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Alexander Pope is considered one of England’s greatest poets of the eighteenth century, known for satirical poems as The Rape Of The Lock and the Dunciad. He was a member of the Scriblerus club, along with names like Jonathan Swift and John Arbuthnot, a circle of writers that combined in the mocking of contemporary mediocrity in science and the arts. Works borne of this group were sometimes attributed to their fictional founder, Martinus Scriblerus.

Amongst the recognised output of Scriblerus’ was Peri Bathous, or The Art Of Sinking In Poetry (1727), Pope’s satirical attack on the poets of his day. Where criticism and disdain may be best put upon inferior works of literature, appreciation of this essay comes in its alternative approach: to praise bathetic instances in poetry.

Pope opens with an explanation of why it is necessary to study the poets of his day:

It hath been long — my dear countrymen — the subject of my concern and surprise that whereas numberless poets, critics and orators have compiled and digested the art of ancient poesy, there hath not arisen among us one person so public-spirited as to perform the like for the modern. Although it is universally known that our every-way industrious moderns, both in the weight of their writings and in the velocity of their judgements, do so infinitely excel the said ancients.

His essay is to be treated as an instructional piece for any poet, “to lead them as it were by the hand and, step by step, the gentle downhill way to the bathos — the bottom, the end, the central point, the non plus ultra of true modern poesy.” The first few chapters outline the reasons behind such a stance, noting that profit and gain should take precedence over the fruitless undertaking of writing for “men of a nice and foppish gusto”, not that writing for such men should be dismissed out of hand, for it would be a “great cruelty and injustice if all such authors as cannot write in the other way were prohibited from writing at all.”

In order to make it easier to understand how one may begin to ’sink’, Pope proposes to collect “the scattered rules of our art into regular institutes” and presents us with his first maxim -

…that whoever would excel therein must studiously avoid, detest and turn his head from all the ideas, ways and workings of that pestilent foe to wit and destroyer of fine figures, which is known by the name of common sense. His business must be to contract the true goût de travers and to acquire a most happy, uncommon, unaccountable way of thinking.

– which requires the application of ideas infinitely below the object approached. In addition, he generously offers up a couple of examples from his contemporaries demonstrating how sinking may be achieved. (”Would it not be a shame if he who is smit with the love of the bathos should not sacrifice to it all other transitory regards?”)

As the lessons continue, The Art Of Sinking In Poetry calls to mind, tangentially, a book that would come some two hundred years later, Raymond Queneau’s Exercises In Style, for Pope provides a catalogue of literary terms — catachresis, synecdoche, metonymy — and works his way through them, citing ‘effective’ examples of their use. However, where Queneau would use such devices as a conscious challenge, Pope, in praising those poets who make use of them unconsciously, documents their sinking.

While there are occasions that it seems Pope is nitpicking, such as jargon, many of the poems Pope excerpts for his comical purposes are truly awful and rightly deserve a bit of a lashing. In some cases he explains why the approach is bad, while some cases speak for themselves, like the anticlimax of a couplet on the extent of British arms –

Under the tropics is our language spoke,

And part of Flanders hath received our yoke.

– or the cumbrous phrasing demanding a fire be lit:

Bring forth some remnant of Promethean theft,

Quick to expand the’inclement air congealed

By Boreas’s rude breath…

Poetry may be the focus of the essay, but its a work thay may be of interest to those who would seek to improve their writing in any literary medium, as the underlying call is for those who would write to consider what they are putting to paper. At times, Pope’s prose can feel a little confusing, a side-effect of its age, but the wit transcends the years to ensure that the book has its funny moments while getting its point across — namely, less sinking, more thinking.

In 1958 Chinua Achebe published Things Fall Apart, the novel that helped usher in a new wave of African literature. Until that point literature concerning African had been written by European colonials, and was rife with derogatory depictions of African people and their varied cultures. With the contributions of Camara Laye, Amos Tutuola, and Chinua Achebe, amongst others, there came a rebellion of sorts - the African novel, going against “an age-old practice: the colonization of one people’s story by another.”

