On most Wednesdays, we host a story hour where a very talented story teller reads books and entertains kids for as long as their attention spans last. Our children's section has a big comfy teddy bear, a stuffed dog, samples of picture books and pop-up books, and toys for kids to play with. We also run a young reviewers program called Fresh Ink, that gives kids a chance to read advanced reader copies of books (which they can keep) and have their reviews published on our website and on a blog. On December 8th, 2010, we hosted an event, with Whole Foods for the poetry anthology, Poets for Haiti, with the proceeds from all sales going to Partners in Health, capping off a year filled with events big and small. We also now run a blog, Facebook page, and Twitter account sharing reviews, recommendations, author interviews, and news from the book world, along with our website with links to bestsellers, IndieNext List selections, Featured Titles, staff picks, our event listings and more. Our in-store displays are like the “Also Bought” feature except instead of some mysterious algorithm spitting out book titles, we have intelligent, passionate readers choosing and arranging the books around important and fun themes. And we love talking about books in all forms, whether through 140 characters a pop or long conversations in the store. And we can do all this because people buy books.
As the world of book buying changes at an increasing rate, people are beginning to ask why bother with a bookstore, especially when most of the time the book you buy is going to cost you more at a bookstore? If I can buy a book for $9.99 from my computer at home why go anywhere else? Well, you buy more than a book when you buy one from a bookstore. You get to pop in after dinner and wander around the stacks for a while or flip through a magazine while drinking coffee; you get a landmark to help you organize meet ups with your friends; a safe place to bring your kids; somewhere to go when you just need to get out of the house; you get a place to meet with your book club; to have a heart-to-heart with an old friend; and a perfect setting for a first date ("So...did you like Freedom?" "No." "Ok, then....") Buying books from us keeps our rent paid, our lights on, and our doors open. And if you don’t feel like going out, you can do the whole shop-from-the-comfort-of-your-own-home thing with us too, for books and ebooks, from our website. Every metal folding chair we put out for events was paid for by a book purchase. Every conversation you have with a bookseller (about a book or otherwise) was paid for by a book purchase, as was every stuffed animal in the kids section, every blog post you enjoyed reading, every author picture you looked at on our Facebook page, and every gift we wrapped for free over the holidays.
Does this mean you should feel compelled to buy a book every time you just happen to stop in to warm up or use the bathroom on your walk home from the train? Of course not. We just ask that when you’re thinking about buying a book from Walmart, Amazon, or some other heavily discounted venue, you think of everything else you get when you buy a book from a bookstore and compare prices as you must, of course, do. Sure the Amazon book is cheap, but it won’t come with a conversation about how Hollywood filmmakers never really capture the essence of Pride and Prejudice, or a free flip through a copy of US Weekly, or a tip on the next big experimental short story writer in translation, or, well, anything else.
But let’s face it, sometimes all that other stuff you get from us isn’t as important as the cost. Sometimes you need a book and would like to have coffee money for the week left over after you buy it. There’s nothing wrong with that. You should have options when buying books and some of them happen to be deep-discount joints. Just remember us with your holiday or birthday money or when you get your tax refund, or during that few day (or week) high after you’ve gotten a raise or a new job.
It might be best to sum this up with an old truism. Sure, their books are cheaper than ours, but, as with just about everything else in the world with a price on it, you get what you pay for.
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Monday, March 7, 2011
Ian Rankin comes to PSB March 16
So a bunch of us were dancing around shouting "Ian Rankin! Ian Rankin!" and looking forward to how cool it'll be to have him in the store. Then somebody said "You're all pretty animated about a crime guy who gets pretty dark sometimes." "But he's probably the best crime writer in the UK!" we insisted. And the retort was, "Well just what makes someone that?" So we all calmed down and got to wondering about the dude. Here are some questions we sent off to him, preliminary to his visit, of course.
Q:Is there a particular book in your childhood that turned you on to the possibility of being a writer? Is there any particular author you'd credit as an inspiration?
A: Not childhood exactly, but as a teenager I read Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange and realised not all literature needed to be about angsty Russians and men in monocles. A bit later I fell in love with Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which led me to R L Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde... and from Hyde to crime fiction.
