The End of Oulipo?: Update

Posted on February 19, 2013 by laurenelkin

Last month the literary world was shaken as a pair of literary critics published the most audacious book since Georges Perec’s e-less novel A Void. Really. It’s that audacious.

Now you can buy us on Amazon in the US and the UK, as an e-book or as one of those old-fashioned rectangular paper things.

Or you can start by reading an excerpt in The New Inquiry, and then buy a copy.

Need convincing in person? There are some events happening, and we’d love for you to come along:

Tonight! Februrary 19th: my co-author Scott Esposito will be in conversation with the youngest most American Oulipian, Daniel Levin Becker, author of Many Subtle Channels, at City Lights in San Francisco.

March 11th: if you happen to be in Paris, I’ll be appearing at Shakespeare & Company with Joanna Walsh.

Further reading: Scott’s Oulipo-themed 2012: A Year in Reading, for The Millions. Chad Post wrote about us here, and Levi Asher wrote about us too.

The End of Oulipo? An Attempt to Exhaust a Movement

Posted on November 8, 2012 by laurenelkin

Very pleased to announce that my next book, co-authored with Scott Esposito, will be out from Zer0 Books on 25 January 2013. Spread the word!

The Oulipo celebrated its fiftieth birthday in 2010, and as it enters its sixth decade, its members, fans and critics are all wondering: where can it go from here? In two long essays Scott Esposito and Lauren Elkin consider Oulipo’s strengths, weaknesses, and impact on today’s experimental literature.

Dreaming in French

Posted on April 11, 2012 by laurenelkin

My latest review, of Alice Kaplan’s Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis, is up at The Daily Beast:

Dreaming in French is, above all, an attempt to validate an undervalued aspect of American culture: the study abroad narrative. The stories of girls overseas have not often been part of the canon of American expatriate writing, Kaplan points out. We have a wealth of material from Norman Mailer, George Plimpton, Saul Bellow, James Baldwin, et al, from their own days on the GI Bill, their Guggenheims, or their Fulbrights. Young American men in Paris were intent on “embrac[ing] irresponsibility,” as James Baldwin put it, producing work that is “gritty, irreverent, macho, [and] frequently alcoholic.” Their female peers, on the other hand, were determined “to embrace a new language and master a highly coded way of life.” Kaplan, a deft historian, avails herself of a range of sources in order to reconstruct their experiences, talking to their classmates and the families who housed them, reading their letters home, looking at the photos they and their friends took, watching the available footage of them speaking French, and reading the newspapers they would have read.

I was once a student at Columbia’s Reid Hall in Paris and a professor at New York University’s Paris campus—I can confirm that the experience of studying abroad marks you for life, forcing you to interrogate your identity as you reconstitute it in a foreign setting. You are not simply “translating” yourself into that language; you are building your identity within it. “True philosophy,” Kaplan quotes Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “means learning to see the world anew.” In their time in the City of Lights, Kennedy, Sontag and Davis didn’t just get an education. They acquired a worldview, and one that would leave an inarguable imprint on history.

(Read more)

In his review for the New York Times Book Review, Dwight Garner wrote that “Alice Kaplan’s ‘Dreaming in French’ is an easy book to admire but a hard one to muster much enthusiasm for.” I couldn’t disagree more– I haven’t felt so enthusiastic about a book in quite some time.

“The obstacle that Ms. Kaplan confronts,” he says, “is that these women did not leave a great deal behind in terms of written accounts of their Paris years. What little there is can seem larval. (…) [Kaplan] dilates on the books these women read, the plays they saw, the shifting French intellectual climate. She is forced to utter broad generalizations, like, ‘France gave each of these women a deep and lasting confidence, confirmed their spirit of adventure and guaranteed their freedom from home constraints.’ That’s a pleasant enough sentence, but it could be written about a summer spent with Outward Bound.”

Garner’s clearly never been a twenty year-old American woman discovering Paris for the first time. In fact, Kaplan’s book is a serious contribution to feminist historiography, unearthing– through material that is thin for obvious reasons– a parallel female experience abroad during a period which we have understood largely through male expatriate accounts.

