etcetera

‘Tis the sea­son for the com­ing out of recluses : First Illa­yaraja, famously idio­syn­cratic genius, per­forms his first live con­cert in decades, and even man­ages to enjoy it. Then, an actual, sub­stan­tive Philip Roth inter­view appears in the Guardian. And now, Annie Proulx — who equates celebrity to being dis­played on a meat rack — reluc­tantly talks to a few pub­li­ca­tions before the release of Broke­back Moun­tain, the movie based on her New Yorker short story from the late nineties.

Proulx started her career writ­ing hunt­ing sto­ries for a men’s mag­a­zine, and to avoid the inevitable “What’s a name like Annie doing in a mag­a­zine like this?” — the edi­tor wanted her to change her name to some­thing more, well, mas­cu­line. Joe or Zack, per­haps? Finally a com­pro­mise was arrived at: Proulx added an E to her name and started writ­ing as E.A.Proulx. Even after she became pop­u­lar, the E per­sisted. Broke­Back Moun­tain was her first work as just plain Annie — even the Pulitzer win­ning Ship­ping News was cred­ited to E. Annie Proulx. ^[1]

Most of Proulx’s tales are set in rural Amer­ica, and her writ­ing is bril­liantly evoca­tive (and uncon­ven­tional and sur­pris­ingly humor­ous), effec­tively doing what she wants it to do — “make land­scapes rise from the page, to appear in the cam­era lens of the reader’s mind.“

More than her lyri­cal writ­ing, the allure of Proulx’s work lies in her stead­fast refusal to glam­or­ize a land­scape that’s often a vic­tim of its own beauty in the hands of lesser writ­ers. Her rivers always run brown, and she’s not afraid of stain­ing the pris­tine snow of the moun­tains with a lit­tle bit of pee. Peo­ple treat ani­mals cru­elly and hand­some, hardy cow­boys fall in love with each other. Fly fish­ing is hard work, rodeo bull rid­ers whim­per when they fall and life on the whole is pretty darn hard. It is the aver­age work­ing class world, pro­jected on white snowscreens.

In her own words,

It is not pas­toral nos­tal­gia that shakes me but imag­ined his­to­ries built on such slen­der clues as a rusted tobacco can nailed to a lodge­pole pine and con­tain­ing a miner’s claim from the last cen­tury, or an unchecked pan­han­dle wind­mill bor­ing a mad hole in the sky…

My intro­duc­tion to Proulx was through The Ship­ping News, her Pulitzer win­ning book about a quin­tes­sen­tial loser named Quoyle. Sad­dled with the respon­si­bilty of rais­ing his two daugh­ters when his wife leaves him for another man, Quoyle decides to move his fam­ily — the kids and an old aunt — to New­found­land. Actu­ally, it was the Aunt’s will, and Quoyle com­plies. He finds a job in a news­pa­per office, and slowly, the fam­ily starts to set­tle down in the aunt’s ram­shackle old home. As the gloom of win­ter starts to take over, Quoyle starts expe­ri­enc­ing some­thing close to hope.. “it may be that love some­times occurs with­out pain or misery.”

The Ship­ping News is a bril­liantly writ­ten book, and Proulx pos­sesses an acute aware­ness of her set­ting and char­ac­ters. Every char­ac­ter has a back­story, and exhibits the odd quirk or two (but never quirky enough to be car­i­ca­tures) and when they all come together, it makes for a very sat­is­fy­ing read. Did I say bril­liantly writ­ten? At unex­pected moments, Proulx decides to do away with prepo­si­tions and con­junc­tions in her sen­tences, adding a wry, darkly funny tone to the writing.

Quoyle, grin­ning. Expected to hear they were hav­ing a kid. Already picked him­self for godfather.

Quoyle at the back of the meet­ing, writ­ing on his pad. Went home, typed and retyped all night at the kitchen table. In the morn­ing, eyes cir­cled by rings, nerved on cof­fee, he went to the newsroom.

And then there are the gim­micks. Each chap­ter begins with the descrip­tion of a knot from The Ash­ley Book Of Knots, and after a few chap­ters it is fun to try and fig­ure out what would hap­pen based on the knot described. Here’s the first chapter:

Quoyle: A coil of rope.