Q:Your depiction of police procedures and the inner workings and/or politics of intelligence seem awfully well informed. Is this due to diligent research and the gleaning of tasty rumor, or do you perhaps have a cousin who's a cop?
A: I have a few friends/contacts within various Scottish police departments, and also know a few journalists and other useful people. I have also worked in a variety of large, bureaucratic organisations, and am guessing the police aren't any different: office politics is office politics, right?
Q:Are you familiar with our local guy Dennis Lehane?
A: I know Lehane, of course! Last time I did an event in Boston, I think he was there to introduce me to the audience. I wrote the introduction to one of the UK editions of 'Shutter Island'. We've known one another since we were hungry young writers. He's about as cool as a cat can get without the refrigerator-light going off.
The introduction and questions for Mr. Rankin were composed by Gary Cowan, PSB bookseller and Rankin fan.
Q:Is there a particular book in your childhood that turned you on to the possibility of being a writer? Is there any particular author you'd credit as an inspiration?
A: Not childhood exactly, but as a teenager I read Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange and realised not all literature needed to be about angsty Russians and men in monocles. A bit later I fell in love with Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which led me to R L Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde... and from Hyde to crime fiction.
Q:Your depiction of police procedures and the inner workings and/or politics of intelligence seem awfully well informed. Is this due to diligent research and the gleaning of tasty rumor, or do you perhaps have a cousin who's a cop?
A: I have a few friends/contacts within various Scottish police departments, and also know a few journalists and other useful people. I have also worked in a variety of large, bureaucratic organisations, and am guessing the police aren't any different: office politics is office politics, right?
Q:Are you familiar with our local guy Dennis Lehane?
A: I know Lehane, of course! Last time I did an event in Boston, I think he was there to introduce me to the audience. I wrote the introduction to one of the UK editions of 'Shutter Island'. We've known one another since we were hungry young writers. He's about as cool as a cat can get without the refrigerator-light going off.
The introduction and questions for Mr. Rankin were composed by Gary Cowan, PSB bookseller and Rankin fan.
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Ebooks Education Session
Last Tuesday Porter Square Books held an ebooks education session. The session featured a general overview of ebooks at Porter Square Books, presentations about three ereading devices; the Nook, the Sony Reader, and the iPad, and a lively discussion that touched on pricing, technology, and other ebooks issues. Along with the presenters and other PSB staff on hand, one local publisher stopped by and shared a publisher’s perspective on ebooks, and a representative from Google ebooks was here answering questions about Google’s plans and getting feedback from the audience. For those of you who couldn’t make it, below is a blog post version of the overview, complete with links to more information. We've also updated our ebooks prices. Click here to learn more. And if you have any questions about ebooks and Porter Square Books, feel free to send an email to Josh at josh@portersquarebooks.com.
Ebooks at Porter Square Books
- Buying ebooks from us supports us the same way buying regular books does
- Our ebooks can be read on virtually any device, except the Kindle, including a regular computer
- With Google ebooks and ebooks provided by Ingram Digital we offer hundreds of thousands of titles and that number is growing
- Ebooks are available 24/7, 365, from the comfort of your home and just about anywhere else and are a great way to support your local bookstore even as you travel
Buying an Ebook from Porter Square Books
Buying an ebook from us is pretty much the same as buying anything else off the Internet, except that instead of getting something shipped to you, you download a file, or, with a Google ebook, you can read it right in your browser. Click here for a complete walkthrough of purchasing an ebook through our website.
The Price of Ebooks
There are two methods of pricing ebooks; traditional and agency. In traditional pricing the publisher sets the list price and then we pay a percentage of that list price to the publisher whenever someone downloads the ebook. Here is a traditionally priced ebook.
Hardcover: $34
.95
Google Ebook List Price: $28.00
Retailer Pays: $14.56
Our Price: $21.00
Amazon Kindle: $9.79
In this case, Amazon loses about $4.77 every time someone buys The Autobiography of Mark Twain for the Kindle.
In agency pricing, the publisher sets the selling price and the retailer receives a commission, acting, in essence, as an "agent" for the publisher. Here is an agency model book.
Amazon: 
$12.99
Google: $12.99
Sony: $12.99
Barnes and Noble: $12.99
Porter Square Books: $12.99
Seven publishers now use the agency model: Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin, Simon & Schuster, Wile, and Random House. These are seven major publishers and together account for a substantial portion (if not the majority) of ebooks publishing. This means that very often our ebooks will be the same price as Amazon's.
