Again with the 2013!

Strange Horizons has just published a collection of short notices from reviewers about what they read and viewed in 2013.

I thought there were too many good things in 2013 for me to be able to even simply list them all in the 250 words I was allowed, so I decided instead to focus on the writer who had, to my knowledge, the best 2013: Richard Bowes.

The other entries are also fascinating, so it makes for a great reading list.

Thinking back on 2013 after I wrote my previous post looking back on the year, I realized I left two important books out that would have been there if I'd remembered they were 2013 books — for some reason, in my mind, they were 2012 books.

The first is Kit Reed's extraordinary retrospective collection The Story Until Now. In a great year for story collections, this was among the absolute best.

The other is the second published and translated volume of Reiner Stach's eventually 3-volume biography of Franz Kafka, Kafka: The Years of Insight, translated by Shelley Frisch. John Banville said:

On the evidence of the two volumes that we already have, this is one of the great literary biographies, to be set up there with, or perhaps placed on an even higher shelf than, Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce, George Painter’s Marcel Proust, and Leon Edel’s Henry James. Indeed, in this work Stach has achieved something truly original. By a combination of tireless scholarship, uncanny empathy, and writing that might best be described as passionately fluent, he does truly give a sense of “what it was like to be Franz Kafka.” He has set himself the Proustian task of summoning up, and summing up, an entire world, and has performed that task with remarkable success. The result is an eerily immediate portrait of one of literature’s most enduring and enigmatic masters.

Reading the book for me was even more thrilling than reading Kafka: The Decisive Years in 2005, because there's something about the last part of Kafka's life, which is what The Years of Insight covers, that is especially strange, haunting, and powerful. (The final volume will be about Kafka's early years; Stach reportedly held off on it in the hope that a Max Brod archive would become available, but he has apparently decided that is unlikely, and the book should be released in the next few years.) Shelley Frisch's translation deserves much praise, as the book reads beautifully.

"Fragments"

a doodle by Franz Kafka

Today is Franz Kafka's 130th birthday, as Google has reminded us, and it reminded me that one of the first and most obscure stories I published was largely about, or at least inspired by, Kafka. I'd been reading the diaries and the letters to Felice Bauer.  I'd dipped into the diaries before, reading around in random order, but had never read them very comprehensively, which is a considerably different experience. While the diaries were fascinating, if sometimes tedious, I loathed the Kafka that came through via the letters to Felice. How she put up with him is beyond me. (The relationship would become clearer when I read Reiner Stach's excellent Kafka: The Decisive Years, which has now been completed in English with the translation of Kafka: The Years of Insight, a book I've just recently begun reading.)

All this reading got me thinking about narcissistic heterosexuality, fragmentary identities, and, somehow or other, the relationship of patriarchy to imperialism. Also, Kafka's great story "A Report for an Academy".

And so I wrote a thing called "Fragments" (truly one of my most creative titles!) and it was published in 2005 in Rabid Transit: Menagerie edited by Christopher Barzak, Alan DeNiro, and Kristin Livdahl. At the risk of utterly defiling this auspicious day, here it is:

First Thoughts on The Childhood of Jesus by J.M. Coetzee

Some preliminary, inadequate notes on J.M. Coetzee's new novel, The Childhood of Jesus, after a first reading:

Kafka and Cervantes haunt this novel, as they haunt so much of Coetzee's work. Cervantes is there on the pages — the boy David carries around a children's copy of Don Quixote and learns to read from it. Kafka is more of a ghost in the book, a presence haunting its words. The Childhood of Jesus tempts us toward reading it as allegory, a tendency common to Kafka's work, and Coetzee has written insightfully about Kafka many times, including a valuable essay on "Translating Kafka" in Stranger Shores that criticizes Edwin and Willa Muir's allegorical and religious reading of Kafka and the effect it had on their translations. Reading Coetzee allegorically is always a false path and yet one he seems to enjoy tempting readers toward. This time, the temptation is even in the title.

