Live Like a Flame

Thank You for Not Reading: Essays on Literary Trivia, Dubravka Ugresic, translated from the Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth with the assistance of Damion Searles, Dalkey Archive Press 2003, $13.95.

What a wicked book this is. For me, its wickedness works on several levels: that of the writer who comes from outside and looks with a mixture of awe and trepidation at the behemoth of Western publishing, that of the inhabitant of a politically moribund, financially bankrupt but culturally rich (or overripe) non-Western society, that of a woman professional in a world that is still run by men (see ‘Women, Smoking and Literature’ in the book). Ugresic quietly lampoons all the pieties of modern publishing (see for instance her short piece ‘Book Proposal’) using a facetious, faux-naif strategy that only half-disguises an intellectual rapier point.

Many times as I read the book I chuckled (painfully), recognising the truths of my own situation. After finishing it, i felt simultaneously deeply depressed about the fate of literature, and even more determined to carry on regardless. Depressed because the entire panoply of modern culture, up to and including the book industry, is ranged against reading, and determined because what the hell.

As a Croatian turned out of her own country by newly liberated Croatians sadly lacking in humour (think of the recent fate of one of our own), Ugresic possesses the double vision we are so familiar with in our own lives. I feel strongly tempted to quote huge chunks of the book because no summary or commentary can capture the sheer mischief of Ugresic’s prose. She comments devastatingly on the cult of the author in the West, on the phenomenon of the ‘bestseller’, on state-funded literature in the erstwhile communist countries, on Oprah and Di, on literary speed dating, on the deadly convergence between communist culture-for-all and capitalist get-on-TV-for-fifteen-minutes-of-fame.

For instance, take this passage at the beginning of the piece ‘Having Fun’. Ugresic is describing a television appearance she made on a five-hour panel discussion with a motley crew of ‘intellectuals’, during which she said not one word. The presenter did not moderate the discussion but simply floated questions in the air like bread for goldfishes, so the biggest biters got first bite. What happens next is like a little tour of stock author behaviour for the media:

One writer launched into a monologue about her own depression, although the topic of the discussion was barely connected with depression. A well known writer fell into the rhetoric of a fighter for human rights, expressing his personal anxiety about events from Uganda to Bosnia. A well known zoologist joined in and expressed her concern for threatened gorillas. A well known feminist-oriented humanist talked about herself, even though the discussion seemed to be about something else. Someone used soccer as a metaphor for something, so others defended soccer, thinking that mass entertainment was under attack. A writer began to explain why she was most concerned about children who suffered from attention-deficit disorders. Someone else gathered that this was an attack on the Internet, and a lively defense of life in cyberspace ensued. The well known humanist — who by now had taken a mirror out of her handbag in order to fix her lipstick — repeated something about rights and morals. The well known zoologist — who had taken a stuffed toy monkey eating a stuffed banana out of her bag and placed it in front of her — repeated her concern for the global environment. Three of them immediately rushed in to confess that they believed in God, although their gods were different.*

Hilarious — and so true. We writers are such narcissists. Take this little gem from ‘Alchemy’:

Recently, during a short visit to Moscow, I met a writer. She looked most impressive, covered in sequins and feathers. If I had met her in New York I would have thought she was a transvestite. She gave me two volumes of her book Notes on Bras (Zapiski na liftchikakh). The author was a so-called woman of the people, a former chambermaid or something. she had written a novel about her feminine communist experiences. And the book was selling like hot cakes, she said.

‘And what has Solzhenitsyn been doing lately?’ I asked stupidly. I really wasn’t that interested in Solzhenitsyn at the time.

‘Huh?’ gawped the author of Notes on Bras blankly.

In the world of trash, wrote Vladimir Nabokov, it is not the book that brings success, but the reading public.

Indeed. Ugresic is equally merciless with publishers, but I should probably stop here before I end up quoting the rest of the book. I leave you with one last quote, from the coda to the book, titled ‘The Seventh Screw’, which tells the haunting and terrifying story of Roy the carpenter. Yes I know that sounds weird: I won’t explain. Read the book.

The belief in doing justice — aesthetic, literary, political, intimate, whatever kind — is one of the most powerful triggers that moves the hand to pick up the pen, no matter what the artistic results are. I myself seem to be pursuing some kind of ‘justice’ too.

Amen.

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* Note that here Ugresic has got her publisher to agree to let both a lowercase and an uppercase god to appear in the same line. It is extraordinarily difficult to get publishers to do this.