Stories from elsewhere

AT A recent literary event aboard a barge on the River Thames in London, Pia Juul, one of Denmark’s leading poets and writers, conversed with Ali Smith, a British novelist. Ms Juul’s voice was nearly drowned out by nearby diners and music playing upstairs. The symbolism was apt. The event’s sponsor, Peirene Press, has just published Ms Juul’s prize-winning “The Murder of Halland” in English translation. But as with Ms Juul’s performance on the barge, it seems nearly all of the best foreign voices go unheard in Britain and America.

When it comes to international literature, English readers are the worst-served in the Western world. Only 3% of the books published annually in America and Britain are translated from another language; fiction’s slice is less than 1%. This contrasts sharply with continental Europe: in France, 14% of books sold in 2008 were translations; in Germany, the figure was 8%, according to Literature Across Frontiers, a translation advocacy network. Yet the bias for English literature appears to be universal: two in three European translations are from English, and about 40% of all novels published in France.

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Christopher Logue

Christopher Logue

Christopher Logue, poet, died on December 2nd, aged 85

PACIFISM was Christopher Logue’s creed. He marched to Aldermaston against Britain’s bomb in 1958, armed only with sandwiches. Three years later he served time in prison for inciting anti-nuclear demonstrations. By then, Homer’s “Iliad” had started to lodge in his head.

                                                    …a gleam

(As when Bikini flashlit the Pacific)

Staggered the Ilian sky, and by its white

Each army saw the other’s china face, and cried:

“Oh please! “

 

 

As a prisoner he was sent to demolish a munitions factory. The irony of that pleased him. All war was criminal behaviour in his eyes. Fighting was something he couldn’t do. He had joined the army briefly at 17, diminutive and shying from physical contact, mostly to avoid work. But when they did a bayonet charge in training, aiming their steel points at bags of straw, hideously roaring, his trousers fell down.

Screaming, kicking, slicing, hacking, ripping

Thumping their chests:

‘I am full of the god!’

Blubbering with terror as they beg for their lives:

‘Laid his trunk open from shoulder to hip—

Like a beauty-queen’s sash.’

Violence, no. Impatience, yes. Jamming the scissors into a vacuum pack of salmon. Crashing his palms on the typewriter keys when he couldn’t change the ribbon. Panting to bring in the Marxist paradise at once in drab postwar Britain, though he hadn’t even got through the “Communist Manifesto”. Reading his poems aloud in the 1960s (a chorus of “Antigone” for the bicycle-makers of Nottingham) in the hope he could immediately culturise the workers. Fuming at his own timidity, political, intellectual, social, sexual. Especially sexual. That lonely twice-daily wank over Men Only.

                                             …in oyster silk,

Running her tongue around her strawberry lips

While repositioning a spaghetti shoulder-strap,

The Queen of Love, Our Lady Aphrodite…

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Publishing in Latin America

A literary deficit

Brazil apart, publishers are struggling to persuade the growing middle class to read more books.

TINY fingers wiggle through the holes in the pages of “A Moverse” (“Let’s Get Moving”), a children’s picture-book that lets readers pretend their digit is a cat’s tail or penguin’s beak. While managers in suits talk print-runs and profits in one hall of the Guadalajara International Book Fair, the world’s biggest Spanish-language literary get-together, shrieks of excitement can be heard from young customers in the children’s area next door.

Illiteracy and poverty once denied the pleasure of reading to many Latin Americans. That should no longer be the case: a quarter of Mexicans born before 1950 are officially classed illiterate but only 2% of those under 30. And less than a third of Latin Americans now live below the poverty line, compared with half in 1990.

The newspaper business has taken note. Paid-for daily newspaper circulation in Latin America rose by 5% (21% in Brazil and 16% in Mexico) between 2005 and 2009, according to Larry Kilman of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers. Newspapers have won over young readers, says Mr Kilman. Argentina’s Clarín group, for instance, markets different titles to different age groups. Regional titles in Mexico’s drug-war hotspots have seen spikes in circulation, he adds (though they have also suffered violence from the mobs they expose).

In books, the picture is more mixed. Publishers are churning out more new titles than ever. Sales in (Portuguese-speaking) Brazil, the biggest market, are rising. On December 5th Britain’s Pearson (which owns 50% of The Economist) announced the purchase by its Penguin subsidiary of 45% of Companhia das Letras, Brazil’s most innovative literary publisher.

