September

Just a quick reminder to let everyone know that our discussion of Giraffe kicked off on Monday. If you have read the book, please feel free to drop in and participate.

October

Also, now that I've been thinking about Remainder again and how I totally failed as a moderator, I'm considering redoing the discussion for October. A reenactment, if you will, since I can't get enough of recommending it to others. Who's with me?

November

Anyone interested in moderating for November?

Hello again, everyone.

I will make this introduction quite short. Forgive me if the following words seem poorly composed. I am in between classes at the moment and I have long day today.

When I picked this book, I was on a "Eastern Europe/Russian" whim. I had picked up a short story collection of Russian master Nikolai Gogol and after some time of perusing through books, found Giraffe. What interested me was that it took place in Czechoslovakia during the Soviet Republic.

Giraffe also coincided with a trip I made at the end of August/beginning of September. I went to Romania for a wedding. My insistent curiosity on post-communist Europe kept my eyes open during our travels in Romania (we did plenty of driving). The trip helped in visualizing Checkolosvakia as I read the novel.

I'll start:

Giraffe. What was it like to read about giraffes? Was it strange as the focus of a novel to the point that it was a character in it? Of course, Giraffe is not so much about real giraffes, but more of the significance of an event, at least, I think. What about the characters philosophizing (probably not a real word) about giraffes? I never imagined that the concept of a giraffe would bring about a kind of insight on life in general, especially in a Communist era.

The novel had way more characters than I expected. I thought it would just be two, Emil and Snehurka, and then we met Amina and so on. What did you think about the characters or about the number of characters in total?

Last point for now, what about the writing style? Was it effective, succesful, annoying? The langugage?

It's incredibly rare for me to buy a frontlist title because I absolutely hate paying hardcover prices. Besides, they're bulky, heavy, and—depending on the number of pages—don't easily fit inside a purse. As a result, I mostly consign myself to bargain books and paperback releases.

Then I read a review of Tom McCarthy's Remainder in The Guardian:

But is all as it seems? The narrator is haunted by the smell of cordite; there are characters who might not be real; and he begins to fall into catatonic trances brought on by the re-enactments. Is this purgatory? Did he in fact die in the traumatic event? McCarthy wisely lets the question remain open, finding instead a marvellous closing image of a plane flying a figure of eight - which, of course, is also the symbol for infinity.

Hmm. It sounded intriguing but wasn't available yet on this side of the ocean, so I made a note of the title and author and went on my merry way. A few months later, Levi oozed enthusiasm when the U.S. paperback original made the front cover of The New York Times Book Review. I thought to myself, "Oh, yeah. I remember being interested in that one," and placed an order on Amazon because I had no problem with paying a paperback price.

Within the first few pages, I fell in love. I reviewed it for an Australian lifestyle site and set it up here as May's discussion. Unfortunately, the discussion didn't go over very well because one participant stopped in after discussion week was technically over (but thanks for the comment!), Eddie finally dropped in even later (but we talked about it in person), and I pretty much fell down on moderator duties.

In time, posts about it began popping up on other blogs. Matthew Tiffany has mentioned it with near obsession on Condalmo. I talked about how much I loved it over dinner with Levi, Jason, and Ed (and it seems as though Ed has finally jumped on the McCarthy bandwagon). It's been reviewed on Bookslut and The Quarterly Conversation. Ready, Steady, Book is currently running a five-part interview series with Tom McCarthy.

I've been seeing the book everywhere, and it makes me want to experience Remainder all over again. Yet, despite the unnamed narrator's need to reenact in order to get at what's real, my reality is that I probably won't reread with the same amount of awe as the first time.

But McCarthy has a new book out, Men in Space, which is not yet available in the U.S. So you know what happened? The same person who usually scoffs at overpriced, bulky books has ordered the hardcover and paid a premium for express international shipping.

I simply have to have it.

What a grumpy, old bookman!

Various people are asking whether trade paperbacks can save literary fiction (see Galleycat for a summary).

The answer is no. Nothing can save literary fiction. It isn't a question of format or cost; it's a question of boredom.

You can fool some of the people some of the time, and you can even fool the same people for several years -- or books -- at a time. But eventually the penny drops.

As I mentioned yesterday, I do enjoy the occasional genre romp because sometimes you simply have to read for entertainment value alone. However, too much genre—thrillers, for example—is what's really boring. Most commercial bestsellers are so formulaic that you can pretty much predict the entire plot from a brief scan of the jacket copy. And reading nothing but the same exact books with the same exact characters and the same exact plots over and over and over again is what's foolish. Mixing it up keeps it interesting, so why not grab some literary fiction that might make you think?

