booklit

A great deal of my reading tends to involve works from all over the world. Places as far flung as Japan, Hungary, and Mexico. Rarely does it occur to me to dig around the literature concerning home. It may, in part, be a rebellion against the Scottish writers read during school, even though in retrospect I liked the poetry of Edwin Morgan and Robert Burns; I liked Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song, later voted Scotland’s favourite novel. An honourable mention to Shakespeare’s Macbeth, too - my favourite of his plays that I’ve read or attended live.

Alasdair Gray is, as well as being a home town man, an all round polymath. Novelist, artist, poet, playwright, and more. His most famous work is Lanark: A Life In 4 Books, which prompted Anthony Burgess to say “it was time Scotland produced a shattering work of fiction in the modern idiom. This is it…” expanding this by calling Gray “the best Scottish novelist since Sir Walter Scott.” His other works perhaps live in its shadow, but he has consistently published new work, last year’s Old Men In Love ending an eleven year year wait for a new novel - a wait that had nevertheless been punctuated with short stories, poetry, and non-fiction.

This evening a small crowd has gathered for the launch of Fleck, Gray’s new play. Fleck, as the author reveals, began as an attempt to create a modern verse translation of Goethe’s Faust, something that was quite tricky since he doesn’t speak German. While he acknowledges that the prologue and first act are faithful to Goethe’s play, he found that there were deviations to be made. The contemporary setting led him on a different path and, where Goethe’s Faust gets an eleventh hour reprieve, Gray says he felt that a level of purgatory was required for “the rotten bastard.” Thus it came to be that Faust became Fleck, although an extended version appears on his publisher’s website: “I hoped the National Theatre of Scotland would commission me to complete it, but learned that Theatre had just produced a new translation of Goethe’s Faust by John Clifford. So I changed the name to Fleck, and the last two Acts and Epilogue are wholly un-Goethean.”

Gray’s publisher this time round is Two Ravens Press, a husband and wife team based in Ullapool, a far cry from the literary hub of London. Gray publishes with Scottish firms for patriotic reasons and has picked a rising star of the publishing scene this time out. Two Ravens Press, having recently turned two years old, has been prodigious in its output, putting out over thirty books. Most have been new names, although if Alice Thompson’s name can raise a few eyebrows as to the pull of Two Ravens Press, the name of Alasdair Gray must surely be the jewel in the crown. Part of the reason is that Gray likes to work with typesetters so that his vision of how the book should look is realised. In days gone by Canongate, Bloomsbury, and Jonathan Cape would have paid to typeset in Glasgow so that Gray, with his friend Joe Murray, could watch over.

David Knowles, one half of the publisher, introduced Gray with the question of how to introduce Alasdair Gray. In fact he was introducing Gray and his former secretary, Rodge Glass, here to assist him with a reading. And what a reading it was. Gray’s voice is grounded in his Glaswegian accent, although it’s enhanced with crisp pronunciation, and lilted with playful sparkle. When he reads he captures the voice and rhythm of Nick so well - and so he should, he wrote him - that the belief is there that he could add actor to his repertoire - if he hasn’t already. The pair bounded through the prologue and a section of the first act,  playing lines off against each other and coming back twice as enthusing.

By contrast the following question and answer section was a tad disappointing. While I attend author events more for this section, I was wishing for more from the reading. It had its moments though, opened by a question from Knowles, asking about how the idea for something in Fleck came about, to which Gray proceeded in a Tristram Shandy tale of diversions, beginning with the Bible and the story of Job and leading off in all directions, halfway through noting that he was “raving”, and then carrying on with the plot of Goethe’s Faust to the point where, in explaining the changes in Fleck, he ceased, after bemused flappings from Two Ravens Press at the side, as he was about to give away the secrets of the play. Then did so anyway. Sort of.

Beyond that there was only one other question on whether there are plans afoot to stage Fleck. No, and the BBC most likely won’t film it as a one-off due to certain content in the ending, whatever that is. It must be a relief for the writer, when questions aren’t forthcoming; it means they can get their pen out, sign some books, and call a cab early. But it must also be upsetting that people make the effort to turn up without a question to air. Many, it seems, have their questions best asked one to one and I, standing at the rear of a queue, listen to the laughter coming my way from both Gray and his fans. I’ve not read him myself, and in telling him this he notes that Lanark is jumping in at the deep end. It may be that, but deep ends are the best place to dive into.

Situated on Sauchiehall Street, bang in the centre of Glasgow, is my favourite Waterstone’s store. There, on the first floor, safe from the hordes hovering around the promotional tables, one can find a mix of displays, regularly imaginative. Recent displays have included ‘Prague Spring‘, offering a range of Czech fiction; ‘Beginners Plagiarise, Professionals Steal‘, in which books borrowing characters from the classics sit side by side; and ‘A Taste Of The South‘, serving up a fine list of fiction from the American South.