African literature is the subject of Home And Exile (2001),  a gathering of three lectures Achebe gave to an audience at Harvard University in 1998. Across these he uses his podium to to discuss the effect of colonialism on African letters and the need for balance. Of particular interest are the autobiographical elements peppered throughout, which give insights into Achebe’s early life in Nigeria and the beginnings of his adult life as a writer.

Achebe starts with his own people, the Igbo. He dismisses the notion that, in numbering over ten million, they can be a tribe by dictionary definition. He finds nation fits better, acknowledging that it’s not a perfect fit. In describing the Igbo culture, a culture of stories, he finds room to open up the differences wrought by colonialism, impressing upon the reader a little tale about a meeting of animals where the chicken, instead attending to a personal matter, is voted man’s primary sacrificial animal in his absence. It’s a fitting parallel with the native in colonial African literature whereby a portrait of the continent has been drawn up by outsiders, at least as far back as 1561, when John Lok, writing of his voyage to West Africa, describes Africans as:

…a people of beastly living, without a God, lawe, religion … whose women are common for they contract no matrimonie, neither have respect to chastitie … whose inhabitants dwell in caves and dennes: for these are their houses, and the flesh of serpents their meat as writeth Plinie and Diodorus Siculus. They have no speach, but rather a grinning and chattering. There are also people without heads, having their eyes and mouths in their breasts.

Compound that with centuries of unfair writing and you get to a moment in a Nigerian school when, having read Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson, about a young Nigerian, it strikes as being superficial:

It was a landmark rebellion. Here was a whole class of young Nigerian students, among the brightest of their generation, united in their view of a book of English fiction in complete opposition to their English teacher, who was moreover backed by the authority of metropolitan critical judgment.

In talking of colonial literature, Achebe understands the treatment of African people as a way of justifying colonialism and the slave trade it produced, citing works by the likes of the aforementioned Cary, Joseph Conrad, and, especially, Elspeth Huxley. V.S. Naipaul, for whom much was made of his nastiness in Patrick French’s authorised biography earlier in the year, is also lambasted for his ignorant portrayal of Africa in A Bend In The River.

Although she’s not named, Buchi Emecheta, also gets a notable mention: not for her portrayal of Africa, but for going in the opposite direction. Having moved to London to pursue her writing career, she is quoted on the subject of African fiction and the dilution of her Africanness. (”After reading the first page you tell yourself you are plodding. But when you are reading the same thing written by an English person who lives here you find you are enjoying it because the language is so academic, so perfect.”) This notion of going in the opposite directon echoes an account opening the book of Achebe’s first ride in a car, in which he was seated so as to watch the road behind. It’s something he returns to in the third lecture, given that he, like Emecheta, no longer lives in Nigeria:

People have sometimes asked me if I have thought of writing a novel about America since I have now been living here for some years. My answer has always been “No, I don’t think so.” Actually, living in America for some years is not the only reason for writing a novel on it. Kafka wrote such a novel without leaving Prague. No, my reason is that America has enough novelists writing about her, and Nigeria too few.

Achebe’s focus now, unlike the child looking back, is squarely on the road ahead for Africa and its literature, noting his anxiety over “what remains to be done, in Africa and in the world at large”. From his podium he calls for writers to remain at home and write about it, to post their manuscripts rather than go overseas and risk dilution. Only with the right people contributing their own stories can literature find the necessary balance be made that will lead to a universal civilisation.

On literature he calls for a fair appraisal of writers’ work, comparing Dylan Thomas’ review of Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard to Huxley’s, wherein Thomas praises it for its language, Huxley uses the opportunity to take a broad swipe at African art (”It is possessed by spirits and the spirits are malign.”) Regardless of unfair treatments, Achebe notes that to read them:

…is the strongest vote of confidence we can give our writers and their work - to put them on notice that we will go to their offering for wholesome pleasure and insight, and not a rehash of old stereotypes which gained currency long ago in the slave trade and poisoned, perhaps forever, the wellsprings of our common humanity.

That Achebe covers so much ground in just over a hundred pages shows a highly concentrated approach to African literature. Those seeking a true autobiography will not find it here, given that it only touches on his early years, but what it does provide is an interesting insight into Achebe’s mind, with him pointing out the little details that have made him the influential writer that he is today, home and away.