I love this anecdote, about the way in which adopting a French identity allowed Davis to circumvent the “violent dialectic of inheritance and disinheritance” in which she grew up in segregated Birmingham, Alabama. When Davis and her sister were teenagers, Kaplan recounts, they proved this by going into a shoe shop in Birmingham and pretending to be from Martinique, speaking only French and broken English. The shoe salesmen treated them with deference and catered to them in the front of the store, whereas American blacks would have been escorted to the back. After keeping the ruse up for awhile, they finally burst out laughing and told the staff in flawless English: “‘All Black people have to do is pretend they come from another country and you treat us like dignitaries’” (150).

An advance look at 2012

Posted on January 3, 2012 by laurenelkin

The Millions has a great round-up of their most anticipated books of 2012, and since they're all from US publishers I won't complain that they didn't include mine, which is coming out in April but in France and in French, so, ok.

Here are the books I'm looking forward to myself, or which I've already read and loved:

I'm particularly looking forward to Ben Marcus's The Flame Alphabet (Knopf), and not just because his mom was my dissertation advisor. Here's what The Millions had to say:

In Ben Marcus’s Flame Alphabet, language is the poison that youth inflict on adult ears. Utterances ushered from children’s mouths have toxic effects on adults, while the underage remain immune to the assault. The effects are so harmful that The Flame Alphabet’s narrator, Sam, and his wife must separate themselves from their daughter to preserve their health. Sam sets off to the lab to examine language and its properties in an attempt to discover an antidote and reunite his family. Marcus’s uncharacteristically conventional narrative makes way for him to explore the uncanny eccentricities of language and life. (Anne)

The Last Nude, by Ellis Avery (Riverhead). I reviewed it for The Daily Beast and will let you know when that runs. Set in Paris in the 20s, and featuring a cast of characters from Tamara de Lempicka to Sylvia Beach, with a Hemingway double to boot, The Last Nude owes more to Jean Rhys than to Hemingway. Like Rhys, Avery draws her characters with a sharp wit and a strong sense of empathy. Look for an essay on Paris from Ellis on this blog later this week. Here's what The Millions said:

With starred reviews from both Booklist and Library Journal, Ellis Avery’s second novel The Last Nude imagines the brief love affair between the glamorous Art-Deco Painter Tamara de Lempicka and the young muse for her most iconic painting The Beautiful Rafaela. Set in 1920s Paris, among the likes of Jean Cocteau, Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach, and a fictional American journalist named Anson Hall (a sort of Ernest Hemingway type), Avery explores the costs of ambition, the erotics of sexual awakening, and the devastation that ensues when these two converge. Critics have praised The Last Nude as riveting, elegant, seductive, and breathtaking. (Sonya)

Smut, by Alan Bennett (Picador). What The Millions had to say:

Given the existence of Nicholson Baker’s House of Holes, a new book entitled Smut would seem to have a lot to live up to—at minimum, it should descend into dimensions so filthy and moist that they would cause Baker’s own thunderstick to droop in disgusted admiration. Instead, the absurdly prolific, versatile, and esteemed writer of The History Boys and The Madness of King George provides a pair of very English stories about the sexual adventures of two middle-aged, middle-class British women. So, rather than a lightspeed journey smack into a rigid “Malcolm Gladwell,” Smut is, in the words of the Guardian, a “comedy of false appearances.” And that’s probably not such a bad thing. (Jacob)

Paris, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down, by Rosencrans Baldwin (FSG, April). Because I don't know how many times I've tweeted that exact sentence. Based on Bladwin's essays for The Morning News. Here's The Millions's take:

In the grand expatriate tradition, Baldwin went to Paris looking for la vie en rose and found himself in a McDonald’s. The editor of The Morning News and author of You Lost Me There moved his family to Paris for a copywriting job and soon learned that it’s not all croissants and cathedrals. Learning to live with constant construction, the oddities of a French office, the omnipresence of American culture, and his own inability to speak French, Baldwin loses his dream of Paris but finds a whole new reality to fall in love with. (Janet)

Equally excited for the sequel to Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, for the next volume of Sontag's essays (which I'm slated to review for the QC) and for Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be? to be published in the US (I reviewed the Canadian edition for The Quarterly Conversation).

But I say enough, enough, enough of books with titles like Nobody Here Loves You More Than Me/Nobody Here is More Sad Than You/Nobody Here But Us Chickens.

