<\/p>\n
The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter<\/em><\/a> by Matei Calinescu, translated from the Romanian by Adriana Calinescu and Breon Mitchell (New York Review Books)<\/b><\/p>\n When I first started reading The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter<\/em> by Matei Calinescu, translated from the Romanian by Adriana Calinescu and Breon Mitchell (published by New York Review Books), I had the sense that I had read this book before. Or not this book exactly, but a different novel, or novels, that employed a similar technique of letting an idiosyncratic character\u2019s bizarre\u2014yet compelling and logical in their quirks\u2014ideas run free in a way in which an overarching plot is tossed aside in favor of a series of semi-philosophical sketches.<\/p>\n From \u201cOn the Realm of Stupidity\u201d:<\/p>\n No wonder then that Lichter sees modern civilization as a vast extension of the Realm of Stupidity. Intelligence is obsessed with that which is fundamental, original, structural, essential. One recognizes intelligent individuals by their fascination with the elementary and the simple. Their efforts within the spiritual order are integrative: they seek the basic principle, or\u2014to put it metaphorically\u2014the ideal key to all the mysteries of the world. Aspiring towards totality and uniqueness is not stupidity\u2019s ambitions. Its strength lies in its ability to placidly accept any theory, even an erroneous one, as long as it offers a viable starting point towards the practical results. A parasite plagiarizing the pure core of intelligence, sapping its vigor, stupidity forever fortifies and perfects itself, sprawling like a vast and dangerous stain on the consciousness of humanity. For stupidity is vain (the vanity of \u201cefficiency\u201d), sure of itself, economical, has wide-spreading technological tentacles and is shrewdly and ferociously aggressive. Stupidity wills itself to be \u201cuniversally human.\u201d Since the domain of stupidity is progress itself, Zacharias Lichter naturally concludes that true intelligence evolves within a vicious circle, forever fantasizing escape yet forever falling back into the realization that all efforts at escape are futile.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n I still can\u2019t quite put my finger on the other book(s) I\u2019ve read like this. Cort\u00e1zar\u2019s Cronopios and Famas<\/em> comes to mind, but that\u2019s not focused on a single<\/em> individual. There\u2019s something of Stefan Themerson here as well, maybe Tom Harris<\/em>? Or part of Ergo<\/em> by Jakov Lind? I feel like there\u2019s a voice just outside of my active memory that is just like this book . . . The best I can come up with right now is Mahu, or, The Material<\/em> by Robert Pinget. Here\u2019s a bit from \u201cStilts\u201d:<\/p>\n Supposing I wore stilts? It would change everything. When you went out for your coffee in the morning you\u2019d put on your coat or something longer to hide your feet, and the pieces of wood would show underneath. The grocer\u2019s wife would say, \u201cThere goes spindleshanks for his morning drink, it must be nine o\u2019clock.\u201d I\u2019d cross the road without waiting for the green light, the cars would stop at the sight of a man on stilts and you might get your newspaper for nothing, at first anyway.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n Anyway, The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter<\/em> is a great bathroom book. Most of the chapters are 3-4 pages long, and require a burst of concentration to immerse oneself in the particulars of this prose style and really tease out the humor and linguistic calisthenics. Don\u2019t read this in one long sitting\u2014it\u2019s a book that\u2019s best enjoyed as little bites, almost like a short story collection, but with a singular mindset, the madness of which takes over the whole book and infuses it with an off-kilter joy accessible to the patient . . . and the clued-in.<\/p>\n What I\u2019m curious about is which books prepare you to like<\/em> a book like this. If you are what you read, and the books you imprinted on are Twilight<\/em>, Slaughterhouse-Five<\/em>, and The Lime Works<\/em>, is that enough? Or will this book seem utterly incomprehensible, or, maybe not incomprehensible<\/em>, but a waste of time? This book nagged at me because my shitty memory wouldn\u2019t call forth all the books I\u2019ve read in this general tradition. That\u2019s a totally different experience than for someone who has never seen writing like this in their life and struggles to understand how exactly this fits within the category of \u201cnovel\u201d that they\u2019ve built up inside of their mind.<\/p>\n The opposite formulation of the \u201cnot for everyone\u201d statement is to clearly define who would be into a particular book: \u201cThis novel is for fans of Pinget, Themerson, and Jouet.\u201d Which circumscribes a readership of approximately fourteen people.<\/p>\n On the other hand, if you name-check the authors everyone has heard of\u2014\u201cthis is for those readers interested in Cort\u00e1zar, Kundera, and Rushdie\u201d\u2014you\u2019re not only full of shit, but you\u2019re about as useful as an Amazon algorithm.