Open Letter Books, based in the University of Rochester, have been blogging away at Three Percent for over a year now, and last month they finally launched their first title: Nobody’s Home by Dubravka Ugrešić (2005). What makes Open Letter special is that they will explicitly only publish works in translation. I’ve been interested in their forthcoming output for a while now and have deliberately held off buying Nobody’s Home, published last year in the United Kingdom by Telegram Books, because I never really liked the cover.

So, first a few words on this edition. It’s a hardback, the image and text printed straight on as there’s no dust jacket. It’s always good to see a bit of cover kudos for the translator - Ellen Elias-Bursac, translating from the Croatian - and the book doesn’t let us down here. Being someone who likes a bit of uniformity to their books, I’ll be looking forward to seeing how other titles from Open Letter stand together.

But to the book, and as is clearly stated on the cover, Nobody’s Home is a collection of essays, split into five sections. The first, each no more than two or three pages, are, as Ugrešić says in the afterword, a series of feuilletons written between 1998 and 2000 for a column for the Swiss newspaper Die Weltwoche. Others, longer in scope, are taken from commissioned works, appearing in the likes of Polish newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza and British quarterly The Drawbridge

Ugrešić’s main topics are identity, nationality, and the global marketplace. It should make sense - her lifestyle is peripatetic, her nationality polymorphous:

Ten years ago I held a Yugoslav passport, with its soft, pliable, dark red cover. I was a Yugoslav writer. Then the war came, and the Croats, without so much as a by your leave, shoved a blue Croation passport at me…Again I hold a passport with a soft, pliable, dark red cover, a Dutch passport. Will this new passport make me a Dutch writer? I doubt it.

The fueilletons that open the book provide a suitable introduction to the author’s style. Warm with humour, they are filled with anecdotes and, with permissable license, overstatements on all manner of topics, typically leading into wider consideration. While talking about an expensive suitcase she leads into a quick discussion on exile (”The only way exiles are able to leave trauma behind is not to leave it behind at all, but to live it as a permanent state…”) and nostalgic for the days when people were famous for, you know, doing something, she laments the rise of the celeb (”A celeb is an empty screen onto which the rest of the world projects its meaning. The celeb is a cultural text, an artifact of mass culture.”) .

In the longer pieces,  Ugrešić finds space to set out her stall and explore her observations of Amsterdam, her adopted home, or reflecting on her experiences on the Literature Express in 2000, a train journey taken by many writers throughout Europe. Amongst these longer considerations are Opium, a piece on how celebrities, with their (ghostwritten) memoirs are the prophets of the day, and one of the more memorable essays in Nobody’s Home: What is European About European Literature? In this the author’s passion is evident at her dislike of national tags:

When my first novel was published in England, a critic finished his review with the question: But still, is this what we need? Only later did I realize what the critic’s sentence had meant. I hadn’t noticed there was a label trailing along behind me as I traveled: Made in the Balkans.

In fact, it really annoys her:

The label is a fundamental assumption of the outdated institutions of national literatures, but also for the modern literary marketplace. Because ethnic identity is a tried and true sales formula which has propelled many writers from the periphery - for the right literary reasons or the wrong ones - into the global literary marketplace. The market always needs a Bulgarian, a Serb, a Croat, an Albanian. But only one. Two max. A surfeit is, naturally, confusing.

It’s an understandable ire, especially given some of the examples she cites about authors born here, living there, speaking this, that, and the other. How can you truly pin them down when even the literary marketplace has gone global? Transnational literature, she concedes, may be the way forward - a catch-all term for those writers, like her, are everywhere and nowhere.

The notion of writers flowing this way is only a small part of a wider picture, too. In other essays Ugrešić tackles the East meets West nature of Europe, with westerners buying up cheap property in Croatia and Bulgaria, with those going the other way, in search of employment, be it migrant works by free will or women, trafficked. While it all may seem serious, there are many moments of humour to be had, such as this one in reference to the new European bogeyman:

I propose that a statue be raised to the Polish plumber in many European cities. Why? Because the Polish plumber is the first victim of European unification, and, particularly of European expansion. Since everyone speaks of the Polish plumber  with such fear and loathing - outstripping even the legendary hatred of the Roma - the statue should consist only of a pedestal. And on that pedestal should be the words: Statue to the Unknown Polish Plumber.