In doing behind-the-scenes work on Literary Kicks' book pricing discussion, I have recently spent some time paying attention to things that would normally fly right by me. One being The New York Times Book Review bestseller lists.

Crain's New York Business recently reported NYTBR's intended split of its paperback fiction list into two parts: trade and mass market.

Earlier today, I finally had a chance to take a look at the revamped lists and immediately noticed the appearance of Richard Powers's The Echo Maker at number 20 on the new trade paperback list. Despite having won the 2006 National Book Award and recently being released in paperback, it was nowhere to be found last week and obviously benefited from the change.

Although viewed by Crain's as a move to increase ad revenue, New York Entertainment's Vulture Blog has this take:

TBR editor Sam Tanenhaus points out that the addition of a trade paperback fiction list means that more books that are actually reviewed in the Times will appear on the best-seller lists. Meaning, of course, literary fiction, not that shameful mass-market pop-fiction crap that the American people keep insisting on buying in large quantities. Good for the Times for making a bestseller list that keeps the riffraff out!

Oh, go fark your sarcasm, Vulture Blog. Some people wouldn't mind having a barometer of what's worth reading in paperback besides "mass-market pop-fiction crap." I'm not a book snob (Well, maybe just a little.) and have nothing against genre since I read my fair share of mysteries, thrillers, and romance. But if you've been through one Bourne installment, you've been through them all. And—before fans send hate email—I also have nothing against Robert Ludlum even though he's the Tupac Shakur of commercial fiction.

The new trade paperback bestseller list is a good thing for books. It will surely bring attention to worthwhile reads that might otherwise be buried under the massive sales of James Patterson's latest thriller he didn't write.

Many thanks to sharp-eyed commenter Horatio, who disagreed with my choice of reviews for Giraffe. Each acknowledged the depth of the story but discredited the stylization of Ledgard's prose. However, Horatio believes they were an "unfair reflection" of a book that is "brave, fiercely imaginative, and stunningly beautiful." As a result, he has pointed us to a pair of more favorable reviews which concentrate on the powerful emotions drawn out by the massacre of the herd.

Library Journal - "Fall Editors' Picks"

Watchtowers of the grasslands, the far-seeing creatures that other animals gather around to catch any sign of unease, giraffes would seem emblematically to be awake. That may have been their downfall. In the novel, when the secret police necklace a small-town zoo, telling everyone involved that “this night has never happened,” the giraffes are evidently being exterminated because they carry a contagion seen as a threat to national security. The contagion of freedom, perhaps? Expert at nailing doublespeak—the giraffes drug in from Africa are said to be migrating and, in a send-up of Socialist engineering, will constitute a new subspecies—Ledgard finally turns tables on the regime, using its own language to reveal the horrific consequences of extreme politics in any form. Yet he does not judge his characters, and his giraffes remain captured but uncapturable in their lofty dignity, “the opposite end of anthropomorphism from Mickey Mouse,” as he surmises correctly. Ultimately, Ledgard leaves us pondering but imbued with a powerful desire to remain engaged—like any good novelist, serving as a watchtower of our culture.

The Independent - "Communism gets it in the neck from a tall story about giraffes"

We live in the copywriters' moment. A jacket blurb these days tends to reveal two-thirds of any plot. In Giraffe, the entire narrative is encapsulated on the inside flap. That Ledgard still manages a gradual build-up of tension is evidence of his storyteller's skill. He does it by installing a number of different narrators and having them pass the storytelling baton, starting with Snehurka, the giraffes' protagonist, and moving on to Emil and others including Jiri, a sharpshooter.

...

The inevitable bloody showdown, when all the narrators come together and retell the mayhem, is a tour de force, a fitting climax to a superb novel that is filled with compassion, yet never sentimental. I'm going to stick my neck out and call it a masterpiece.

Our discussion of J.M. Ledgard's Giraffe will begin on September 24th. All are welcome to participate.

Literary Kicks' discussion of book pricing has turned toward looking more closely at book formats. I've been working with Levi off-blog to present some ideas about alternatives to hardcover-first releases, but I've discovered that most of what seems innovative has already been tried before.

As book lovers, we're all used to them first coming out in hardcover with a paperback to follow a year later. But did you know that simultaneous triple-format publishing (hardcover, paperback, mass market paperback) has been tried?

