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Tag Archives: Paul Auster

Siri Hustvedt

20 Wednesday Nov 2019

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books, history of ideas

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Iain Banks, Margaret Cavendish, Paul Auster, Siri Hustvedt, Virginia Woolf

The Kent Literature Festival, which started lo these many years ago (though after most of the country’s other literary festivals) has gone through a fair number of name and location changes over the years. It now seems to be settled as the Folkestone Book Festival. One thing has been consistent over all this time: it has been something of a tail-end Charlie of book festivals, coming late in the year and drawing on a number of participants already familiar and tired from a year on the circuit. There have, from time to time, been somewhat misplaced attempts to live the thing up. I remember one notorious occasion when they had Iain Banks, and the organiser therefore decided it would be a Scottish Evening with himself and all the staff in tartans.

The more recent incarnation of the festival does seem rather more adventurous, however. This year, the cast included Siri Hustvedt, which felt like a real coup to me, though I did wonder if anyone else in Folkestone would have even heard of Siri Hustvedt (it didn’t help that they misspelled her name in the programme). I am inveterately early for things like this, and for a while my worries about how popular she might be seemed to have borne out: I was sitting outside the auditorium for over 20 minutes before anyone else turned up. Still, in the end there were around 40 of us in the audience, though I hadn’t taken on board that she seems to have become something of a feminist idol, and the only other few men in the audience were accompanying more intense wives.

Initially, I confess, I was disappointed. It turned out that we were not having an audience with Siri Hustvedt, we were having a Skype chat with her: she was sitting in a sunny room in her home in Brooklyn, we were in a dark theatre in Folkestone. It is, admittedly, a creative way to broaden the range of writers we might get to see at our tired little late-year book festival, but at the same time, bang goes my hope of getting her to sign The Blazing World. And I was a little annoyed that this wasn’t made clear in the programme: the Siri Hustvedt talk was under a heading “Words from a Wider World”, and if you worked your way patiently through the programme book you would find, several pages away, a note about this thread that, mid-paragraph, included a passing reference to “live link-up”, but that wasn’t at all clear.

On the plus side, her head filled a six-foot screen, which meant we had a wonderful view of how animated she is. Her eyes were particularly expressive, opening wide, rolling, glancing away to left or right. Her face was never still, and she laughed a lot; maybe, being in her own home, she was more relaxed that she might have been on stage. When we came to questions from the audience, someone asked inevitably about what conversations were like over the Siri Hustvedt/Paul Auster dining table. I saw Auster once at a reading, and I suddenly had an image of the light and lively Hustvedt against the dark and static Auster, and nearly burst out laughing.

The real problem was the interviewer. She wasn’t a writer or a critic, or even a psychiatrist (Hustvedt is a lecturer in psychiatry, so that might have been an interesting dynamic); she was an artist interested in “text and image”, the sort of bland phrase that means nothing. I’m not sure she’d had much experience interviewing, because her questions were rambling statements to which she somehow managed to append a question mark. And she had a habit of still hesitating and qualifying her question long after Hustvedt had started trying to answer it, which for me is a capital offence among interviewers.

But Hustvedt was gold: full of perceptions and ideas that moved effortlessly and revealingly from the structure of writing to the history of science to the character of memory to the role of women to the fluidity of gender. Everything was grist to her mill, everything interweaved with the way she wanted to write her novels. It was fascinating.

From the audience, after the usual fluffy questions from people who don’t really know how to talk to writers (the Hustvedt/Auster dining table, can you tell me something about that picture on the wall behind you) I managed to ask how she came to Margaret Cavendish. She immediately started on an excited five-minute talk about researching 17th century science and how the name Cavendish kept coming up and how she knew it from Virginia Woolf’s dismissive comments and how she therefore hadn’t read any Cavendish (because, well, Woolf), but then she did and how the scientific ideas still resonate with ideas we’re asking about today. When she finally wound down, she added: “And thank you for asking that question.”

So, a good evening. But I still don’t have my copy of The Blazing World signed.