From an image of Vladimir Putin kissing a fish in another essay, Ugrešić notes the difference between a totalitarian Moscow (”…the less you said about yourself, the thinner the police files would be.”) and the world of today, where everyone is rushing to fill their files, chasing that Warholian fifteen minutes. You’d think we’d know the Polish plumber to see. But as she notes, it’s a media paradox:

The paradox is: the more we eat, the hungrier we are. The more opportunities we have to inscribe our name on the map of the world, the greater the fear of disappearing. The more traces we leave behind us, the faster these traces are erased. The more books we publish, the quicker they are forgotten; the more movies we watch, the less able we are to remember what they were called.

Perhaps that’s why Open Letter are only publishing twelve books a year. That they may not be forgotten so fast. As the inaugural title, Nobody’s Home is an interesting choice for the American publisher, not least because it’s a collection of essays. But in that it introduces a whole other continent and the changes it’s currently undergoing to an American audience, and is written, for the most part, in a witty, easygoing style, it may just prove an ideal grounding for those who subscribe to later releases.

When it comes to Jorge Luis Borges, I’m more aware of him and his contribution to letters than I am versed in him. A few short stories from Labyrinths is about as far as I’ve delved, but his legacy extends far beyond his own works and he has, in some form, appeared in the works of others. As Jorge of Burgos in Umberto Eco’s The Name Of The Rose or Zampano in Mark Z. Danielweski’s House Of Leaves. In both instances the character, like Borges, is a blind man

Borges became blind in later age and would ask people to read for him. One of the many who did just that is Alberto Manguel who, when sixteen, received the request and would read books and poetry aloud to Borges for the next four years. In With Borges (2006) Manguel reminisces over this period of his life, giving accounts of the man himself interspersed with fragments of narrative, both of which combine to provide an interesting, if slight, portrait of arguably Argentina’s greatest writer.

It’s an intimate picture, depicting the close relationship between the two, Manguel admitting the influence Borges had on his understanding and appreciation of literature:

…the conversations with Borges were what, in my mind, conversations should always be: about books and about the clockwork of books, and about the discovery of writers I had not read before, and about ideas that had not occurred to me, or which I had glimpsed only in a hesitant, half-intuited way that, in Borges’s voice, glittered and dazzled in all their rich and somehow obvious splendour.

And while Manguel does talk of his experiences, much of the book is given over to the character of his mentor, a man to whom books were everything (”his world was wholly verbal: music, colour and form rarely entered it”) and, far from being a writer, was the perfect reader of the world:

For a man who loved to travel but who could not see the places he visited…he was singularly uninterested in the physical world except as representations of his readings. The sand of the Sahara or the water of the Nile, the coast of Iceland, the ruins of Greece or Rome, all of which he touched with delight and awe, simply confirmed the memory of a page of the Arabian Nights or the Bible, of Njals Saga or of Homer and Virgil.

It’s fascinating to imagine this, the imagery of man who can’t see. Yet in his head were words - passages of prose, lines of poetry; always retrievable - being constantly edited, reshaped, and rewritten. Manguel sprinkles his recollections with a few anecdotes about Borges’ capacity for recollection and composition, and how he used it to satisfy a wry sense of humour.

Amongst all the facts and stories, one of the more interesting - and surprising - aspects of Borges, Manguel notes, was his library:

For a man who called the universe a library, and who confessed that he had imagined Paradise ‘bajo la forma de una biblioteca‘, the size of his own library came as a disappointment…

But what was in it contained “the essence of Borges’s reading” - encyclopaedias, dictionaries, volumes of epic poetry, and novels by Joyce, Kipling, Chesterton - and Manguel also provides a sizeable list of those Borges rejected (e.g. Proust, Balzac, García Márquez).