Beyond static displays, the store hosts regular author events, most of which tend to pass me by. Not so Neal Stephenson’s event, a poster for which has been resident on the door for some time now. I’ve never read Stephenson’s work, in fact I’ve only a slight acquaintance with Snow Crash (1992), the novel that made his name. I put it down to not been a sci-fi fan. Or rather, since I’ve enjoyed some speculative works, not actively pursuing a path of sci-fi reading.

(photo courtesy of Bob Lee)

Stephenson was in town as part of a book tour promoting his new novel, Anathem. I knew nothing of it, other than it falls just short of a thousand pages, is set on another world, and is rife with neologisms. Three things, right there, that are a surefire way to send me running in the other direction. But I liked the cover, was intrigued by the brief synopsis I’d read, and was swayed to attend after reading a genial article in the Arts supplemental of the Glasgow Herald.

When he took to the stage he pondered the microphone for a minute, testing whether it was onmi- or uni-directional, before heading straight into reading two separate passages from Anathem. He needn’t have worried about the microphone, it crackled out after a few minutes, forcing him to project his voice over a crowd of perhaps a hundred.

The passages he chose were both heavy on dialogue, the dialogue heavy with its own nadsat. With Stephenson intoning the voices of his characters, there was a sense that they were rather stock in nature, one coming across brattish, the other authoritarian, both with little flexibility beyond that mould. While most laughed at the right moment, I admit to being lost in lines of reference to Farspark generators, Praxic Orth, speelycaptors. If you are like me and don’t know your Fluccish from your Farspark, fret not: Anathem comes with a twenty-page glossary.

Indulgence appears to be something Stephenson enjoys. When he stops reading and takes questions from the audience, he mentions that he likes writing big novels and, acknowledging it’s a self-serving statement, that he wouldn’t say no to a backlash against the internet. This is in response to a query about whether the internet is helpful for story telling. The internet, he says, has condensed activities, reducing them to small packages: you check out this or that site, you read your email, etc, and thus there’s been a movement to smaller, more digestible reads. An uprising against the internet would see more return to larger books. You can almost see the dollar signs in his eyes.

But it’s not about the money, he says. When asked if he would continue to write if he weren’t enjoying, Stephenson seems happy to say that no, he won’t. As it is he only writes when he has an idea that needs exploring, partly the reason why he’s only written so few books in the last twenty years. And he’s quick to shrug off any notion of his writing as an art form, distancing it from more “high-falutin’” works, a general sweep that casts its net wide but ultimately captures nothing.

It’s the act of writing that most obsesses those gathered around. Was he taught to write or did he get to where he was today with natural talent? He refutes both, saying that he started writing at a time before creative writing was an educatable vocation, and introducing his cabinet maker motif, noting that a person couldn’t immediately produce a cabinet but would require regular practice - likewise, the writer.

When he first went full-time as a writer, Stephenson muses on how he felt that it had to mean full-time, forcing himself to sit at his desk for every hour of the day. It was only when he realised that his best work came in the mornings that he freed up his afternoons for other pursuits: engineering, construction work, anything removed from his writing and the ideas that occupied it.

On the subject of his desk, which interested someone enough to ask, Stephenson commented on the sparsity of his study. It’s more a box, a window behind him bringing light in on where he sits, his first drafts written with a fountain pen. Stuck to the walls are notes and photocopies of relevant research. It’s in this environment that he spent two years working on Snow Crash, three-and-a-half on Anathem.

Returning to research, it’s something that defines his work. There, history meets science meets anthropology meets a whole lot more. When starting out on a book ninety-nine per cent of his time is given up to the task, the amount inversely proportional as time goes on until, nearing the end, ninety-nine per cent of the time is spent with his pen, with that last per cent referring back to books to confirm some fact or other. A street name, for example. The amount of research he does, he admits, has seen him look into ways to present it to those that read his works and are interested in that direction. With Anathem he has provided a short list of acknowledgements with a URL to an extended list of research material.

With such a wealth of information, much regarding intricate ideas and theories, one person wonders how he goes about dumbing down his books for readers. It’s something he’s conscious of, when writing, although he wouldn’t calling it ‘dumbing down’, and to this he riffs on an old college story about communicating with a disabled student, trying to make an idea comprehendible and digestible and doing so with some success. It’s an experience in his life that has taught him something, and one that he returns to when communicating ideas in his books.

His fans aren’t just interested in his books, though, and the questions soon turn to who, when at leisure, Stephenson reads. At this point he takes a few minutes to remember and recommend the late David Foster Wallace, explicitly referencing Infinite Jest. Another name was Dennis Lehane, author Mystic River, before turning to a list of recent reads (The Glass Books Of The Dream Eaters by Gordon Dahlquist; Ken Follett’s The Pillars Of The Earth and World Without End), and that he noticed, while looking through the store earlier, that Bernard Cornwell had a new title out that he’d be looking to read. One woman noted that he hadn’t mentioned any woman writers, which he laughed off, saying she had found a character flaw.

