A Novel

I bought another $2 book at Half Price Books this afternoon, translated a little awkwardly from French, perhaps justifiably so, and titled "A Novel Bookstore". "A hymn to fine literature" says a quote from Le Figaro magazine printed smack in the middle of the soft cover.  Irresistible on the throw away shelf.

Then, reading the blurbs on the back cover I discovered that the author Laurence Cosse is female, and it occurred to me that had I known it in the bookstore, I might have thought twice about buying the book. Why, I'm not sure, I just might have. I like Agatha Christie and Patricia Highsmith.  Perhaps I don't trust post-modern female writers. Perhaps.

Just this morning a friend sent me an e-mail notifying me about some literary prize (I had beat him to it, actually, and ordered the winning tome last night.) And he added that this is probably not good, because selected by the "salon" and undoubtedly politically correct.

The Kenzaburō Ōe Prize, is a Japanese literary award  whose the winner is selected by Kenzaburō Ōe the only judge.

The Interrogation

My second Thomas H. Cook novel.  NO literary references, none at all.  It is a straight police procedural, if i understand the term correctly.  Over 10 years old, mass market paperback that I overpaid for, even though it was a used copy. Yes, Mr Cook says that he writes crime fiction to say other things. And here in this novel  despite it not being as "literary" as my introduction to his book he does, I think.

Spoiler Alert!

There are several dead bodies at the end of the story. Each takes some part of the plot's mystery with him to the grave, the only part he knows, so that no one, dead or alive knows it all, no one including the reader, and even the author. Nevertheless, a police detective continues the investigation and finds something else before the conclusion, something not yet revealed to him.

Full truth cannot be known? Something like it, something like it.

Practiced Disdain

Twenty six novels the man has published, all mysteries, and I am now reading my first one, having been encouraged to do so only after seeing Tom Nolan's review in a Saturday Wall Street Journal, whose reviews I mostly avoided in the past.  And it is a literary mystery, so much so that one is surprised to see it published as a narrow genre novel.  But then, that's where the money is, isn't it.

And so, all my practiced disdain for everything that's popular and genre, all that airport lit, New York lit, all  my snobism and taste for the slightly eclectic have led me nowhere.  (I say, 'slightly eclectic' because the radically eclectic doesn't appeal to me either.)

I've ordered another of his book on Amazon, for a mere $0.01 plus shipping, and am on the lookout for more - there are twenty four others, after all!

In the meantime, I am unable to finish another tome, a literary novel, because although it is rich and readable, it just doesn't make final sense.  I'll write about it here another time.

The mystery I'm reading is The Crime of Julian Wells, by Thomas H. Cook.

of Graphomania

I've never been certain what graphomania, or grafomania is, but I think I'll know it when I see it.  It has been, I've noticed, a handy description used by the published elites to dismiss the writings of the unpublished or self-published peasants.   Nowadays of course everyone is or can be published, not only on blogs but in the form of real books sold on Amazon and even in bookstores, but certainly in electronic form the world over.

I must say that the dismissals of others' writings that I've encountered are usually based on the style of writing and not actually on any discernible mania of the writer.  And here's the problem.  What style of writing is to be judged graphomaniacal, and what style isn't?  That's the question I've never seen answered.

I know one writer who writes maniacally.   He is a music industry gadfly who writes daily emails, often several of them, to his subscribers, myself one of them.  Somehow or another through a link to one of his newsletters I discovered a new exciting rock group which discovery led me to signing up for subscription.

The man has an opinion on everything in the universe and expresses it in single sentence paragraphs which, if they don't end with exclamation points, they ought to.   I would have cancelled the subscription, as I don't read most of his daily e-mails, if not for the fact that he has many followers in the music industry, whose responses he regularly includes, and they are most interesting  pieces of historical fact and opinion.  So I stay on.

Other than that, if I were to ever publish a book myself, I'd title it "Graphomania" or "of Graphomania", just to stick it in the face of those literary elites always so weary of competition.  I am starting yet another blog inspired by yet another diary of a writer that I am reading now, about which more later.  My own mania however takes a different form or forms which will perhaps become evident later, has already become evident or will remain a mystery to the reader and to myself.  Keep a-readin'!