Manguel finds space to talk about Borges time with Adolfo Bioy Casares (”the most important relationship in Borges’s life”) and, talking of their collaborate efforts, the Casares’ home life, and the magnitude of their conversations, in aspects of science, religion, and the arts. There’s even a funny story regarding the death of Casares’ dog that, in true Borgesian humour, complements the themes that dominate his literature.

Amongst all the names - of friends, of books - Manguel recalls more poignant moments spent discussing the other infinities of life. Like being a tiger. But at the same time hints at moments of cruelty and casual racism. Overall, though, Borges comes in for much praise - not just for his work, but for renewing the Spanish language by way of borrowings from other tongues. Interestingly, though, he is remembered as a man who had little regard, in a physical sense, for his own work. That he should go down as a reader of the world over one of its writers certainly feels apt. On whether history remembered him at all, he was indifferent:

…it was his work, his material, the stuff on which his universe was made, that was immortal, and for that reason he himself did not feel the need to seek an everlasting existence. “The number of themes, of words, of texts is limited. Therefore nothing is ever lost. If a book is lost, then someone will write it again, eventually. That should be enough immortality for anyone.”

Although, only sixty pages in length, Manguel uses each one effectively and produces a wide ranging picture of a man, his city, his loves, his hates, and his philosophy. In Borgesian terms it need never have been written at all:

“[Borges] likes to imagine a universe in which magazines and books are not necessary because every man is capable of every magazine and book, of every story and every line of verse. In this universe…every man is an artist and therefore art is no longer necessary…“

He was a man that could cheat death by being infinitely possible: in life, in literature, and in memory.

It’s a mistake to subtitle Kurt Vonnegut’s A Man Without A Country (2005) with “a memoir of life in George W. Bush’s America” since a) it’s not much of a memoir; and b) its range is wider. What it is, then, is a collection of essays covering a range of topics, most of which initially appeared in the In These Times magazine. I did have reservations in reading this since I’d read Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and didn’t enjoy his style at all. But with non-fiction I was willing to take another chance.

A Man Without A Country is a book that deals tangentially with aspects of Vonnegut’s life - his humour, his creativity, and his humanism - but the larger canvas centres on the issues of the day, namely the environment, politics, and war. As a swansong it’s perhaps not the greatest contribution to American letters, being a cobbled together collection of essays that seemingly Vonnegut wasn’t up to the task of editing, but it has its moments.

The first couple of pieces focus solely on the man, about how being the youngest in the family makes humour the way to be appreciated. Then Vonnegut moves on to the arts, discussing how he want to be a writer, noting, with his trademark humour:

If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts.

Beyond the personal, Vonnegut moves on to a thin creative writing lesson accompanied by some amusing graphs showing events in the works of Shakespeare and Kafka, amongst others. But where the book is most enjoyable is when discussing issues that matter to others. On the subject of cigarettes, for example, he jokes about suing the American tobacco companies for not giving him cancer and, at the time of writing, he was eighty-two, saying:

The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.

Vonnegut’s disdain for the Bush administration is clear but A Man Without A Country doesn’t really hit new ground, being much in line with public sentiment. Nor does it offer any persuasive reasons for others to change their ways in the wider world, as regards the planet’s state. His pot shots here and there are effective but his kindly tone soon soothes their blow and undermines there seriousness.

In one chapter Vonnegut tells of letters receieved and his replies to the questions therein, one of which sums up his attitude to life, on the being asked for reassurance that everything will be okay:

“Welcome to Earth, young man,” I said. “It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, Joe, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of: Goddamn it, Joe, you’ve got to be kind!”

It’s the balance of optimism and pessimism that make Vonnegut’s writings here enjoyable and while he jokes for the most part, he makes it clear that he has lost faith in humanity (”I think the planet should get rid of us. We’re really awful animals.”) and the future looks bleak thanks to the mass indifference shown, pushing it to the point that we are not so much facing a man without a country as a planet without man. And I think Kurt, who’s up in Heaven now, would quite like that.