Things are less bright in the Spanish-speaking world. In Mexico and Argentina, Latin America’s second and third markets, book sales have been falling. Thanks to the “Twilight” vampire saga and a self-help series, Spain’s Grupo Santillana, the region’s biggest publisher, reports that its sales of titles aimed at teenagers have held up. But Mexico’s publishers’ association says that total sales last year were 139m copies, down by 12% from 2005. Many of these are textbooks, for which demand is pretty steady. But in the four years to 2009 sales of novels fell by 39% (to 8m) and of children’s books by 42%, to 13m. That was the year that recession whacked Mexico. With economic recovery, many publishers at this year’s Guadalajara fair, which closed on December 4th, report better sales.

The stagnation has deeper roots.

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A town crier in the global village

A cross-border fraternity that strives to be seen, heard and heeded

NEARLY four years ago, a web-based political movement set itself the modest task of “closing the gap between the world we have and world most people everywhere want”. Calling their group Avaaz, which means “voice” in several languages, the founders aimed to reproduce globally some of the success which their progenitors—like America’s Moveon.org, and Australia’s Getup!—had enjoyed in national political arenas.

By its own lights, the movement, using 14 languages and engaged in a mind-boggling list of causes, has had some spectacular successes. Within the next few months, membership will top 6m. The number of individual actions taken (from bombarding a politician with a well-aimed message, or funding a poster campaign, to helping provide satellite phones to Burmese monks) is estimated at over 23m. Among the recent developments Avaaz claims to have influenced are a new anti-corruption law in Brazil; a move by Britain to create a marine-conservation zone in the Indian Ocean; and the spiking of a proposal to allow more hunting of whales.

But is there any objective measure by which the reach of a global e-protest movement can be assessed? Sceptics use words like “clicktavism” to describe political action that demands nothing more of a protester than pressing a button, which may just imply curiosity; and it is rarely possible to prove beyond doubt that e-campaigning is a decisive factor in a political outcome.

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Review : Other People’s Money

Buy this

By Lucy Kellaway

Other People’s Money, by Justin Cartwright, Bloomsbury

Ever since Shylock demanded his pound of flesh from Antonio, bankers have been presented as loathsome figures in literature. Trollope and Dickens made them greedy, unprincipled villains; Tom Wolfe updated this model for the 1980s, adding sexual incontinence, coke habits and a taste for vulgar interior design.

In the slew of new novels about the financial crisis, the bankers are all of the above but blacker still: two-dimensional sociopaths who blithely destroy the world economy. Though there may be some truth in this, it makes for dull reading, particularly when the lecture is dished up – as it was by Sebastian Faulks in his book A Week in December – with a half-baked explanation of how a derivative works.

The title of Justin Cartwright’s novel leads one to fear more of the same. But Other People’s Money turns out to be nothing of the kind. For a start it is a literary first – a feel-good novel about the financial crisis. Second, it is a comedy of manners, in which bankers are good and bad – as are journalists, failed actors, drop-outs and postmen.

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Spine chilling

Mass-market retailing changed publishing before the e-book

SNAZZY technology is a twist in a narrative already several chapters long. Mass-market retailing has changed the publishing industry: these days books are as likely to be found beside steaks and saucepans as they are to be bought in specialist stores. The story turns on whether broader changes in bookselling will stifle literature. Dan Brown will survive. Would Dante?

For most of the past century, governments across Europe protected book prices; many still do. Even in America, apart from dime-store romances, few titles were sold outside bookshops. But in the 1970s stores like Borders and Barnes & Noble applied a supermarket maxim to print: pile them high and watch them fly. Waterstones did the same thing in Britain and top titles started selling in the hundreds of thousands, even millions.

Just as book superstores forced out many independents, so supermarkets and other mass retailers have since crowded the book chains (see chart). In Britain, when price regulation was disbanded in 1997, supermarkets rushed in and now sell a quarter of all books, according to the way that Nielsen, a market-research outfit, calculates it. Belgium and Finland mimicked this trend.

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Disappearing ink

Readers have never had it so good. But publishers need to adapt better to the digital world.

DURING the next few weeks publishers will release a crush of books, pile them onto delivery lorries and fight to get them on the display tables at the front of bookshops in the run-up to Christmas. It is an impressive display of competitive commercial activity. It is also increasingly pointless.

More quickly than almost anyone predicted, e-books are emerging as a serious alternative to the paper kind. Amazon, comfortably the biggest e-book retailer, has lowered the price of its Kindle e-readers to the point where people do not fear to take them to the beach. In America, the most advanced market, about one-fifth of the largest publishers’ sales are of e-books. Newly released blockbusters may sell as many digital copies as paper ones. The proportion is growing quickly, not least because many bookshops are closing.