Although he’s there to promote Anathem, there’s little talk of it, the multitude of questions overlooking it to satisfy curiosities regarding previous works. The island of Qwghim, for example, has its origins in a need to make a convenient location that required no research, it soon becoming too much of a convenience. And an overlapping of details between Cryptonomicon and the later Baroque Cycle exist because it was too late to edit into the former.

The questions continue until Stephenson calls for two more, generously taking a number beyond that. Then, it’s over to the scheduled signing, where piles of Anathem tower over him. With a snake of fans circling the basement of the store, the signing is almost as long as his books. It’s been an interesting evening, even for this uninitiated reader, and goes against the author’s opinion that he does his best work in the morning.

Tucked away in the west end of Glasgow there’s a building that I’ve known about for a while but never taken the time to visit. It’s the Goethe Institut,  promoting the German language abroad. One way in which it achieves on its mission is with literary events. After an event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival I was given a promotional flyer for three separate events at the Institut, highlighting writers who have come to the German language from other mother tongues. Two of these originally hail from Europe, Bosnian Saša Stanišić and Hungarian Terézia Mora, but the series began yesterday with a reading from Japanese born writer, Yoko Tawada.

The chair Marc Lambert, Chief Executive of Scottish Book Trust, opened with a brief summation of Tawada’s career to date. Born in Tokyo in 1960, mastered in Russian literature, and moved to Germany at the age of twenty-two where she has lived since.  In her writing career, in which she uses both Japanese and German, she has proven competent in different forms, such as prose, poetry, and essays, picking up prestigious prizes along the way. Notable honours include the Akutagawa Prize in 1992, the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, an award for foreign writers’ contribution to German culture, in 1996, and a Goethe-Medal in 2005.

In discussing her early interest in Russian literature Tawada mentioned how it was that Russia’s writers, along with some French, were among the first European literatures that she knew. Dostoevsky, she loved, along with Gogol, who, along with Kafka, she later named as one of her main influences. As a result of steeping herself in the Russian works, Moscow became the image of a literary Europe, not to be mistaken with the Europe of reality. So it came to be that she travelled to Moscow to discover Europe for herself, eventually landing in Germany, planning to stay for two years.

Tawada showed an appreciation of the German language, notably for the strength of its vocabulary. Where the Japanese for water is mizu, she preferred the force of Wasser, its German equivalent. Likewise strong: Japanese tsuyoi, German stark - the latter preferred because it sounds strong. It’s no surprise, then, that sounds play an important part in Tawada’s work.  One particular highlight was a poem inspired by the Austrian poet, Ernst Jandl, in which she translated a poem between German and Japanese, not literally, but by the sound of the words used.

In another reading, a story titled Canned Foreign, taken from  Where Europe Begins, the book she was promoting, Tawada gave an immediate taste of her themes - language, loneliness,  bewilderment - in prose informed by her own experience, when she said, “I already knew the alphabet when I arrived in Hamburg, but I coud gaze at the individual letters for a long time without recognising the meaning of the words. ”

Language plays a central role in Tawada’s fiction - her reading was a trilingual affair, offering a delicious mix of Japanese, German, and English. Punctuating her reading was an element of performance, put there to keep it interesting for those who may not have the grasp of all languages (i.e. me), be it holding up Japanese characters, speaking from behind photographs, or reading off a glove, the text written along each finger, and literally peeled off parallel to a figurative peeling in the text.

On the subject of the aforementioned Gogol and Kafka, she credits them with changing her style. When writing in Japanese her fiction followed a traditional mould. Now, her works are less linear, experimental. Being translated to English comes as a relief to her. She said she felt as if she were two writers: a Japanese writer translated to German and a German translated to Japanese. Having work from both Tawadas consolidated into English (and French) made her German and Japanese selves feel whole.

At one point Marc Lambert took to the podium to read, at Tawada’s request, a short-short story called Hair Tax, a bizarre piece about the government basing tax rates on having hair. In this strange world different prices are set for hamsters and Alsations, and to show off a body of hair - or objects given hair through genetic modification! - is a sign of affluence. When the punchline came Tawada seemed genuinely excited that the audience laughed given an implied complexity in the original German. A testament to the translator, perhaps?

While Tawada has over twenty books to her name, available in both German and Japanese, few are available in English. New Directions in the United States has put out two collections thus far, the aforementioned Where Europe Begins and Facing The Bridge. With another translation scheduled for early next year, it looks like Tawada is sure to stay whole for some time yet. That’s the kind of performance I like.