A Question of Time

29 Monday Oct 2018

Posted by Paul Kincaid in science fiction, Uncategorized

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Christopher Priest, Claire North, Dave Langford, Eric M. Bosarge, Gary Wolfe, Gregory Benford, H.G. Wells, Harry Turtledove, Ian Watson, Jack McDevitt, James Gunn, Jenny Erpenbeck, John Brunner, John Kessel, Kate Atkinson, Mark Twain, Paul Auster, Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein, Robert Silverberg, Washington Irving, Wolfgang Jeschke

Some time ago, I was invited to write an essay for a Chinese anthology of time travel stories. I was happy to do so, not least because the 2,000 words I wrote earned more than any other piece of writing I have ever done, more even than my Iain Banks book. Today a copy of the anthology, with a title that seems to translate as Time Non-Exist, arrived. I cannot read any of it, though I have found my article because my name is printed in roman letters after it. Because of that, I know I’m in there with Dave Langford, Gary Wolfe, James Gunn, Robert Silverberg and others. For those of you, like me, who cannot read Chinese, this is what I wrote.

It began with a question from the editor: Is it difficult to write about time in science fiction? Which time-themed science fiction story(s) impressed you most lately? Ever since The Time Machine in 1895, countless writers have touched upon time or time travel in their writing. Do you feel the ideas about time have been exhausted? In other words, is ‘time’ done as a long-lasting theme in science fiction narrative?

This is what I answered:

Let me start with a question you haven’t asked: why do people write about time?

Practically all fiction revolves around two fundamental issues: identity and death. Who are we? What are we doing here? How do we make sense of life given the overwhelming fact of death? And so on. You can understand everything, from a murder mystery to a love story, as nibbling away at the edges of these big questions.

The machinery that links these two issues is time. It is time that brought us to this point, and time that hurries us on towards death. Time provides the context within which all fiction happens, within which all fiction must be understood.

What is unique and exciting about science fiction is that it provides a variety of mechanisms for taking us outside time, for providing perspectives on the fundamental issues of fiction that are not available to other fiction writers. These mechanisms include, among others, setting stories in the future (whether it is the day after tomorrow or unimaginable millennia from now), immortality (which undercuts the notion of death, but then rewrites our relationship with time), alternate histories (which question the fixity of time), and of course time travel. With time travel, those two basic questions of all fiction – how did we get to this point? and what happens next? – both become answerable.

Time, therefore, is the foundation upon which all science fiction is built. So, to answer your last question first, is ‘time’ done as a long lasting theme in science fiction? No. Because if time were done, then science fiction would necessarily be done also.

Is it difficult to write about time? Yes, and it should be. Partly because worthwhile fiction is not something to be carelessly dashed off. But mostly because the author is required to externalise something that for most of us is subjective. We are aware of the passage of time when we cross off a date on a calendar, but in truth Wednesday does not feel that much different from Tuesday; on the day I turn 65 and begin to draw a pension I feel no different from the day before when I was only 64 and not a pensioner. We notice time in retrospect, the sudden awareness of how our children have grown or how our partner’s hair has turned grey, but in our ordinary day-to-day lives, time is something that impinges only slowly, obliquely. But in fiction, the changes wrought by time have to become immediate and visible.

Writing about time, in other words, requires attention to detail, and an awareness of the processes of change. If you are setting a story 500 years in the future, it might help to consider how much the world has changed over the last 500 years, and then work out how such change might manifest going forward. If you are sending your heroine back to an earlier age, then it is incumbent upon you to know what foods she might eat, what clothes she might wear, what buildings would or would not be standing, and even how the language would have changed in the interim. A modern day Englishman transported to Shakespeare’s London would have great difficulty making himself understood; a modern day American transported to the time of the Civil War would find that religious attitudes and transcendentalist philosophy had engendered a very different attitude towards everyday occurrences like death. Movement in time entails far more than simply slotting in a different highly coloured backdrop and leaving everything else the same. The difference is everything, and everything is different.

When Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” sleeps through just 20 years, he awakes to find a world that is changed utterly. It is worth noting that when H.G. Wells invented a machine for travelling at will through time, he spent no time on the mechanism itself, we don’t even have any clear idea what the time machine looked like, and other than a brief lecture on the then novel idea of time as a dimension, the philosophy behind it all doesn’t get much of a mention either. The story of The Time Machine is not about travelling through time, but about the changes wrought by time. The Victorian upper class, the 1% if you like, have descended into the feeble, childlike Eloi; the Victorian underclass have descended into the brutal, chthonic Morlocks; while over and above these petty human concerns, entropy sweeps all before it towards the desolate terminal beach.

Naturally, when science fiction writers took up the time machine that Wells had invented for them, the vast majority chose to send their protagonists into the past rather than the future. After all, it can be fun to take a different look at what the history books have told us, and those same history books give us enough research material to get at least the basics right. Not that such colourful adventures in time needed a time machine; well before Wells’s novel, Mark Twain had already given us A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court, which set the tone for a certain kind of romp in the more imaginative portions of the past. But these are less stories about time than ways of separating a character from their familiar environment, whether in the past or the future, and then mining this situation for comic or dramatic effect. In truth, the history in such stories is usually no more accurate than the science, but they are generally entertaining and continue to be popular. Just in the last few years, for instance, we’ve seen such variations on a theme as Time Travelers Never Die by Jack McDevitt, The Cusanus Game by Wolfgang Jeschke, and The Time Train by Eric M. Bosarge. These are not necessarily great works of literature, or even great time travel stories (though I would recommend the Jeschke), but at the very least they indicate a continuing vitality in the most familiar strand of time travel narrative.

Speaking personally, however, I feel that simply depositing someone in a different time, past or future, and then seeing what the culture clash will produce, is hardly the most satisfying way of exploring the possibilities and peculiarities of time. I find it far more interesting when authors use the freedom to move in time as a way of exploring more technical and philosophical questions. Though these tend to come in waves and then fade from view, perhaps because there are only so many ways you can ask the same question. Thus there was a time when the most interesting time travel stories revolved around paradoxes, most familiarly the grandfather paradox (what would happen if you went back in time and killed your grandfather before your father was born?). Probably the most complex and interesting such story was “By His Bootstraps” by Robert Heinlein, but after that what more is there to say? You do occasionally come across a story of time travel paradox even today, but they mostly feel overly familiar and derivative. After that there was a vogue for stories that examined the morality of changing the past, often introducing the idea of a time police (as in, for example, Times Without Number by John Brunner) whose role is to preserve the true timeline. Before long the idea of the time police was dropped and writers became more cavalier about changing the past, as in Harry Turtledove’s Guns of the South or John Kessel’s Corrupting Dr Nice, but even these have become less common.

During the 1960s and 70s, when alienation became one of the dominant moods of new wave science fiction, we started to get stories in which time travel cut people off from their society and their sense of identity, as in Philip K. Dick’s “A Little Something for Us Tempunauts” or Christopher Priest’s “Palely Loitering”. Avoid time travel, Ian Watson told us in what may be his masterpiece, “The Very Slow Time Machine”, because that way lies madness. Watson’s story also points us to another brief fashion in time travel, which located it in the laboratory just as we started to pay attention to some of the interesting properties displayed by tachyons. The best such story is undoubtedly Timescape by Gregory Benford.

More recently the aspect of time that seems to be inspiring the most interesting work, particularly and curiously among writers not normally associated with science fiction, is a variation on alternate history in which the central character relives their life repeatedly, sometimes learning from the experience, sometimes not. This has resulted in extravagant works such as The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North, or in more restrained but psychologically acute works like Life After Life by Kate Atkinson, The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck, and 4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster. It is hard to imagine that time could be exhausted as a subject for fiction when it can produce work as astute and as satisfying as Life After Life.

It may be, because Auster’s novel is rather more pedestrian than Atkinson’s, that this particular strand of time narrative has run its course. But that doesn’t mean that there won’t be other forms of literary experimentation with time coming our way in the future. And, of course, there are still some of the other approaches to time that still have life and novelty in them.