The title is mischievous, because there is no character named Jesus in the novel, though there are certainly allusions to the story of Jesus of Nazareth. Coetzee, like Kafka, is often mischievous; and, like Kafka, his mischievous tendencies often go unnoticed by readers and critics. His playfulness has only become more pronounced in the books since Disgrace and the Nobel Prize, books that flagrantly transgress expectations of genre and realism, books seemingly designed to torture readers who desire one, stable meaning in the texts they read, and who insist on knowing what is real and what is not.

"Genres Do Not Exist"

From a New Inquiry Q&A with Eileen Myles:

What ‘bad’ genres did you grow up reading—science fiction, fairy tales, romance, etc.—or read as an adult?

I resist the question entirely. I don’t think quotes ['...'] dispense with the idea of putting writing into good and bad genres. Let me say and I probably mean this in the most manifesto-ing way that genres don’t exist. They don’t exist at all. They serve the needs of marketing, of academic specialization, even as modes of work, but in terms of meaning or content or associative formations they are like traffic lights—not so interesting and most adamantly not what we are doing today. Genres for me are just a way in which we are controlled, protected I suppose but I’m not a writer to be protected at all. I love science fiction, have all my life and it’s where I met Kafka. Angela Carter is swimming around in there too. Science fiction propelled me into poetry and writing in general and if I think of the children’s books I was exposed to I can’t see the difference between sci fi, poetry, Kafka or Angela Carter. Yet they all know each other very well. That’s all I’m saying. Are there good and bad writers? I’m not sure about that either.

While I generally agree, I would offer various footnotes of minor disagreement (or nuance), most of which would just be me paraphrasing my introduction to The Jewel-Hinged Jaw and review of Gary Wolfe's Evaporating Genres. Genre is not merely something that "serves the needs of marketing", etc., but rather has been something produced by a variety of publishing practices — genre-specific magazines and book publishers, fan clubs, fanzines, conventions. Those are real, and they exist, and they profoundly influence, for better and worse, how all sorts of different texts are created, shaped, distributed, and received.

Otherwise, yes, exactly. I, too, met Kafka in science fiction. As have others.

Awoke From Troubled Dreams, Found Self Changed Into a Monstrous Memoir

Franz Kafka's editor:

The story is true. Kafka simply wrote a completely verifiable, journalistic account of a neighbor by the name of Gregor Samsa who, because of some bizarre medical condition, turned into a ‘monstrous vermin.’ Kafka assured us that he’d made the whole thing up. We now know that to be completely false.

I wonder if Penguin will offer me a refund for the new Michael Hofmann translation of the stories that I bought a few days ago?

Meanwhile, some of my super-secret, oh-so-influential, don't-you-wish-you-were-as-connected-as-I-am-nah-nah-nah-nah sources within the publishing industry tell me that Mark Leyner's My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, will soon be revealed to be not a memoir of a family's amusing exploits down digestive tracts (as we've all thought for years), but rather a microeconomic study of the effects of household income as a determinant of natural gas consumption. Keep your eyes out for further revelations!

A Golden Age

At The Valve, John Holbo just posted this cover from the June 1953 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries:
Yes, indeed -- Ayn Rand and Franz Kafka in one pulp magazine together! But it's better than that. Here's the entire table of contents:

Worms of the Earth by Robert E. Howard
Pendulum by Ray Bradbury and Henry Hasse
Bernie Goes to Hell by Arthur Dekker Savage
Find the Happy Children by Benjamin Ferris
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
Haunted Hostel by Emma L'Hommedieu Frost
Dirge (Aztec) by Louis M. Hobbs
Anthem by Ayn Rand

Yes, Robert E. Howard, Ray Bradbury, Ayn Rand, and Franz Kafka all in one issue! (All reprints -- I would love to know what went through Mary Gnaedinger's mind as she put it together...) As noted at The Valve, this was the final issue of FFM, "after which the magazine evidently died of confusion."

This is apparently a particularly rare issue -- the least expensive copy I could find on the internet is going for $61, and it usually sells for around $100 or more. If anybody out there has bucks to burn and wants to send me a gift, though, I wouldn't complain... (It's the mix that's appealing; even in high school I thought Anthem was badly written, and I've never had much of a taste for Robert E. Howard, but that contents page is enough to cause the covetous consumerist impulses to stir in even the most mild mannered of us.)