A Flem­ish flake is a spi­ral coil of one layer only. It is made on deck, so that it may be walked on if necessary.

For what’s essen­tially a cat­a­log of a gloomy life, The Ship­ping News can also be incred­i­bly funny. Quoyle tends to think in news­pa­per head­lines, and Proulx uses this through­out the book to great effect. Just this one “trick” light­ens up the book tremen­dously, and trans­forms what could have eas­ily become a labo­ri­ous lit­er­ary novel into an acces­si­ble classic.

Saw the com­mon­places of life as news­pa­per head­lines. Man Walks Across Park­ing Lot at Mod­er­ate Pace. Women Talk of Rain. Phone Rings in Empty Room.

Here’s an excerpt.

Com­ing back to Broke­back Moun­tain, Proulx says she spent more time on this short story than she would on a novel and it shows. It is a beau­ti­ful short story. (In fact, all the sto­ries in Close Range are great reads).

They were raised on small, poor ranches in oppo­site cor­ners of the state, Jack Twist in Light­ning Flat, up on the Mon­tana bor­der, Ennis del Mar from around Sage, near the Utah line, both high-school drop-out coun­try boys with no prospects, brought up to hard work and pri­va­tion, both rough-mannered, rough-spoken, inured to the stoic life.

that dif­fer­ent, she seems to be say­ing. Their love is for­bid­den love; Jack wants them liv­ing together but Ennis is wor­ried about the con­se­quences. The two of them part ways and try to lead “nor­mal” lives — wives, kids — while pin­ing for each other. And then,… I won’t give it away, just read it if you can get hold of it somewhere.

Update: A Broke­back Moun­tan FAQ at annieproulx.com.

And a Fal­staff review of the movie.

[1]: I got this from the Com­plete New Yorker, which is my stranded-on-a-desert-book now. Ok, DVD, but still.

Gra­ham Greene, we hear, sucked at spelling. And so, when play­ing Scrab­ble, he resorted to the clas­sic poor speller’s trick: quoign­ing new words.

The prob­lem, accord­ing to Meyer, was that [Gra­ham] Greene’s spelling was “deeply dubi­ous”, and the pair did not have a dic­tio­nary. Dur­ing a stay in Tahiti, Greene pro­duced the words “zeb”, which he claimed was an Eliz­a­bethan word for “cock”, and “quoign” which he insisted was Shake­spearean, quot­ing: “Yon castle’s quoign that Duncan’s spirit haunts.”

Meyer thought the line was as dubi­ous as Greene’s spelling and, in the sul­try Tahit­ian nights, tem­pers frayed. The pair were still argu­ing when they reached San Fran­cisco, months later. They ran straight from the ship to a second-hand book store and found a dictionary.

The word was in, spelled “quoin”, which sat­is­fied Greene, though as Meyer pointed out, “quoin” would not have landed on a triple let­ter score.

I don’t feel so bad now for trick­ing my eleven year old nephew into believ­ing that qyon­der was the one of the few words in Eng­lish where a u didn’t fol­low the q. Think it meant a prob­lem at a dis­tant place. I hope he men­tions me in his auto­bi­og­ra­phy, but given that he hasn’t both­ered to look up qyon­der yet, that is a very dis­tant pos­si­bil­ity. He isn’t that good at cricket either.

Mr Greene and Scrab­ble (Through Book­slut)

Mean­while, every­one else in the world seems to have watched the new Pot­ter movie. I want to go watch it tomor­row, so that I can tell peo­ple that the book was so much bet­ter than the movie. To make that state­ment with author­ity, I had to read the book first, so I read it online here — check back next week for the post that tells you the book is so much bet­ter than the movie.

The Guardian Digested Read is my (very belated) find of the year.

Why, I even read the entire dirty book that Fal­staff talks about so much. In five min­utes, no less. Let’s see you beat that buddy.

And before I sign off, check out Gayathri’s crisp lit­tle review of Harold Pinter’s A Birth­day Party. And wish the soon to be mar­ri­a­jed (damn, that’s bet­ter than qyon­der) Veena. To bal­ance out the sexes, here’s another bad speller exposed.