And today it is moving, however slowly, toward a new reality—although the latest paper chase sounds like a fairy tale: the Papa Bear, Mama Bear, Baby Bear deal. The term was coined to describe Tom Robbins' 1980 intermountain fantasy, Still Life with Woodpecker. The book was published simultaneously in a $12.95 hardcover (Papa) and a $6.95 quality paperback (Mama), with a $3.25 mass-market paper edition (Baby) that soon followed. The decent (and once profitable) interval between hard-and soft-cover editions may be a thing of the past. Traditionalists like Random House have begun issuing simultaneous clothbound and paperback editions. Nobody's Angel, by picaresque Novelist Thomas McGuane, is being issued with 5,000 Papas and 30,000 Mamas. Bantam, Ballantine and Pocket Books, three major mass-market houses, shortcut the hard-cover publishers with their own original titles. Jerzy Kosinski's just published Pinball is appearing as a Bantam Papa (5,000), Mama (150,000), with babies yet to be determined.

However, it must not have been very profitable since I haven't seen much news about books being released like the above today. And as far as I can tell, the following hasn't happened yet:

Industry experts predict that by 1990 more than half of all books will originate in soft-cover—a situation that prevails in Europe today. And many of the hard-cover editions will be mere tokens, published in small amounts for libraries, for reviewers who shun paperbacks—and as a boost for authors' egos.

"Hard Times in Hard-Cover Country"
TIME Magazine
March 22, 1982

It's possible the prediction could still come true, but I don't see publishers giving up very easily on the wider profit margins of hardcovers. That is, until ebook reader technology gets good enough to compete with paper. Does anyone know if Steve Jobs is working on this?

The New York Times - "The Plague"

If you’re going to read only one novel this year that has an opening chapter narrated by a newly born giraffe, why shouldn’t it be this one? Finding a convincing “voice” for such a creature is obviously going to test any novelist, and this giraffe, named Snehurka, appears to have attended a rather perfervid creative writing class: “The first thing I see is my own form, my hooves impossibly far away, slicked with fluid, and my mazed hide, bloodied, flickering in the haze, burning, as though I am not passing from my mother to the ground, but from the constellation Camelopardalis into the Earth’s atmosphere.”

If this is the kind of thing you like, you’re going to like this novel a lot. For my money it’s an opening that threatens to cripple the work completely, and if Ledgard gets away with it, it’s because we’re prepared to be indulgent toward what is by any standard an ambitious and remarkable first novel. This is not to say Ledgard needed to have been quite so indulgent of himself.

The Prague Post - "Giraffe explores science, secrets"

Jonathan Ledgard: I was a Central and Eastern Europe correspondent of The Economist at the time. One day, around 2001, I came across a snippet in one of the Czech papers. It was just a line in an interview with someone who later defected, to the effect that he had filmed the birth of a giraffe for Czechoslovak state television, but that the footage had disappeared after secret police had shot dead all the giraffes in that zoo. Could this be true? I was captivated. I spent a couple of years researching the book, then got sent to Afghanistan to look for Osama bin Laden, which is where I started to write it.

The Harvard Book Review - "Sticking their Necks out in Czechoslovakia"

The impossibility of the giraffes' survival in Czechoslovakia is evident to nearly all those involved in their capture and transport, yet each participant performs his part. Hus, the bureaucrat who oversees the transfer of the giraffes, is the only character who expresses enthusiasm about creating a "Camelopardais bohemica" to entertain the worker. This enthusiasm, however, is governed by self-interest rather than idealism. Hus is characterized as "a careerist" rather than an ideologue. Idealism has long since failed. The characters that populate Ledgard's novel are not delusional they are practical. They are fully aware that rebellion will lead only to the destruction of the little personal freedom they have retained. Jiri the sharpshooter who kills the giraffes says, "I am a Communist because I wish to remain in the forest" and later adds, "I hold to CSSR out of fear and am openly relieved at its banality." These citizens know that to retain their ounce of freedom, to be left alone to the woods and to the summer cottages where "the only regime is mushroom picking, moonshine, and card games," they must simply not participate in the public sphere.

The Guardian - "Up to their necks"

Ledgard places his characters fully at the service of this essentially neoplatonist worldview. They exist mainly as mouthpieces for research and mood, and show little convincing interaction or development. That's fine by me: realism isn't the intention here. But a symbolist work - however beguiling the writing (and the prose here is certainly that) - must stand or fall on the depth of its concepts. And seductive though Ledgard's reworking of this ancient tradition undoubtedly is, it's still just posh mysticism, and the first step on a road that leads inevitably, alas, to Paulo Coelho. Where I should have felt moved I started to feel manipulated, which is a shame, because there's plenty to like in Ledgard's novel: not least the wondrous, and gentle, giraffes.

I kick now in the darkness and see a coming light, molten, veined through the membrane and fluids of the sac, which contains me. I am squeezed toward the light. Let it be said: I enter this world without volition.