Still in the Works
The world of ebooks is constantly changing and Porter Square Books and the American Booksellers Association are doing our best to keep up with it. Here are some aspects of ebooks we are working to improve.
- Using Gift Cards to buy ebooks
- Not all books are available as ebooks or in all ebook formats so, before you buy, make sure you've selected the right format
- Penguin ebooks available on our website
- Integrated check-out so you can buy ebooks and regular books online at the same time
- Highlighting and annotating Google ebooks in their otherwise very convenient, browser based reading function
For more information please visit our ebooks resources page.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Egyptian fiction for adults and children
I have found myself thinking about great Egyptian fiction in the last few weeks, as the protesters in Cairo filled the news and swept over my thoughts. Below are a handful of books that delve into modern Egypt and allow for the complexity of all that has happened surrounding the end of Hosni Mubarak's presidency.
A few titles I've loved:
The Map of Love, by Ahdaf Soueif (Anchor Books, 2000)
This parallel love story spans England, the U.S. and Egypt, and numerous generations. The novel begins with Isabel and the Egyptian-American conductor she's fallen in love with in 1977 New York, while also following Isabel as she retraces the love affair between her great-grandmother, Anna, and the Egyptian nationalist she loved a hundred years prior. This book is intense, full of politics, yet also seductive and beautiful.
The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al-Aswany (Harper Perennial, 2006)
In an apartment building in central Cairo stands the Yacoubian Building, full of different Egyptians simultaneously going about their lives. Al-Aswany attempts to chronicle many of the buildings' tenants in this intense fictional web that displays contemporary Egyptian society.
Midaq Alley, by Naguib Mahfouz. (Anchor Books, first published in 1966 in English)
Mahfouz is the most widely translated and sold Egyptian author internationally, and he won the Nobel Prize for Literature after this title was published in 1966. At the center of his books are Egyptian politics, and this book takes place in 1940s Cairo, as Egypt struggles to become a "modern" nation. This novel follows the lives of a rich and complicated cast of characters. Also try Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy, which begins with "Palace Walk".
I Loved You For Your Voice, by Selim Nassib (translated from French, Europa Editions, 2006)
Nassib is actually a Lebanese author, but this book is fitting because it's a fictional account of the legendary Egyptian singer, Umm Kulthum, a massive cultural icon of the 20th century, and a fierce Egyptian nationalist. The novel is told from the perspective of Ahmed Rami, the poet who wrote many of the lyrics for Umm Kulthum's songs, and who is desperately in love with her in this novel.
And for children:
The Illustrator's Notebook, by Mohieddin Ellabad (Groundwood Books, 2006)
Ellabad is a cartoonist and illustrator in Cairo by profession, yet this is his childhood memoir (of sorts). The book is a collage of his childhood growing up in Egypt, all beautifully pieced together and commented upon. One side of the page has the original Arabic text, and on the opposite page is the English translation.
Goha, the Wise Fool, by Denys Davies-Johnson & illustrated by Hag Hamdy & Hany (Philomel, 2005)
This collection of "Goha" tales (known elsewhere in the Arab World as "Joha") is hilarious and witty. As always, Goha gets himself in and out of trouble in ways that will make the whole family laugh out loud. The illustrations are done by two well-known Egyptian artists who stitched the panels together in this traditional form of Egyptian quilting, called khiyamiyas.
A few titles I've loved:
The Map of Love, by Ahdaf Soueif (Anchor Books, 2000)
This parallel love story spans England, the U.S. and Egypt, and numerous generations. The novel begins with Isabel and the Egyptian-American conductor she's fallen in love with in 1977 New York, while also following Isabel as she retraces the love affair between her great-grandmother, Anna, and the Egyptian nationalist she loved a hundred years prior. This book is intense, full of politics, yet also seductive and beautiful.
The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al-Aswany (Harper Perennial, 2006)
In an apartment building in central Cairo stands the Yacoubian Building, full of different Egyptians simultaneously going about their lives. Al-Aswany attempts to chronicle many of the buildings' tenants in this intense fictional web that displays contemporary Egyptian society.