Thus, when you ask which time-themed sf story has impressed me most recently, the novel that immediately sprang to mind is The Gradual  by Christopher Priest, which in many ways returns to the equation of time travel with alienation that we saw in post-new wave science fiction. In fact it is not immediately obvious that The Gradual is a time travel story. It returns us, as so much of Priest’s recent work has done, to the Dream Archipelago, a world of islands that encapsulate nightmare and desire. To one musician living in a repressive northern society, the sun-blessed islands embody everything he desires, and when he has a chance to tour the islands everything seems to live up to his dreams. Until he returns home and finds, like Rip Van Winkle before him, that a stay of a few weeks among the islands has meant the passage of years on the mainland. Time moves differently in dreams, and to recover his equilibrium, to reconnect with his sense of self and with his family (in the person of his long-missing brother), he must follow a complex sequence of spiralling movements dictated by the wooden stave that he carries and that perhaps resemble the stave markers on the music he writes.

There is nothing conventional in The Gradual as a time travel story (though it is worth noting that time, in one form or another, has been a key element in everything that Priest has written this century). But then, time travel shouldn’t be conventional. Time is what shapes our lives, what carries us to our deaths, what provides the context for our understanding of each day that passes and each story that we read. There are as many ways of approaching time as there are lives on this planet, and we all constantly make anew our understanding of time. So there will always be new time narratives. The subject will be exhausted only when science fiction itself is exhausted.

2017 in Review

31 Sunday Dec 2017

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books

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Anthony Gottlieb, Arthur C Clarke, Becky Chambers, Benjamin Black, books of the year, Bruce Sterling, C.J. Sansom, China Mieville, Christopher Priest, Colin Greenland, Dave Hutchinson, Edmund Crispin, Emma Chambers, Emma Newman, Gerry Canavan, Gwyneth Jones, Helen MacInnes, Iain Banks, Iain R. MacLeod, Joanna Kavenna, John Banville, John Crowley, John Kessel, John Le Carre, Judith A. Barter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Laurent Binet, Laurie Penny, Lavie Tidhar, Lily Brooks-Dalton, m john harrison, Margery Allingham, Mark Fisher, Matt Ruff, Michael Chabon, nina allan, Octavia Butler, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Paul Auster, Paul Nash, Rick Wilber, Rob Latham, Steve Erickson, Stuart Jeffries, Tade Thompson, Tricia Sullivan, Ursula K. Le Guin, Yoon Ha Lee

It’s that time of year again, when I dust off this oft-forgotten blog and post a list of my reading through the year, along with other odd comments.

2017 has been, in some respects, a very good year. My first full-length book not composed of previously published material, appeared in May. Iain M. Banks appeared in the series Modern Masters of Science Fiction from Illinois University Press, and has received some generally positive reviews, much to my relief.

Also this year I signed a contract with Gylphi to write a book about Christopher Priest, which is likely to take most if not all of the next year. In addition, I’ve put in a proposal for another volume in the Modern Masters of Science Fiction; the initial response has been quite good so I’m hoping I’ll have more to report in the new year. So, in work terms, it looks like the next couple of years are pretty much taken care of. Continue reading →

Reprint: Postmodernism

28 Saturday Mar 2015

Posted by Paul Kincaid in Uncategorized

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Brian McHale, Christine Brook-Rose, Christopher Priest, Don DeLillo, E.L. Doctorow, Frederic Jameson, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Geoffrey Chaucer, Henry James, Iain Banks, James Joyce, John Fowles, Katherine Dunn, Kathy Acker, Kim Newman, Kurt Vonnegut, Laurence Sterne, Miguel de Cervantes, Paul Auster, Richard Jefferies, Robert Coover, Samuel R. Delany, Steve Erickson, Thomas Pynchon, Virginia Woolf, William Gibson, William S. Burroughs, William Vollman

Another of my Cognitive Mapping columns, this one appeared in Vector 219, September-October 2001. As with the column on Modernism, my views are likely to have changed somewhat in the interim.

