Lives of Astronomers

In summer 1997 I went to Oxford to do research on a character I thought should be an astronomer.  I went to the Radcliffe Science Library and began reading journals, increasingly aware of how ill-equipped I was to create a fictional astronomer: I should probably spend several months getting a better understanding of the kind of research he might do.

My agent, Stephanie Cabot, had said in June 1996 that with 6 chapters she could get me money to finish the book; somewhere along the line she seemed to have forgotten this, so it was not easy to know how to do justice to this astronomer.  In the meantime I went on looking at journals in the few days I had managed to take off work.  I came upon the Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, which includes a splendid feature: each issue included a brief autobiography by a distinguished astronomer or astrophysicist.

I don't think any of these were used in the book, but I offer a couple of examples, mainly as a reminder of how much better it would be if all academic journals offered this kind of feature:

Publicist says I have NOT committed professional suicide

Profile in New York Magazine by Christian Lorentzen, here.

Interview with Ilana Teitelbaum on HuffPo

The Last Samurai did have a somewhat storm-tossed passage to publication.  It's possible if the Internet had flourished in something like its current form things would have gone better.  Back in the day, if Tina Brown was tight with Hillary Clinton, a party for Clinton's New York Senate victory could bump the launch party for the book back to a point when the author was no longer capable of public appearances.  Publicity involved dragging the authorial body here and there so that sentences could emerge from the authorial mouth.  And the events had to be set up by a publicist competing for scarce public space.  So if the author cracked up after the oft-deferred launch party and disappeared, if the publicist was in a miff, people who were excited about the book couldn't set up more congenial ways to talk about it. Couldn't unilaterally find venues independent of the whims of the publicist.

Anyhoo, the whole thing here.

My first time: Paris Review video interview series

The Paris Review has commissioned a series of video interviews with authors talking about their first book.  Tom Bean and Luke Poling came up to my cottage in Vermont back in March to talk to me about The Last Samurai; the video is now up here.

The Last Samurai reissue, news of the day

Over on LitHub, 7 booksellers talk about how to hand-sell The Last Samurai.  If you are not a bookseller you are probably not looking for tips on how to hand-sell The Last Samurai or, indeed, any other book, but -- what's appealing is to have something we so rarely see, a round-up of different responses to a book.  The convention of our review papers is that a book is handed over to a single reviewer; you might get different takes on a book if it is lucky enough to be reviewed in several papers, but for the most part we're invited to collude in the fiction of the magisterial assessment.  We all know, of course, that different readers may have radically different responses to a book, but we rarely see this on display in one place in the literary press.

Note: A big round of applause to Mieke Chew, the publicist at New Directions who came up with this brilliant idea.  

The whole thing here:

http://lithub.com/seven-ways-to-hand-sell-a-lost-modern-masterpiece/

be on the one hand good, and do not on the other hand be bad

Rich Beck has a terrific discussion of The Last Samurai on Emily Books, of which this is my favourite line:

DeWitt, working at a time when critics routinely praise writers for their “generosity of spirit,” is ungenerous, even mean.  

This also made me laugh:

She is neither a likeable protagonist nor the kind of charming, charismatic jerk who populates Martin Amis novels. She is just genuinely unlikeable, full stop.

Not that I actually agree, mind you; it still made me laugh.

When I started work on the book it had a single mother whose name was Ruth, a Shavian character of perfect self-possession.  She decided to raise a child following the principles of J S Mill and did so. Her many strong opinions set her at odds with the rest of the world; she remained sublimely untroubled.  It struck me at some point that this was rather dull.

I then read Kurosawa's account of his problems with the script of Drunken Angel, in which a virtuous doctor looked after tubercular patients in the slums.  Kurosawa explained that his breakthrough came when he realised the character was too good, it wasn't interesting.  He saw suddenly that the character would work much better as an irascible alcoholic.  I then thought of Wilkie Collins' Armadale, and in particular of the marvellous Lydia Gwilt: an acerbic drug addict, plotter, murderess.  (Best line: 'He put his arm round her waist - if you can call it a waist.')  How much more appealing my single mother would be if she were as tormented, as acerbic as Lydia Gwilt!  It was immediately obvious that her name must be Sibylla, from the opening epigraph of the Waste Land (quotation from Petronius, where two boys see the Sibyl at Cumae, ask what she wants, are told she wants to die).