Midaq Alley, by Naguib Mahfouz. (Anchor Books, first published in 1966 in English)
Mahfouz is the most widely translated and sold Egyptian author internationally, and he won the Nobel Prize for Literature after this title was published in 1966. At the center of his books are Egyptian politics, and this book takes place in 1940s Cairo, as Egypt struggles to become a "modern" nation. This novel follows the lives of a rich and complicated cast of characters. Also try Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy, which begins with "Palace Walk".
I Loved You For Your Voice, by Selim Nassib (translated from French, Europa Editions, 2006)
Nassib is actually a Lebanese author, but this book is fitting because it's a fictional account of the legendary Egyptian singer, Umm Kulthum, a massive cultural icon of the 20th century, and a fierce Egyptian nationalist. The novel is told from the perspective of Ahmed Rami, the poet who wrote many of the lyrics for Umm Kulthum's songs, and who is desperately in love with her in this novel.
And for children:
The Illustrator's Notebook, by Mohieddin Ellabad (Groundwood Books, 2006)
Ellabad is a cartoonist and illustrator in Cairo by profession, yet this is his childhood memoir (of sorts). The book is a collage of his childhood growing up in Egypt, all beautifully pieced together and commented upon. One side of the page has the original Arabic text, and on the opposite page is the English translation.
Goha, the Wise Fool, by Denys Davies-Johnson & illustrated by Hag Hamdy & Hany (Philomel, 2005)
This collection of "Goha" tales (known elsewhere in the Arab World as "Joha") is hilarious and witty. As always, Goha gets himself in and out of trouble in ways that will make the whole family laugh out loud. The illustrations are done by two well-known Egyptian artists who stitched the panels together in this traditional form of Egyptian quilting, called khiyamiyas.
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Iain (M.) Banks
The author of both mainstream and science fiction novels (the latter distinguished by the use of the adoptive initial "M"), Scottish-born Iain Banks is a writer of power and imagination -- wicked, brilliant, deep imagination.
From his first infamous novel, The Wasp Factory -- the gruesome and humorous 1st person story of a 16-year-old psychopath -- to his quantum-thriller Transition Banks bends genres and breaks boundaries. He is best known, however, for his novels of the deep-future, ultra-technological utopia known as the Culture. Liberal to the point of anarchy; home to billions of humans, aliens, and hyper-intelligent AIs, all technologically empowered beyond the dreams of avarice; the Culture is a kind of anti-Star Trek meddling in the affairs of lesser societies for their own good. That Banks can repeatedly tell exciting, suspenseful stories of such powerful characters is a continuing testament to his own power. He has quickly become my favorite living SF author and I urge you to visit the Culture for yourself, it is truly a wonder-land.
The Culture novels (though presented here in published & chronological order) are self-contained books that may be read in any order:
Consider Phlebas (1987)
The Player of Games (1988)
Use of Weapons (1990)
Excession (1996)
Inversions (1998)
Look to Windward (2000)
Matter (2008)
Surface Detail (2010)
From his first infamous novel, The Wasp Factory -- the gruesome and humorous 1st person story of a 16-year-old psychopath -- to his quantum-thriller Transition Banks bends genres and breaks boundaries. He is best known, however, for his novels of the deep-future, ultra-technological utopia known as the Culture. Liberal to the point of anarchy; home to billions of humans, aliens, and hyper-intelligent AIs, all technologically empowered beyond the dreams of avarice; the Culture is a kind of anti-Star Trek meddling in the affairs of lesser societies for their own good. That Banks can repeatedly tell exciting, suspenseful stories of such powerful characters is a continuing testament to his own power. He has quickly become my favorite living SF author and I urge you to visit the Culture for yourself, it is truly a wonder-land.
The Culture novels (though presented here in published & chronological order) are self-contained books that may be read in any order:
Consider Phlebas (1987)
The Player of Games (1988)
Use of Weapons (1990)
Excession (1996)
Inversions (1998)
Look to Windward (2000)
Matter (2008)
Surface Detail (2010)
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
A New Translation Please
Over the last few years a number of classic European novels have gotten new translations, some to widespread acclaim and excitement; War and Peace, Doctor Zhivago, The Death of Ivan Illyich and Other Stories, Madame Bovary, and The Tin Drum to name a few. This got me thinking, what book would I really like to see newly translated?