<\/p>\n That\u2019s a lie. Amazon\u2019s algorithmic recommendations can be damn interesting. Like with this book, which, I\u2019ll look up right now on Amazon and . . . uh. That\u2019s not what I expected. I should\u2019ve done that search before starting this paragraph and finding out that, aside from other NYRB<\/span> titles, the \u201cCustomers Also Bought\u201d listings include Jenny Erpenbeck, Mathias \u00c9nard, and L\u00facio Cardoso\u2014all really good authors!, none of which really relate to this book. (Unless you\u2019re looking for titles that fit into the category of \u201cliterary,\u201d which is almost as bad as the category I\u2019m going to discuss below.)<\/p>\n I used to think a lot about \u201cdiscoverability\u201d and recommendation algorithms. If you find the tag \u201cfuture of reading\u201d on this blog, you\u2019ll hit upon a treasure trove of detailed breakdowns of \u201cnew\u201d book recommendation sites, like BookLamp, Small Demons, Bookish 1.0 (or 2.0? Does it even matter?), GoodReads, etc. I still spend at least one class period every semester going over all of these mostly defunct sites, digging into the rationale for why everyone wanted to create online recommendation sites (it\u2019s crucial to get the right book to people at the right time and we all live online, so that\u2019s where you can make the connections) and the variety of theoretical ways by which these sites created their recommendation algorithms (by starting with the book and matching elements in the text to preferences; by starting with groups of readers and assuming similiar readers like similar books).<\/p>\n Nowadays, I\u2019m not sure that I care all that much. I don\u2019t feel like these sites are a viable strategy for publishers to connect their books with potential readers because a) they don\u2019t exist anymore and b) no one cares. Aside from GoodReads users, I\u2019m not sure there\u2019s a significant subset of readers who use a particular algorithm-driven website to figure out what book to read next.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n (A site I never use.)<\/em><\/p>\n Last week in my \u201cWorld Literature & Translation\u201d class, I had a couple grad students give presentations on Adam Thirlwell\u2019s The Delighted States: A Book of Novels, Romances, & Their Unknown Translators, Containing Ten Languages, Set on Four Continents, & Accompanied by . . . Illustrations, & a Variety of Helpful Indexes<\/em>, a book that I unabashedly love. Adam usually gets an email from me every spring about how much god damn fun<\/em> it is talking about his book in class. He\u2019s in that relatively small group of authors who I would love to get wasted with and shoot the shit about books. To be honest, I think of The Delighted States and It\u2019s Long Subtitle<\/em> less as a book and more as a textual eavesdropping in on the smartest guy you know drinking Guinness at a dive bar and getting way too into literary ideas. \u201cThe whole of literature can be explained through a tricycle.\u201d (An hour of stories about Proust falling down, the three-wheel theory of literature, triangles and linguistics in translation, and how cool is Hrabal?) \u201cAnd then when the tricycle appears in [insert obscure work by Eastern European writers] you can see the whole of history of writing as play. You know?\u201d \u201cFuck yes, Adam. Fuck. Yes.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n The joy I had reading this book for the first time\u2014and reading various sections over and again\u2014wasn\u2019t exactly the same as what my students experienced. Here were their general reactions: 1) this book is all over the place and hard to follow, 2) \u201cI\u2019ve never read the authors Thirlwell mentions.\u201d \u201cWhich ones, specifically?\u201d \u201cFlaubert, Proust, Borges, Hrabal, Gombrowicz, Laurence Sterne, Nabokov, Ulysses<\/em> . . .\u201d \u201c. . .\u201d \u201cSo it was kind of ridiculous.\u201d \u201c. . . \u201c, and 3) how does any of this relate to the books we\u2019re reading for class?1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n I\u2019ve gone through a variety of emotions as I worked my way through these responses, but the main one I keep coming back to is the one that would get the most \u201cthumbs up\u201d on Facebook: why would anyone admit, in a literature class<\/em>, to not knowing some of the most influential writers of the past hundred-plus years?<\/p>\n Stepping back from my existential dismay, I can cycle through some of the more legitimate reasons: there\u2019s not much value in knowing about books that the masses don\u2019t talk about, no one has read much at nineteen, the Canon is thankfully now canons, and it\u2019s not like they\u2019re aware of classic films, TV shows, albums, or other art works either. These are kids!<\/p>\n At the end of every semester I take myself to task for all of my fuck-ups. I read the student evaluations and get neurotic thinking about the ways in which Open Letter stress bled into my teaching. I replay too many class conversations in which I wish I was just smarter. I obsess over my shortcomings as a hopefully decent (question mark?) publisher and reader who generally functions outside of academia and teaches from particular world experiences\u2014those of bookselling, publishing, and reading, not deep academic research. From September to May, I actively try and teach students how to write for readers who aren\u2019t PhD holders or candidates, from May to September, I question myself and think I\u2019m just stupid. Then I remember that there are very few people in the world\u2014in academia and outside of it\u2014who have read so broadly and voraciously in world literature. And I think that\u2019s valuable? At least for making connections and recommendations?<\/p>\n