike truffles from Joseph Schmidt or men with beautiful backs. It is a terribly difficult thing to resist! But it must be resisted. It must be put aside. One must return to the work at hand, this book of one’s own, this thing that has sucked up four years of one’s life, not consecutively but spottily, in fits and starts, a few weeks here, a few months there, with long intervals in between for things like babies and husbands and trips to far-off lands, sex and pilates and Scotch, movies and more movies and books and books and books.
Another writer told me recently that when she is in the throes of writing, when she is truly inspired, when the words are just coming, flowing forth, that it is “better than sex.” I have not found this to be true.
-
Borges on Criticism & Compulsory Happiness
“I have tried to disregard as much as possible the history of literature. When my students asked me for a bibilography, I told them, ‘A bibliography is unimportant–after all, Shakespeare knew nothing of Shakespearean criticism. Why not study the text directly? If you like the book, fine; if you don’t, don’t read it. The idea of compulsory reading is absured; it’s only worthwhile to speak of compulsory happiness…if a story doesn’t make you want to know what happened next, then the the author has not written for you. Put it aside. Literature is rich enough to offer you some other author worthy of your attention–or one today unworthy of your attention whom you will read tomorrow.”
From “Poetry,” a lecture in Seven Nights
-
Borges on enchantment
I have read almost all of Croce, and though I am not always in agreement with him, I am enchanted by him. Enchantment, as Stevenson said, is one of the special qualities a writer must have. Without enchantment, the rest is useless.
~from “The Divine Comedy,” the first lecture in Seven Nights
I love what Borges says here, by way of Stevenson. As authors we try so hard to enchant, but it is impossible to do so without being, by turns, enchanted–not only with language and narrative, but also with the complexities of human nature and the intricate mysteries of the natural world.