The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch. The Death of Virgil is a story about the last day or so in the life of the great Roman poet Virgil (think Tinkers, only instead of off-their-rocker woodsmen, the man dying hung out with Caesar Augustus) as he grapples with his unfinished Aeneid while thinking about the nature of poetry, power, and love. Occasionally his thoughts break out of structured prose and into verse. The book opens with Virgil being carried from a ship on a litter through the back streets of the port city to the hut where he will be staying and it ends when he dies.
I’ve written about how brilliant this book is before but there were many times when I was reading that I could feel the prose straining against its own translation. I’m not entirely sure how to describe the sensation, but I could tell that Broch said more in German than was translated into English.
In the end, Broch turned from the novel to philosophical writings, but before he did he produced two of the great novels of the twentieth century. A new translation of The Death of Virgil (and maybe one for the Sleepwalkers too, since I’m pondering this) might go a long way in generating the kind of attention that Broch deserves.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Jonathan Coe
Fans of Jonathan Coe may be a diminutive group, but I count myself among them. I started my infatuation with The Rotter's Club and continued with The Closed Circle (both available as Google ebooks by the way) and have now picked up his latest, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim, which will be released in March. He will be making his first trip to the US in March and plans a stop at Porter Square Books to sign copies of the book. To get you started on the path to "knowing" Jonathan Coe, I am pasting a copy of an interview with him below. Enjoy and pick up a copy of a Coe novel next time you are in.
****************************************************************************
A conversation with Jonathan Coe, author of The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim
Q: Like your well-known novels The Rotter’s Club and The House of Sleep, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim is a dark comedy but it also tackles new territory, examining the very modern position of being technologically connected and yet socially bereft. How did this book begin for you? Did it feel like a new direction or a return?
A: In many ways it felt like a return. I had built up a reputation for writing 'social satire' - a label I have never felt comfortable with - and The Rain Before it Falls was in some ways an attempt to break free from that: a more interior, more melancholy, more psychologically-focused book. With Terrible Privacy I went back to writing about the contemporary world, and back to the seriocomic vein of my most well known books. Only the subject matter (loneliness in the age of advanced communications technology) is new. My regular readers will, I'm sure, recognize the tone and intentions of the book as distinctively mine.
Q: Our hero, Maxwell Sim, has some trouble navigating the tech world: he e-mails his estranged wife under a false identity, can’t seem to distract his daughter from her Blackberry and tech-alienation reaches a point of absurd hilarity when Max develops feelings for Emma, the voice of his car’s GPS system. It’s very funny but ominous. How do you feel about the role of technology in society?
A: The book really evolved out of some everyday observations: just things I saw happening around me in cafes and restaurants and other public spaces every day. One of the most common sights you see in restaurants these days is a couple who have gone out for a meal together but are sitting sending text messages to other people on their mobile phones, rather than talking to each other. I suppose I became slightly obsessed with this situation and started to wonder what it told us about
our relationships at the current time. The obvious conclusion was that our most important or consuming relationships are no longer necessarily with the people with whom we're sharing the same physical space. But this is interesting, because the one thing you can say about someone sitting opposite you at a table (or lying in bed) is that they are real. Whereas a relationship with someone by text - or email, or Facebook, or whatever - will on some level be a virtual relationship, however
well you think you know that person. They're not there while you talking to them, so you have to imagine them. The question the book tries to raise is whether our closest relationships these days should be with 'real' people or with virtual or imaginary ones. So it also becomes a book about reading, about literature, and about how we all construct our identities through storytelling.
Q: Do you consider yourself tech-savvy? How involved are you in the worlds of Facebook,Twitter and all the rest?
A: I joined Facebook in order to research the novel, and I'm still on it, but I don't use it much. Twitter is a step too far for me, though. I don't need reasons to sit at my computer or gaze at my iPhone any more than I do already.
Q: In TERRIBLE PRIVACY, Maxwell Sim is on a kind of odyssey, physically driving a Prius full of toothbrushes to the remote Shetland Islands as part of a new job, but also facing private demons along the way: his father’s secret past, his own childhood and his broken family. Through all the twists and turns of the journey, did you know exactly what was going to happen next or were there any surprises for you, as there certainly are for the reader?