Read the rest here.

to read

Posted on May 18, 2011 by laurenelkin

Robert Maggiori's Le Métier de critique, journalisme et philosophie, on the art of writing about ideas outside of the academy: neither pure journalism, nor pure philosophy, the "journaliste philosophique" is a métier marked by paradox and pressure:

Hanté par ce qu'il appelle le "syndrome de Garve" (Garve fut le premier à avoir fait connaître la Critique de la raison pure de Kant dans un article publié en janvier 1782), l'auteur se dit obsédé par la possibilité, humaine après tout, de passer à côté d'une Critique de la raison pure d'aujourd'hui, "d'un livre inaugural, d'un ouvrage qui marquerait une rupture épistémologique dans l'ordre de la pensée". Comme l'angoisse du gardien de but avant le penalty, l'angoisse du critique devant la pile de livres, où se cache peut-être l'immanquable manqué, est une condition de vie.

(Too busy to translate, sorry.) More in Les Inrocks.

To the River

Posted on May 8, 2011 by laurenelkin

A glowing review for the brillantissime Olivia Laing by Paul Farley in today's Observer:

A kind of desire to draw with, and be drawn by, the landscape informs Olivia Laing's first book. In 2009, a series of minor crises led Laing to the Ouse in Sussex. The river – like all rivers – has magnetic properties, and a reassuring sense of direction that appeals to those who've "lost faith with where they're headed". More than its geographical, material facts or its winding blue filament on an OS map, it provides a metaphor for time's eddy and flow, and for memory.

History hasn't crossed paths with the Ouse very often, and if we only know one thing about this river, it's likely to be that it was where Virginia Woolf drowned herself – wearing Wellington boots, fastening on her hat and filling her jacket pockets with heavy stones – in March 1941. Laing was aware of Woolf as soon as she first dipped her hand in the Ouse a decade ago, and began returning for walks and swims that "amassed the weight of ritual". Laing and the Ouse have history.

With Woolf as a presiding spirit, she undertakes to walk this 42-mile, ten-a-penny kind of English river that rises near Haywards Heath and empties into the Channel at Newhaven (City of the Dead, according to Woolf) from source to sea. Significantly, she chooses a week at midsummer, the year's hinge. The journey she records here feels like a clearing and a clarifying, bringing to mind the old Latin tag solvitur ambulando: literally, sorting it out by walking. She immerses herself in the landscape; she achieves that trance-like state "when the feet and the blood seem to collide and harmonise" that's conducive to writing.

Problems in Book Reviewing, redux

Posted on April 16, 2011 by laurenelkin

I'm sorry, but if you are only discovering Terry Castle's classic article "Desperately Seeking Susan" after you have been asked by the New York Times to review Sigrid Nunez's memoir about Susan Sontag, perhaps you are not the right person to be reviewing a memoir about Susan Sontag.

Laura Shapiro professes herself "baffled" by Nunez's memoir:

Not until I discovered Terry Castle’s essay “Desperately Seeking Susan” did Nunez’s book start to make sense. Castle was teaching at Stanford when she met Sontag, whom she had long worshiped as a writer and feminist; and they were friends, more or less, for a decade. The essay (in Castle’s recent collection, “The Professor”) zings right to the heart of a relationship built on the mutual neediness of the worshiper and the worshiped, in part because she’s able to step back and recognize the inanity. “Desperately Seeking Susan” is hilarious — her description of Sontag re-enacting on a Palo Alto street how she dodged sniper fire in Sarajevo could have come straight from Thurber. At the same time, a credible part of Castle’s psyche still idolizes the glorious braininess of Sontag’s feminism back in the ’70s. “She was our very own Great Man,” she writes — a perspective that sums up Sontag’s role in Nunez’s growing up better than Nunez does herself.

Castle's article first appeared in the LRB, before being republished in The Professor and other writings, but who reads that old rag. (Clearly not anyone at the NYT.)

Best Books (read by me) of 2010

Posted on December 30, 2010 by laurenelkin

What a nice relief that after the onus placed on critics, last year, to come up with a "best of the decade," this year we can stick to 2010.