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The Brooklyn Follies

14 Sunday Aug 2011

Posted by Paul Kincaid in Uncategorized

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Paul Auster

Anyone who has followed Paul Auster’s career knows that for every New York Trilogy or Leviathan or The Book of Illusions we have to put up with an Oracle Night or Timbuktu. There is no predictable pattern to whether a new novel will soar or crumble: chance rules all. But that is appropriate for Auster since in his fictional world his characters put themselves at the dictates of happenstance. And that is exactly how The Brooklyn Follies (Faber, 2005) starts: our narrator, newly retired from the insurance industry, newly divorced, newly recovered from cancer, arrives in Brooklyn alone and friendless and looking for nothing more than a place to die. The familiar patterns fall into place and one fears the worst, but then, slowly, one realises that something rather strange and unexpected is happening in this novel, and it could turn into one of his best yet. Continue reading →

Oracle Night

11 Thursday Aug 2011

Posted by Paul Kincaid in Uncategorized

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Paul Auster, Siri Hustvedt

Something traumatic must have happened to Paul Auster and his wife, Siri Hustvedt, in the last year or so. I say this simply because they have both written the same story, or part of a story, not as the main thrust of their novel but as a violent intrusion into the world of the novel late in the course of the book. Those of you who read my piece on Hustvedt’s What I Loved a little while ago might recall that I lamented the melodrama when the son of a friend of the main character turns into a drug addict and thief tied up with a vicious crowd. Now, towards the end of Auster’s new novel, Oracle Night (Faber, 2004), the son of a friend of the main character is a drug addict and thief who commits a sudden act of outrageous violence against the narrator’s wife. Both Auster and Hustvedt transpose the event into the past, but because the two stories are so uncannily alike it feels recent. Auster’s handling of it is the more visceral, but less melodramatic; and I wonder if it is significant that the father of the criminal is the inevitable Auster-surrogate in the novel, here called Trause?

Other than that, Oracle Night is, for much of its length, one of the better of Auster’s novels, as good as Mr Vertigo or Leviathan (both of which I rate up there with his best), though in the end it is a book of trailing, unfinished stories, which means the book itself has an unfinished feel. It is narrated by a novelist, Stanley Orr, who lives, inevitably, in Brooklyn. Having suffered some sort of seizure bad enough that the doctors assumed he would not live, he has now finally come out of hospital. On one of his hesitant, recuperative walks around the neighbourhood he happens upon a new stationer’s shop, where he buys a blue notebook. Back home, he finds a new story coming to him which he writes in the notebook (so intensely is he engaged by this new story that when his wife, Grace, returns home he seems to have disappeared, one of several vaguely magical touches in the novel that are not developed). The story is of a man who walks away from his life and ends up in Kansas City, working with a retired taxi driver who collects telephone books as some sort of memorial for the victims of the concentration camps (this makes more sense in the novel than it does in any synopsis). The man was a publisher, and with him he carries the manuscript of a newly discovered novel by a noted author from between the wars; this novel, which is only very briefly synopsised, is called Oracle Night. When Orr manages to get his hero locked in the underground bunker where the collection of telephone books is stored, he finds himself unable to continue with the story. Curiously, his wife reports a dream which has almost the same plot as this abandoned novel. Next he writes a movie treatment for The Time Machine. Orr (and presumably Auster) does not rate The Time Machine highly: ‘a bad, awkwardly written piece of work, social criticism disguising itself as adventure yarn and heavy-handed on both counts’, so he rewrites it into a tale of two time travellers, one from the past and one from the future, who meet in Dallas in November 1963. The treatment is, not surprisingly, rejected.

All this while Orr is finding his wife acting strangely. Around the middle of the novel she informs him that she is pregnant, but seems disturbed by the prospect. Eventually, Orr uses the notebook to write a story which explains his wife’s behaviour: he imagines (and we are given no reason to doubt that this fiction is true, since the whole novel is about fiction turning into reality) that she had an affair with another writer, Trause, who had known her since she was a child and who is now Orr’s best friend. Having written the story, he tears up the notebook as if by so doing he is destroying the fiction’s chance of affecting reality. But in the moment of that destruction Trause dies as a result of deep vein thrombosis, and not long after Trause’s addict son attacks Grace causing her to lose the child.

And there it ends, and despite the fact that I think this is a wonderful novel (and I get more out of it the more I think about it) it still feels somehow unresolved…

First published at Livejournal, 25 February 2004.

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