A: I tend to be pretty controlling as a novelist. In real life I'm rather a passive person, not very good at getting my own way, so I probably try to compensate for that in my writing. The novel is my kingdom and I'm the absolute monarch. Occasionally, I know, this can be a problem for some of my readers - people who don't like my books find them over determined and too full of coincidence. But I do increasingly leave room to surprise myself too. A lot of important events in TERRIBLE PRIVACY were improvisations: the whole business of Max inventing a virtual female
identity for himself, for instance, so that he could go online and get closer to his ex-wife. And also the 'controversial' final chapter of the book (which of course I won't give away here) was something that only occurred to me as a possibility about halfway through. And it wasn't until the very end that I actually plucked up the courage to write it, and realized how closely it tied in with the book's central themes.
Q: Privacy and its sadder cousin, loneliness, are obviously a big part of this book. Can you talk a bit about the “terrible privacy” of the title?
A: The phrase comes from a review written by James Wood in the early 1990s. James and I were colleagues on the books pages of the Guardian newspaper in London at the time. Since then, of course, he's gone stateside and become very well known over here. Anyway, in those days I used to read his pieces pretty closely, and was struck by how his prose could often seem more resonant and lyrical than that of the author he was reviewing. He was a great phrasemaker, even then, and it was in the context of writing about Toni Morrison that he used the words 'terrible privacy',
which have haunted me ever since. (I myself first used the phrase in my novel The Closed Circle, as part of a poem purportedly written by the hero, Benjamin Trotter.) Over the last few months, as my novel has been published in most of the major European countries, I've come to realize that 'privacy' is a peculiarly British concept: my translators have found it impossible to render it in Italian, Dutch, German or French. We British certainly value our privacy, but what James's phrase always reminds me is that being self-contained, keeping the rest of the world at a
safe distance for purposes of self-preservation, can mean that you are only a coin flip away from a dreadful, paralyzing isolation. And this is the hinterland that Maxwell Sim is traveling through in the novel.
Q: One of the stories within the book is the real-life adventure of Donald Crowhurst, an amateur drawn into a boat race-around-the-world. It’s an unbelievable story - how did you first become interested in Crowhurst? Did you know then that it would be a past of Maxwell Sim’s tale?
A: The story of Donald Crowhurst is becoming more and more well-known in the UK. Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall's book about him has, of course, become a classic, and that was my first introduction to this fascinating and tragic figure. I was given the book shortly after I'd started writing my novel, and immediately I knew that it would become a key component. (Another instance, I suppose, where I allowed something to surprise me, and an important new element entered the book even after it was up and running.) Taking advantage of the primitive/nonexistent technology of his day, Crowhurst famously entered a race in 1969 to become the first yachtsman to sail around the world non-stop and single-handed, and - realizing that he was not
up to the task - decided to fake his voyage instead, by tacking out into the mid-Atlantic, hiding there for several months, and devising a 'phantom' journey by writing fictional logbooks. Ultimately he could not handle the loneliness of his situation or the scale of his own deception,and committed suicide. I found several aspects of this story to be resonant: it seemed to illustrate very graphically how much communications technology had changed in the last forty years,
making such a deception impossible today, and also I realized that Crowhurst and Max's father have a good deal in common - both have decided to present untruthful versions of themselves to the world, with tragic consequences. Most of all, though, I think that so many writers, visual artists and filmmakers have been drawn to Crowhurst's story over the years because in this figure - condemned to months and months of isolation and 'terrible privacy', which he filled by devising
fictions about himself and his voyage - they recognize something of themselves. He has become a powerful archetype of the artist.
Q: A very diverse cast of characters pops in and out of Max’s life throughout Terrible Privacy, many of them poignant and also very funny. Poppy, for example, is a junior adultery facilitator. She helps her clients with technological evidence to prove to their partners that they have been working, instead of philandering. Do you have a favorite character? Was there one particularly fun to write?