I do also feel somewhat wounded and misunderstood, since I think I was generous to a fault: I think of the hours spent incorporating Greek and Japanese and Old Norse into the text, all to enable the reader to see for him- or herself how delightful they were; the months, or rather years, wrangling with typesetters and copy-editors in multiple editions, to share these delights with readers throughout the world . . .  I contemplate the misery involved in clearing permissions for quotations from 26 separate sources, all to share passages with readers that I might otherwise have saved for my own personal enjoyment in the privacy of my own personal library . . .  A woman who has suffered to share the aerodynamic properties of the grebe with the reading public is likely to feel that her distinguishing characteristic is wanton prodigality. 

But I still thought this was a very clever take on the book, and in some sense I would agree with Mr Beck: the book does not make much of an effort to be nice.

Meanwhile I am taking a weekend intro to Dutch, which is very cheering.  The language feels shocking after German: j = y, w = v, but you have to learn to pronounce the e of 'me', 'je', 'we' like that in French 'me'.  Also, you have to learn not to pronounce final n in words like 'kennen', 'leren' and so on. G is a harsh guttural, like Arabic kh: geboren = khebore(n), gegeten (G. gegessen) = khekhete(n). 'ui' = the ow of 'house' (duizend, Zuid-Holland, huis).  oe = the oo of moo (boek).  This is hard to get used to, but great.

H, R

Piece on the Book Bench about reactions on Twitter to casting of an actress of color as Rue in The Hunger Games.

Interesting.  Too slothful to link back to my own posts, but I was surprised by many of the covers for The Last Samurai - I went out of my way in the book to give Ludo an appearance that would leave the ethnicity of his father open, and then got many a cover back with a little white boy.  In one case, with blue eyes. Later, talking to Steve Gaghan, I commented that there was really no reason Sibylla must be played by a white actress - I had always thought of her as looking like Nigella Lawson, but there's nothing in the text that would be require it. (Was trying to be helpful -- really just wanted to emphasize that he could do whatever he wanted.  Not that it did in fact help.)

infra dig

I recently read a discussion between Nathan Englander and Jonathan Safran Foer in the Guardian (they were talking about their new edition of the Haggadah, translated by NE and edited by JSF). JSF said he did not read reviews. A fortiori I'm guessing he does not check out GoodReads and then dig down to the stats on ratings. If one is going to indulge in this undignified practice I can't help feeling the best plan is to keep quiet about it. But! We have data! (You know my weakness for data.)

Lightning Rods was rejected by 17 editors when Bill Clegg sent it out; it was rejected by another 4 or 5 years earlier; this looks like a unanimous rating of <= 2 stars.

Here is a dear little bar chart from GoodReads:

This isn't quite what I would expect the distribution to look like if people either loved it or hated it, which (editorial consensus notwithstanding) seemed to be the response among people who read it pre-publication, but there's certainly much more variation than among readers of The Last Samurai:

 

I contemplate the fact, though, that many of the people who HATED the book are of my mother's generation - and my mother HATES COMPUTERS.  She tried e-mail, grudgingly, for years; six years into the trial she had not gone online once to check out a website.  So she would certainly not sign up for GoodReads; if the sort of person likely to hate the book is also the sort of person unlikely to sign up for GoodReads, this would naturally affect the distribution.

How much easier life would have been, I can't help thinking, anyway, if the distribution among editors had matched that of readers on GoodReads. Or rather -- it's so complicated with editors. Bill said 16 out of 17 editors thought the book was funny and well written but they could not see publishing it, which maybe means they anticipated most readers giving it a rating <= 2 stars. Would an anticipated distribution like that of GoodReads have tipped the balance? (How much easier life would have been had the distribution of editors anticipating a distribution like that on GoodReads matched the distribution on GoodReads . . .) But regrets are fruitless. On with the show.

the Cassandra Sydrome

The Last Samurai is, for the time being, well and truly out of print. Not because sales of a paltry few hundred a year had caused its publisher to lose heart. No. How to gesture at the situation without aggravating?