Update: Some­how, this post would like to think it spawned this one. It feels rather proud about the fact.

It is as if we are too pug-nosed indi­vid­u­ally, but together, we cre­ate a patri­cian nose a Roman would be proud of. And from atop that noble pro­boscis, we gaze down upon the world. For all our toils for the sake of being included, exclu­sion is the ulti­mate reward.

The inces­sant pat­ter of rain through the night. Dawn, the trees greener than before, drops of water cling­ing to leaves. Rays of sun­shine reflect off the water, and find a way to enter the room through care­fully placed lay­ers of win­dow dress­ings for­ti­fied with tow­els and sheets. Crows caw­ing, inter­spersed with spar­rows chirp­ing. The maid scream­ing at her son, in a voice that would have made a tenor immensely proud, ask­ing him not to pee out­doors. A lone mos­quito buzzing malaria and dengue in my ear, wak­ing me up sev­eral hours ahead of sched­ule. Bad days, I now know, begin this way.

Later that evening, I fin­ished Chetan Bhagat’s Five Point Some­one, a book that the author’s web­site describes as a con­tem­po­rary clas­sic. Hmm.

Now if a book starts with,

Before I really begin this book, let me first tell you what this book is not. It is not a guide on how to live through college.

you really have no busi­ness read­ing it. But I did. I mean, who can resist a low priced book that promises to let you relive the best years of your life?

Five point some­one is about the lives of three under­achiev­ers at one of the Indian Insti­tutes of Tech­nol­ogy — a series of mis­steps bring them to the brink of (aca­d­e­mic) extinc­tion. And then, a mag­i­cal mis­sive arrives and sets things straight. But the book is not about the plot: it is a just a series of inci­dents that are sup­posed to make you all nos­tal­gic about your own life at college.

Five point some­one is also about atro­ciously bad writ­ing that hov­ers pre­car­i­ously in the region between just awk­ward usage and out­right bad gram­mar.

“God, you look a mess,” Ryan greeted in the toi­let as we were shav­ing together.

I kind of went inside myself in that short span of time before Cherian’s office door opened again and sealed our fate, just sat qui­etly and ignored what Ryan and Alok said, that is if they did say anything.

The writ­ing man­ages to effort­lessly over­shadow any mer­its the book might have — believ­able char­ac­ters, real­is­tic dia­logues and (on occa­sion) funny inci­dents, result­ing in the poor­est read since the likes of um… can’t think of any­thing right now. The Inscrutable Amer­i­cans, maybe?

The book did (is doing) really well in India — appar­ently due to a smart pub­lish­ing strat­egy that priced the book very low. Chetan Bha­gat even got him­self a follow-up deal to write another book called One Night @ the Call Cen­ter, and that book is out now. Omi­nously, Bhagat’s web­site touts this one as another con­tem­po­rary clas­sic. Hmm once again.

Jai Arjun Singh has good words for One Night @ the Call Cen­ter — he calls it an improve­ment over Five Point Some­one. Now that’s not say­ing much, is it?

Time Mag­a­zine makes a list of the best books of this cen­tury — a list skewed towards pop­u­lar lit­er­a­ture — and me likes it very much. Le Carre makes it and so do William Gib­son and Neal Stephen­son. And Bel­low and Roth. Very cool.

Update: John Le Carre has long been a per­sonal favorite — I’d argue a bit over the book cho­sen to rep­re­sent Le Carre in the list (Tin­ker, Tai­lor, Sol­dier, Spy or The Lit­tle Drum­mer Girl would’ve been bet­ter choices, but at least they didn’t pick The Con­stant Gar­dener), but no quib­bles with him being in the list. He did the hard­est thing you could ask a writer to do: mak­ing lit­er­a­ture out of the most dumbed down fic­tion genre. Now if he’d only start writ­ing code­break­ing books set in the Vatican…

William Gib­son and Neal Stephen­son are much over­looked writ­ers. Just because they write Sci­ence Fic­tion, the lit­er­ary types sneer, hold their noses and walk away from them. But if the value of a book lies in the amount of (smart) enter­tain­ment it pro­vides, then Neu­ro­Mancer and Snow­Crash are right up there with the best. Crypto­nom­i­con too, but I’ll live with this.