A: Poppy was a good deal of fun to write. She arose out of watching a man one night at Singapore airport (on my way home from Australia) wandering around with a recording device. I started to ask myself why anyone would want to make ambient recordings of airports and came up with the idea of a cheating husband playing these recordings in the background while talking to his wife on the phone, to make her think he was in a different part of the world altogether. But actually my favorite character is Miss Erith, the old woman who lives by herself in a high-rise
apartment in Lichfield, and whom Max encounters about halfway through his journey. She is someone who grew up in a world completely alien to Max - spending her childhood on the network of working canals which still linked British towns in the 1930s - and she represents the last living memory of this vanished era. Through her I allowed myself to voice nostalgia for a preindustrial England based on a notion of local community which is all but irretrievable in the era of globalization. Such nostalgia is usually the preserve of the patriotic right, so I wanted to lay
hold of it and reclaim it for a different (perhaps more progressive) way of political thinking.
Q: Are there any writing habits that you rely on as you sit down to your first draft?
A: Eating biscuits. The results are there for all to see in my waistline.
****************************************************************************
A conversation with Jonathan Coe, author of The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim
Q: Like your well-known novels The Rotter’s Club and The House of Sleep, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim is a dark comedy but it also tackles new territory, examining the very modern position of being technologically connected and yet socially bereft. How did this book begin for you? Did it feel like a new direction or a return?
A: In many ways it felt like a return. I had built up a reputation for writing 'social satire' - a label I have never felt comfortable with - and The Rain Before it Falls was in some ways an attempt to break free from that: a more interior, more melancholy, more psychologically-focused book. With Terrible Privacy I went back to writing about the contemporary world, and back to the seriocomic vein of my most well known books. Only the subject matter (loneliness in the age of advanced communications technology) is new. My regular readers will, I'm sure, recognize the tone and intentions of the book as distinctively mine.
Q: Our hero, Maxwell Sim, has some trouble navigating the tech world: he e-mails his estranged wife under a false identity, can’t seem to distract his daughter from her Blackberry and tech-alienation reaches a point of absurd hilarity when Max develops feelings for Emma, the voice of his car’s GPS system. It’s very funny but ominous. How do you feel about the role of technology in society?
A: The book really evolved out of some everyday observations: just things I saw happening around me in cafes and restaurants and other public spaces every day. One of the most common sights you see in restaurants these days is a couple who have gone out for a meal together but are sitting sending text messages to other people on their mobile phones, rather than talking to each other. I suppose I became slightly obsessed with this situation and started to wonder what it told us about
our relationships at the current time. The obvious conclusion was that our most important or consuming relationships are no longer necessarily with the people with whom we're sharing the same physical space. But this is interesting, because the one thing you can say about someone sitting opposite you at a table (or lying in bed) is that they are real. Whereas a relationship with someone by text - or email, or Facebook, or whatever - will on some level be a virtual relationship, however
well you think you know that person. They're not there while you talking to them, so you have to imagine them. The question the book tries to raise is whether our closest relationships these days should be with 'real' people or with virtual or imaginary ones. So it also becomes a book about reading, about literature, and about how we all construct our identities through storytelling.
Q: Do you consider yourself tech-savvy? How involved are you in the worlds of Facebook,Twitter and all the rest?
A: I joined Facebook in order to research the novel, and I'm still on it, but I don't use it much. Twitter is a step too far for me, though. I don't need reasons to sit at my computer or gaze at my iPhone any more than I do already.
Q: In TERRIBLE PRIVACY, Maxwell Sim is on a kind of odyssey, physically driving a Prius full of toothbrushes to the remote Shetland Islands as part of a new job, but also facing private demons along the way: his father’s secret past, his own childhood and his broken family. Through all the twists and turns of the journey, did you know exactly what was going to happen next or were there any surprises for you, as there certainly are for the reader?
A: I tend to be pretty controlling as a novelist. In real life I'm rather a passive person, not very good at getting my own way, so I probably try to compensate for that in my writing. The novel is my kingdom and I'm the absolute monarch. Occasionally, I know, this can be a problem for some of my readers - people who don't like my books find them over determined and too full of coincidence. But I do increasingly leave room to surprise myself too. A lot of important events in TERRIBLE PRIVACY were improvisations: the whole business of Max inventing a virtual female
identity for himself, for instance, so that he could go online and get closer to his ex-wife. And also the 'controversial' final chapter of the book (which of course I won't give away here) was something that only occurred to me as a possibility about halfway through. And it wasn't until the very end that I actually plucked up the courage to write it, and realized how closely it tied in with the book's central themes.