Originally published as a serial in a Colombian newspaper back in 1955, The Story Of A Shipwrecked Sailor, to my surprise given other Márquez titles, is a piece of non-fiction. It was only attributed to Gabriel García Márquez in 1970 and tells the story of Colombian sailor, Luis Alejandro Velasco, as told to Márquez. While the full title pretty much covers the bulk of the story (The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor Who Drifted on a Liferaft for Ten Days Without Food or Water, Was Proclaimed a National Hero, Kissed by Beauty Queens, Made Rich Through Publicity, and Then Spurned by the Government and Forgotten for All Time) there’s a great deal of action here despite being pretty much restricted to a raft.

Leaving Alabama after eight months of repair work, the Colombian destroyer, Caldas, is heading home. Only a couple of hours from ending their journey a number of sailors are knocked overboard, their ship sailing on innocent of their loss. In the subsequent scramble the narrator Velasco recalls seeing his friends in the water with him as he fought his way to a raft. And then, one by one, they disappeared until he was alone at sea.

The next ten days are Velasco’s account of his time as his hopes of rescue abandon him, as starvation, thirst, and the sun take their toll on his mind and body, leading him to hallucinations. And that’s not all - he hunts for fish and gulls, fights against the sharks that punctually arrive each day, and saves himself when the raft overturns. Twice! It’s amazing how much action you can fit into ten days in such a confined space. But eventually, as the lengthy title states, it all comes to an end when he ends up ashore in the place he least expects: his own Colombia.

As Márquez’s first real work, there’s little of the style that he would become famous for - and, indeed, take the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature - and his journalistic tendencies see him reporting the account from Velasco’s perspective, adding colour where necessary, and bringing life to the page. And, despite it’s basis in fact, there’s something of the myth to it, given perhaps the solitary nature of one man’s fight for survival amidst the unforgiving sea.

The Story Of A Shipwrecked Sailor is a relatively quick read covering the stubborn will to live of one man with a positive outcome. Sprinkled amongst its pages there’s some interesting tidbits of survival and enough action to maintain such a narrative account. There’s also an emotional connection as we wonder what it’s like to be feared dead, what our families and friends must think. And given the current climate of people becoming celebrities for absolutely anything, this book shows that, no matter where these people are in the world, it’s not such a recent phenomenon after all.

First published in the 1960s, Oranges by twice Pulitzer winning journalist, John McPhee got a limited lease of life back in 2000 when Penguin reissued it as a modern classic. And while it’s an interesting little book covering pretty much everything to do with oranges, the reportage within doesn’t so much as ground the book in its time than date it.

 You may think that there is not much to say about fruit in general, never mind being specific. But that’s where you’d be wrong as, it turns out, the orange has a catalogue of facts literally bursting with juicy trivia. It begins with uses for the fruit around the world, covering methods of eating, seasoning, and even cleaning the floor and removing grease. It explores the etymology of both the fruit’s name, and it’s scientific name, Citrus Sinensis. Along the way, as it spouts nugget of information in quick succession, we see the orange in history as it began its two thousand year westward journey from China to the Americas until orange growing and juicing became a worldwide industry within itself.

Splitting up chapters of trivia, McPhee shares the outcomes of his meetings with orange barons, orange growers, and other assorted industry types. While interesting to read, the text is littered with anecdotes containing names that will mean nothing to anyone other than their immediate families. And, to top it off, there is a section whereby we learn of new methods being introduced to improve the industry that, even if you have no experience of it, you know has long since been superceded by methods. It doesn’t take a genius to know that in a world rife with technology and technological gains, that the huge workforce mentioned in Oranges has long since been made redundant or replaced by immigrant workers.

McPhee’s style is immensely readable, the way he dances from fact to fact a delight to read, and when he injects some humour to his catalogue of orange facts, you can’t help but raise a smile – at the joke and in appreciation of its wording. His anecdotes do drag, and I think it wouldn’t be uncommon to breath a sigh of relief once they conclude.

It’s a quick read and a quirky subject, and McPhee’s research is to be commended, although much of the journalistic writing –reading it forty years on from publication - has soured. That said, if you know nothing of the orange industry – and oranges in general – then Oranges is a fun little book that should quench that specific hole in your trivia.