Writing stories was not easy. When they were turned into words, projects withered on the paper and ideas and images failed. How to reanimate them? Fortunately, the masters were there, teachers to learn from and examples to follow. Flaubert taught me that talent is unyielding discipline and long patience. Faulkner, that form – writing and structure – elevates or impoverishes subjects. Martorell, Cervantes, Dickens, Balzac, Tolstoy, Conrad, Thomas Mann, that scope and ambition are as important in a novel as stylistic dexterity and narrative strategy. Sartre, that words are acts, that a novel, a play, or an essay, engaged with the present moment and better options, can change the course of history. Camus and Orwell, that a literature stripped of morality is inhuman, and Malraux that heroism and the epic are as possible in the present as is the time of the Argonauts, the Odyssey, and the Iliad.-- Mario Vargas Llosa, Stockholm, December 7, 2010
Saturday, January 1, 2011
"...not easy."
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7 comments:
Boy... You could do worse than this as a reading list for the new year.
(Adding, of course, Conversations in the Cathedral -- the one book that Vargas Llosa says that he'd save from the fire.)
The mysterious Martorell took a lot of Googling. He wrote "Tirant lo Blanc" one of the two romances (together with "Amadis of Gaul") that drove Don Quixote mad with literary passion.
Funny how, in the eyes of some, scope and ambition equals pretension and bloat. Not a minimalist in the bunch, here.
Malraux! Better than Elmore Leonard? You decide.....
Way too frivolous for the moment, but still amusing: novelist Cathleen Schine's literary resolutions, from this morning's NYT:
“(1) Stop reading mysteries obsessively like an addict. (2) Stop pretending never to read mysteries. (3) Read all of Hazel Holt’s 19 mysteries in a row. (4) Read Proust. (5) Don’t broadcast resolution to read Proust all over New York the way every other person resolving to read Proust does. (6) No Trollope this year, not even one — even though, against all odds, there is an app for that. (7) Download Trollope app.”
Of course, there's room for both American terseness and Gallic grandiosity... Besides, if I remember, Camus is pretty terse (which is why everybody reads L'Etranger in French class)
Terse, and yet "The Plague" is grand if not grandiose; a universal metaphor.
Malreux > Leonard, apples > oranges.
We can't have both?
http://www.amazon.com/White-Knight-Tirant-Blanc-ebook/dp/B002JM0KX4/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1294004294&sr=1-4
Of course we can have both and should.... The point of the snark (which I regretted, but you can't edit comments) was to raise a tired old point that (1) you should make time for both and (2) Vargas Llosa, for example, doesn't publish articles about how to write and while doing so hint that all those not Vargas Llosa are bad writers.
In fact, the Leonard issue doesn't interest me much any more... I suspect that he's really not as dumb as his rules for writing would lead you to believe.
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