Q: Privacy and its sadder cousin, loneliness, are obviously a big part of this book. Can you talk a bit about the “terrible privacy” of the title?
A: The phrase comes from a review written by James Wood in the early 1990s. James and I were colleagues on the books pages of the Guardian newspaper in London at the time. Since then, of course, he's gone stateside and become very well known over here. Anyway, in those days I used to read his pieces pretty closely, and was struck by how his prose could often seem more resonant and lyrical than that of the author he was reviewing. He was a great phrasemaker, even then, and it was in the context of writing about Toni Morrison that he used the words 'terrible privacy',
which have haunted me ever since. (I myself first used the phrase in my novel The Closed Circle, as part of a poem purportedly written by the hero, Benjamin Trotter.) Over the last few months, as my novel has been published in most of the major European countries, I've come to realize that 'privacy' is a peculiarly British concept: my translators have found it impossible to render it in Italian, Dutch, German or French. We British certainly value our privacy, but what James's phrase always reminds me is that being self-contained, keeping the rest of the world at a
safe distance for purposes of self-preservation, can mean that you are only a coin flip away from a dreadful, paralyzing isolation. And this is the hinterland that Maxwell Sim is traveling through in the novel.
Q: One of the stories within the book is the real-life adventure of Donald Crowhurst, an amateur drawn into a boat race-around-the-world. It’s an unbelievable story - how did you first become interested in Crowhurst? Did you know then that it would be a past of Maxwell Sim’s tale?
A: The story of Donald Crowhurst is becoming more and more well-known in the UK. Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall's book about him has, of course, become a classic, and that was my first introduction to this fascinating and tragic figure. I was given the book shortly after I'd started writing my novel, and immediately I knew that it would become a key component. (Another instance, I suppose, where I allowed something to surprise me, and an important new element entered the book even after it was up and running.) Taking advantage of the primitive/nonexistent technology of his day, Crowhurst famously entered a race in 1969 to become the first yachtsman to sail around the world non-stop and single-handed, and - realizing that he was not
up to the task - decided to fake his voyage instead, by tacking out into the mid-Atlantic, hiding there for several months, and devising a 'phantom' journey by writing fictional logbooks. Ultimately he could not handle the loneliness of his situation or the scale of his own deception,and committed suicide. I found several aspects of this story to be resonant: it seemed to illustrate very graphically how much communications technology had changed in the last forty years,
making such a deception impossible today, and also I realized that Crowhurst and Max's father have a good deal in common - both have decided to present untruthful versions of themselves to the world, with tragic consequences. Most of all, though, I think that so many writers, visual artists and filmmakers have been drawn to Crowhurst's story over the years because in this figure - condemned to months and months of isolation and 'terrible privacy', which he filled by devising
fictions about himself and his voyage - they recognize something of themselves. He has become a powerful archetype of the artist.
Q: A very diverse cast of characters pops in and out of Max’s life throughout Terrible Privacy, many of them poignant and also very funny. Poppy, for example, is a junior adultery facilitator. She helps her clients with technological evidence to prove to their partners that they have been working, instead of philandering. Do you have a favorite character? Was there one particularly fun to write?
A: Poppy was a good deal of fun to write. She arose out of watching a man one night at Singapore airport (on my way home from Australia) wandering around with a recording device. I started to ask myself why anyone would want to make ambient recordings of airports and came up with the idea of a cheating husband playing these recordings in the background while talking to his wife on the phone, to make her think he was in a different part of the world altogether. But actually my favorite character is Miss Erith, the old woman who lives by herself in a high-rise
apartment in Lichfield, and whom Max encounters about halfway through his journey. She is someone who grew up in a world completely alien to Max - spending her childhood on the network of working canals which still linked British towns in the 1930s - and she represents the last living memory of this vanished era. Through her I allowed myself to voice nostalgia for a preindustrial England based on a notion of local community which is all but irretrievable in the era of globalization. Such nostalgia is usually the preserve of the patriotic right, so I wanted to lay
hold of it and reclaim it for a different (perhaps more progressive) way of political thinking.
Q: Are there any writing habits that you rely on as you sit down to your first draft?
A: Eating biscuits. The results are there for all to see in my waistline.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