For readers, this is splendid. Just as Amazon collapsed distance by bringing a huge range of books to out-of-the-way places, it is now collapsing time, by enabling readers to download books instantly. Moreover, anybody can now publish a book, through Amazon and a number of other services. Huge choice and low prices are helping books hold their own on digital devices, even against “Angry Birds”.

For publishers, though, it is a dangerous time.

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Great digital expectations

The offline experience

Digitisation may have came late to book publishing, but it is transforming the business in short order.

TO SEE how profoundly the book business is changing, watch the shelves. Next month IKEA will introduce a new, deeper version of its ubiquitous “BILLY” bookcase. The flat-pack furniture giant is already promoting glass doors for its bookshelves. The firm reckons customers will increasingly use them for ornaments, tchotchkes and the odd coffee-table tome—anything, that is, except books that are actually read.

In the first five months of this year sales of consumer e-books in America overtook those from adult hardback books. Just a year earlier hardbacks had been worth more than three times as much as e-books, according to the Association of American Publishers. Amazon now sells more copies of e-books than paper books. The drift to digits will speed up as bookshops close. Borders, once a retail behemoth, is liquidating all of its American stores.

Having started rather late, books are swiftly following music and newspapers into the digital world. Publishers believe their journey will be different, and that they will not suffer the fate of those industries by going into slow decline. Publishers’ experience will, indeed, be different—but not necessarily better.

In some ways the transition from paper to digital distribution is a boon. E-books currently have high profit margins, and are free from many of the drawbacks of print. Peter Osnos, the founder of PublicAffairs Books, says the biggest challenge small publishers face is managing their inventories. Print too many books, and lots of them will be returned by stores. Print too few and publishers will forgo sales while they order reprints (at higher prices). None of these problems exists when distributing books digitally.

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Raiders of the lost archive

Writers’ papers don’t necessarily belong at home.

THE flimsy manuscript pages of J.G. Ballard’s dystopian novel “Crash” are scrawled with corrections in blue ink. This evidence of the intense composition process forms one item in the 42 boxes of the writer’s papers that the British Library unveiled on August 1st, after acquiring them last year. Anyone visiting the library’s reading room can now peruse these pages, along with the first draft of Ballard’s semi-autobiographical “Empire of the Sun”, and his school reports and letters.

The appeal of such relics is partly the “magical value” of the thing itself, as poet Philip Larkin termed it, and partly the chance to understand authors and their work better. Collecting them was once a hobby for rich individuals, but over the past 50 years acquiring authors’ complete archives has become a mark of status for universities and libraries. As manuscript prices shot up, Britain’s state-funded institutions have often been trumped by private American ones. The University of Texas at Austin, for example, used oil wealth to build its cultural collections, which now include papers from British writers such as Tom Stoppard, Penelope Fitzgerald and Julian Barnes. Coca-Cola endowed Emory University in Atlanta, which bought Salman Rushdie’s archive in 2006.

Not all writers have sold to the highest bidder.

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Bachmann and the good book

The Republican nomination

Michele Bachmann

YESTERDAY Politico reported that the Obama campaign was planning to destroy Mitt Romney, should he win the Republican nomination, by portraying him as “weird”. So much for “hope” and “change”. None of those quoted in the piece say it, but such a strategy would obviously play on America’s perception of Mr Romney’s Mormonism. And that got me thinking, what if Michele Bachmann wins the nomination?

In next week’s New Yorker, Ryan Lizza has a dispassionate profile of Mrs Bachmann that explores, among other things, the candidate’s religious beliefs. She recommends Christian books and films that suggest non-Christians are trouble, that the government may be poisoning the water supply, and that America’s civil war was a theological battle that pitted the victimised Christian South against the godless North. She is a fan of Nancy Pearcey’s book, “Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity”, which argues that only systems built on “Biblical truth” are correct. She says she was profoundly affected by Francis Schaeffer’s film series “How Should We Then Live?”, which again promotes the idea that the inerrant bible is the final authority, while also condemning the influence of the Italian Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Darwin, secular humanism, and postmodernism. In Mr Lizza’s piece Sara Diamond, an author who has studied evangelical movements, sums up the thinking of Schaeffer, whom Mrs Bachmann calls “a tremendous philosopher”, as follows: “Christians, and Christians alone, are Biblically mandated to occupy all secular institutions until Christ returns.”

Does Mrs Bachmann believe all this?

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