Faithful readers of pp may remember that I did not want to publish the book as a first novel, because a debut novelist is in a weak position; I thought permissions would be a nightmare, copy-editing would be a nightmare, typesetting would be a nightmare, and in short I felt I could do a better job of defending the book if I were in the position of, say, Salman Rushdie. Jonathan Burnham (editor), Steve Hutensky (friend who showed the book to Jonathan) and Larry Shire (lawyer recommended by Steve) pooh-poohed these fears to a man.  Suffice it to say that it was the fate of Cassandra never to be believed.

It's at times like this that the old Secondhand Sales Donation comes into its own.  New copies, as new copies, very good and good copies are available on Amazon Marketplace.  A very good copy, for example, is available from Bacobooks for just $2.50 plus $3.99 p&p.  Easiest thing in the world to buy this very good copy for a friend, send the author a $1 royalty-equivalent, and make TWO people happy. (Acceptable copies start at $0.24, but these are probably not gift-standard editions.)

Even when the book was in print, readers who generously sent a donation after buying the book secondhand were doing as much to pay the author's rent, and so give time to finish new books, as those who equally generously stumped up for a new copy.  So thank you, thank you all.  New readers can try out the PayPal button in the sidebar if so inclined.

argh

A new edition of The Last Samurai arrived on the doorstep this morning via FedEx.  I flip through the book with the sense of foreboding which greets each new translation, and find:

Οχυπέφθ y άυδ ςώ ξηιγωφ έοέκωτ Μυρφ θ φ

above the transliteration

muromeno d'ara to ge idon eleese Kronion

[I omit macrons in the depth of my despair]

As so often I am consumed with guilt.  I expect I should have tracked down this new publisher when it first expressed interest in the book and insisted on proofreading the Greek.  It seems to me, though, that they sent in their request in the early days of my representation by Mr Clegg; there were a lot of other things going on.

I should say that, randomised Greek apart, it is a lovely edition.  But oh my poor head.

¿K?

Always the last to know.

From to time to time people ask whether The Last Samurai is available as an e-book, to which I reply, Not to my knowledge, jinsai. (Roughly.)

I've just been checking out Amazon.co.uk to see whether they have relented and agreed to stock new copies of the book.  (They have not stocked it for the last 5 years or so.  It is in fact available, new, from the Random House website, but the average punter has better things to do than scour publishers' websites on the off-chance that a more expensive version of the book might be available.)

To the best of my knowledge, the physical book can still not be bought new off Amazon.co.uk -- but it turns out there is a Kindle edition. Available only in the UK. I can't buy it from Germany. If you're reading this in the US or Canada, my guess is you can't buy it there. If you happen to live in the UK, you lucky devil, you can in fact get an e-version of the book.  I THINK.

The link is here.

When I view this page, I am told that pricing information is not available, and that Kindle titles cannot be sold to residents of my country off Amazon.co.uk.  I surmise that a resident of the UK would have better luck.  It's entirely possible, though, that a UK Kindle version does exist but cannot actually be bought.  (UK resident readers of pp can check out the link and report back, if so inclined.)

[Since you ask, no, no Kindle version is offered on Amazon.com. Bastards. BASTARDS.]

[Update: a commenter has checked out Amazon.co.uk and says the Kindle edition is indeed available for £7.99, or rather WILL be available from May 31. 

American readers who own a Kindle and would like to have The Last Samurai on the device would appear to have two options:

1. Mail the Kindle to someone in the UK and get them to buy the e-version and send it back.

2. Buy a cheap flight to the UK; fly to the UK, taking care not to leave the Kindle behind; personally buy the e-version; return in triumph to the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. A bit pricey to the untutored eye, but offers the opportunity for Samurai-themed London tourism: you can ride the Circle Line around and around and around, buy a chicken meal at Iowa Fried Chicken, see Ulysses Mocking Polyphemus at the National Gallery . . .  You could go to Grant & Cutler!  Anyone rash enough to go to Grant & Cutler would probably, it has to be said, wipe out the modest gain in portability achieved by installing Samurai on a Kindle: here is a whole bookstore crammed to the rafters with foreign language books, books almost certainly NOT available on Kindle -- if you have not taken the precaution of bringing an empty suitcase you will find yourself giving most of your clothes to Oxfam. 

2. is clearly the option likeliest to make your life more interesting, though perhaps not the best choice if credit card debt is a source of concern.]