My hooves come first, then my nose, then the whole of my head. I hang halfway out. I swing. I fall. I am found, I am found at this moment, and my coming into being is a head-over-hooves tumble from weightlessness to weight and from the drowning, which has no memory, to what has breath and is yet to be.

It is white-hot out here, thin; it sears. The falling takes the longest time. The first thing I see is my own form, my hooves impossibly far away, slicked with fluid, and my mazed hide, bloodied, flickering in the haze, burning, as though I am not passing from my mother to the ground, but from the constellation Camelopardalis into the Earth's atmosphere.

—Giraffe by J.M. Ledgard

Ashamedly, I have to admit to finding Cormac McCarthy kind of unreadable. This Coen brothers adaptation of No Country for Old Men, however, looks like a winner.

An early experiment in book discounting, perhaps?

"The announcement ... is the crowning example of the chronic inferiority complex from which the book business in this country seems always to have suffered. I regard the decision of these publishers ... as shortsighted, unwise, and likely, if it has any effect whatsoever, to have a very disturbing effect indeed on the industry as a whole."

Thus last week did Alfred A. Knopf, book publisher, flay four other book publishers who had made the astounding announcement that they would hereafter sell for $1 or $1.50 books exactly similar to those for which they had for years been demanding $2 or $3.

"Book War"
Time Magazine
June 2, 1930

"There always will be books but perhaps the only books in the future will be reference books, scientific books and research books."

Novelist Booth Tarkington
1936

Hmm. Literature certainly has been in its death throes for a long time.

According to Publisher's Weekly, the bestselling book of 1900 was a historical romance called To Have and to Hold by Mary Johnston. It begins:

THE work of the day being over, I sat down upon my doorstep, pipe in hand, to rest awhile in the cool of the evening. Death is not more still than is this Virginian land in the hour when the sun has sunk away, and it is black beneath the trees, and the stars brighten slowly and softly, one by one. The birds that sing all day have hushed, and the horned owls, the monster frogs, and that strange and ominous fowl (if fowl it be, and not, as some assert, a spirit damned) which we English call the whippoorwill, are yet silent. Later the wolf will howl and the panther scream, but now there is no sound. The winds are laid, and the restless leaves droop and are quiet. The low lap of the water among the reeds is like the breathing of one who sleeps in his watch beside the dead.

In honor of Literary Kicks' look at pricing, I've done a little bit of research into the cost of books through the years. The first big book of the last century—chick lit, no less—seemed like a sensible place to start. First run as a serial in The Atlantic and released as a novel in February 1900, a small tidbit in The New York Times mentions that 270,000 copies of To Have and to Hold were in print by November. The next month, the Los Angeles Times reports the author's earnings as $40,000, roughly equivalent to just under a million dollars today.

Some other numbers:

To Have and to Hold by Mary Johnston
Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, 403 pages

List price in 1900: $1.50
Adjusted for 2007: $36.20

List price for a 2006 reprint (Vision Forum, hardcover, 440 pages): $24.00
Adjusted for 1900: $1.03

Price range of the first edition on Abebooks: $3.00 to $350.00
Adjusted for 1900: $0.12 to $14.50

Ebook download: free

Interesting. The passage of time has actually forced the price of this particular title downward. And you can't get much cheaper than free.

So I went to the local Barnes & Noble to try and find a copy of Giraffe. Of course, they didn't have it. 95% of this location is either children's books or non-fiction, so I rarely ever leave with something in a bag.

The customer service desk made the usual pitch to order it, but I declined by explaining that I needed it right away for a book club. She then offered to call the next nearest B&N to find out if they had it. They did.

Excellent.

Books on hold get placed behind the front counter, so I didn't get an opportunity to inspect it before plunking down $14. When I arrived home, I discovered that someone (not me) had gotten the book wet (no liquid in the car). In fact, the back quarter of its pages were damp and still in the process of becoming ripply. Of all the kinds of injuries inflicted on books, nothing gets on my nerves more than water damage.

Dammit.

If the store weren't so far away, I'd have turned around and brought it back. I'm too lazy to drive all the way out there again and am eager to get it started, so I'm going to do my best at ignoring it.

Grin. Bear.

Happy post-Labor Day. I hope the working world had an enjoyable three-day weekend break. Since I only work when I feel like it, I spent the day laboring in the garden to make room for several iris rhizomes gifted by a neighbor. And then I got drunk. Go me!

Over at Literary Kicks, Levi has begun attempting to answer the question: Does literary fiction suffer from dysfunctional pricing? Of course, I have lots of thoughts on the subject and will share them eventually. In the meantime, check out what a publisher, soon-to-be novelist, and literary agent have contributed to the discussion.