I don't have a lot to say about the books published in 2010 because, well, I didn't read very many of them. I read a whole lot of books published in the 1930s, and about the 1930s, but 2010 didn't get much play. So for what it's worth, I thought I'd do a list of the best of what I did read this year that I think might be of interest.

Alix Roubaud, Alix's Journal (Dalkey Archive).

I reviewed this for The Quarterly Conversation and was totally blown away. Am now working up a project on early journals and self-portrait photography, looking at Roubaud, Claude Cahun, and a few others.

J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (Secker & Warburg).

People will tell you it's basically just a collection of essays in loose novel form. And that's exactly what it is. But it's brilliant nonetheless, in its insightful investigation of topics from vegetarianism to African literature, and in its portrait of the woman at its center.

Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist (Simon & Schuster).

The first book I read in 2010 and I've already gifted it three times and recommended it countless others. If you like poetry, or if you like to procrastinate, or both, this bud's for you.

Anne Marsella, The Baby of Belleville (Portobello).

This smart Belleville caper is populated by French aristocrats, a pregnant nun, Muslims Without Borders, ku-fu fighters, and a send-up of Julia Kristeva, brought together by a wise-cracking American expatriate in Paris, whose infant son is the baby of the title. The author is a good friend of mine and I have to say that in the name of disclosure, but she's a great writer and I'd hawk her book even if I didn't know her. Most novels of expatriate life in Paris are pretty thin gruel. Anne's novels, and I don't think she'll mind me saying so, are ratatouille.*

Lydia Davis, The Collected Stories (FSG).

Enough has been said about Davis's work (most elegantly by Dan Chiasson in the NYRB) that I don't feel I can add anything productive or interesting. I don't have a "take" yet. All I can say is read it for yourself. Then let me know what your take is so I can pretend it's mine.**

Elif Batuman, The Possessed (FSG).

A collection of essays about being a graduate student in Russian literature, Batuman makes me wish I'd had the idea to take notes at all the adorably absurd conferences I've been to and put them together into a collection of wacky tales from the groves of academe. Except I guess we have fewer eccentrics in English lit. And we don't have to learn Uzbek. And yet somehow Batuman makes her particular subject universally interesting, which I am just not capable of doing, or you'd see a lot more academic anecdotes on this blog. So Batuman gets special mention in the category of "I wish I could do that."

Books I feel more mixed about

David Shields, Reality Hunger (FSG).

Shields doesn't really say anything new, or anything coherent, but through expert justaposition and occasional rants he raises some interesting issues not about plagiarism (which is what the uninteresting controversy surrounding this book was about) but about collage as technique and novelistic form. Overall, I am grateful to him for putting together a list of aphorisms which will serve extremely well as classroom prompts and article epigraphs.

Jonathan Franzen, Freedom (FSG).

I got about 150 pages in before I had to put it down to turn to more pressing work. I was mildly interested in the characters. Nowhere near as invested as I was told I was going to be, which seems to be the thing people love about this book– Patty and Walter really get under your skin, they say. But is character enough to make a novel great? Not really. I didn't get all the fuss about The Corrections and I still don't get it with Freedom. But I guess I can't say that for sure until I finish it.

Most disappointing book of 2010

The only one that stands out is Martin Amis's The Pregnant Widow (Jonathan Cape), which I only got halfway through. I don't have time to finish books that seem to exist solely so the author can write about nipples. I do realize of course that maybe is the draw for one sector of Amis's audience, but my interest waned.

Biggest book-related disappointment of 2010 (concerning a book I did not read)

Michel Houllebecq getting the Goncourt for La Carte et la Territoire. I suppose they felt they had to give it to him and the other contenders weren't strong enough to knock him out of the running. There's been a big PR push with the publication of this book to rehabilitate Houellebecq's image (led in the Anglophone world by the Paris Review, who seem to labor under the delusion that it gives them Gallic credibility to believe anything Les Inrocks says)– I just can't believe people have fallen for it. Once a racist misogynist, always a racist misogynist. That's what I always say.***

*Sorry but I am experiencing worse jetlag than usual, having spent Tuesday night in the terminal at JFK. Consequently, my metaphors are suffering.

**kidding.

***especially when I'm too busy/jet-lagged to actually read the latest book by the racist misogynist in question.

Lauren Elkin

Critical enthusiast.

Category Archives: Critical