The Last Samurai will be the Fall Read at Conversational Reading , starting September 19. More here.

Me, Samuel

The reader who wrote earlier of teaching her daughter to read Greek has had a look at the Russian translation of The Last Samurai. She sends this table:


She adds

If personally I could make another translation of the Last Samurai, just out of interest, it would be a very particular one: a bilingual version, with the original on one side and the translation on another and the footnotes on a half of every page (naturally, it resembles a bit Teach Yourself Iliad that Sybilla started one day). I love how they made it in a series of bilingual books called “Pereval”, published by a French publishing house Librairie du Globe (they published this way bilingual French-Russian versions of Pushkin’s novels, as well as Goncharov, Kuprin & Ilya Ilf). It is the best bilingual series I know.

I'm afraid the various things that went wrong with translations are really fall-out from my decision to sign with the Wylie Agency in August 2000. I had a meeting with Andrew Wylie, Sarah Chalfont and Zoe Pagnamenta in which the agency's strength as an international player was stressed: unlike other agencies, which do business through sub-agents, the Wylie Agency deals directly with foreign publishers, and is able to be a better advocate (it was claimed) as a result. I was assured that the agency could coordinate publicity set up by the many foreign publishers of the book, and was also assured that the agency could coordinate translators.

This seemed desperately important at the time - I could not see how I would ever get any writing done if I had to deal singlehanded with 15 or more foreign publishers, so leaving that in competent hands seemed more important (odd as it may seem) than finding the agent who was most enthusiastic about my work. After all, if I want to write a book, I already have people whose opinion I respect who are enthusiastic about my work, and even that matters much less than having a clear block of time free of distractions. So I signed with the agency, and tried to cash in on these offers to coordinate and orchestrate, and very junior members of staff told me they could do nothing about the translators because the agency had not done the deal. This was all horrible and in the end I was not sane any more, but Me, Samuel - this is hard not to love.

couper la difficulté en quatre

I got a wonderful e-mail from a Russian reader, Elena Davos, who has kindly allowed me to quote some of it:

It all started with “The Last Samurai”.

In 2002 I worked as PR manager for the Sheraton hotel in Moscow, Russia and met a lot of interesting people, at work and after-hours. One beautiful winter evening a British journalist invited me for a cup of tea to his studio not far from the hotel. We talked about everything and about nothing, drinking our tea in the kitchen as many Russians do. And I asked something, and he answered something, and I told something and it was time to say goodbye. So he went to his living room and came back with a big yellow book. On the cover of the book there was a picture of a boy holding a book.

And the journalist said something like:

You know, may be, being a single mom of a 5 y.o. girl, you will find this stuff interesting. It is about how to teach kids foreign languages. I think you’ll enjoy it.

[... ]

For one point the journalist was right however. Having finished We Never Get Off at Sloane Square I quickly taught my daughter Greek letters.

It was not like with Ludo. She could not wake up at 7 am and ask for a book to work with. But anyway she learned how to read in French and in Russian using the method you described in the book: highlighting the words she knew with a yellow Stabilo. Writing with Latin letters Russian words. Asking me millions of questions I didn’t know the answer to. I’m not (at all) a patient teacher, I wasn’t born to be a teacher, I never wanted to be a teacher. But somehow “couper la difficulté en quatre” helped me. It helped me with my daughter; it helped me with my son. During my Russian lessons in Paris it helped me too. But I’m piping into Volume Two, as Psmith once said, so -

…as at that time my daughter liked to listen to my stories, I told her some bits of what happened in Odyssey. She immediately asked who Homer was, and it blocked me again, and I had to stop, to reread, and to describe several points of view, about Unitarians and others, as simple as possible.

It breaks my heart to tell the truth, but I wasn’t persistent enough and she doesn’t remember how to read Greek letters now. She still remembers though what happens in Odyssey 5, 6 & 7. She started Japanese this winter. She is 11 y. o.

I’m happily looking forward to teaching languages to my 3 y.o. son who is bilingual and twice as stubborn as my daughter.

In brief

A reader has sent me a link to his review of The Last Samurai on amagnificentbastard, which includes a fuller discussion of ethical questions raised (including those relating to suicide) than was offered by most reviewers.