There’s This Literary Genre Called Fiction. Ever Hear of It?

Another fake memoir almost hits the press (from the NYT):

A man whose memoir about his experience during the Holocaust was to have been published in February has admitted that his story was embellished, and on Saturday evening his publisher canceled the release of the book.

And once again a New York publisher and Oprah Winfrey were among those fooled by a too-good-to-be-true story.

This time, it was the tale of Herman Rosenblat, who said he first met his wife while he was a child imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp and she, disguised as a Christian farm girl, tossed apples over the camp’s fence to him. He said they met again on a blind date 12 years after the end of war in Coney Island and married. The couple celebrated their 50th anniversary this year.

Ms. Winfrey, who hosted Mr. Rosenblat and his wife, Roma Radzicki Rosenblat, on her show twice, called their romance “the single greatest love story” she had encountered in her 22 years on the show. On Saturday night, after learning from Mr. Rosenblat’s agent that the author had confessed that the story was fabricated, Berkley Books, a unit of Penguin Group that was planning to publish “Angel at the Fence,” Mr. Rosenblat’s memoir of surviving in a sub-camp of Buchenwald with the help of his future wife, canceled the book and demanded that Mr. Rosenblat return his advance.

Now, both articles linked above touch on all that is wrong with this sort of thing, as well as ponder why it’s just so popular to make up a story about your life and claim it’s true; and I admit, while reading the article, the entire time I’m thinking, “what an asshole.” This bit, however, touched me in a strange way:

In a statement released through his agent, Mr. Rosenblat wrote that he had once been shot during a robbery and that while he was recovering in the hospital, “my mother came to me in a dream and said that I must tell my story so that my grandchildren would know of our survival from the Holocaust.”

He said that after the incident he began to write. “I wanted to bring happiness to people, to remind them not to hate, but to love and tolerate all people,” he wrote in the statement. “I brought good feelings to a lot of people and I brought hope to many. My motivation was to make good in this world. In my dreams, Roma will always throw me an apple, but I now know it is only a dream.”

I get this. It makes me start to like the guy. It also made me wonder, “what the hell is wrong with fiction”? And that’s the thing. These faked memoirs are obviously compelling stories, or else publishers wouldn’t pick them up and people wouldn’t read them. Do people feel that their messages will somehow lose their oomph if presented as fiction sprinkled with occasional truth? It’s not like no one has ever written fiction with elements of true events before. If these are his dreams, why not write and present them as his dreams? As fiction. Storytelling can be an agent of change, regardless of the veracity of the events described. To paraphrase Einstein, often times the imagination is more important than knowledge.

I’d like to believe that Rosenblat, at least in the beginning, wasn’t motivated by profit, that he was motivated by a desire to do good. It’s saddening that his legacy is now tarnished because he had to present the story he wanted to tell as the truth. The best fiction, after all, revels in the fact that it is a lie.

The First Jazz-Poet President?

Could Obama be the President that gets people interested in poetry again? Ok, maybe that’s a stretch, but it turns out that he dabbled a little in verse back in his undergrad years, even publishing a few poems in the undergrad literary journal. Heh, even Harold Bloom “was not unimpressed” with his work, which is really saying a lot coming from Bloom.

This is really cool, though (h/t Baratunde).

President-elect Barack Obama said Sunday that he wants to “open up” the White House to local children and artists and that he also envisions a science lecture series to inspire youth.

Mr. Obama, speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” outlined for the first time a way to showcase the “tapestry that is America.”

“We want to invite kids from local schools into the White House,” he said.

Mr. Obama said he wants the White House to be a forum for “elevating science once again and having lectures in the White House where people are talking about traveling to the stars or breaking down atoms, inspiring our youth to get a sense of what discovery is all about.”

He said he would like to invite jazz and classical musicians and have poetry readings in the White House.

Wait? What’s this? Intellectualism and creativity in the White House? Say it ain’t so! Poetry readings and Jazz in the White House? I too get all blubby about hearing that Obama plans on, gee imagine, investing in the U.S. infrastructure and creating jobs, but stuff like this just sends me into a complete tizzy of happiness.

Art, science, learning, and all a part of the new administration. Wow. Just wow! You’ll forgive me for being a tad overwhelmed over the thought of it. I’ve suffered from an 8-year nightmare that would send The Sandman into hiding.

David Foster Wallace, R.I.P.

Photo by Suzy Allman

David Foster Wallace, author of Infinite Jest, has passed on.

David Foster Wallace, 46, a novelist, essayist, teacher and story writer whose effort to come to grips with the America of his time resulted in the huge and hugely successful novel “Infinite Jest,” was found dead Friday at his home in Claremont, Calif.

Wallace’s wife found that he had hanged himself when she returned home about 9:30 p.m., said Jackie Morales of the Claremont Police Department, the Associated Press reported.

Literary observers recognized Wallace for his intellect and energy. They saw a confident willingness to tackle the largest issues, to search for the deepest meanings, to extend inventiveness to its utmost, and to employ the traditional tools and techniques of fiction in service of an unapologetically modern sensibility. His notable humor was often of the dark variety.

So sad. The NYTs did a good job of capturing his talent:

A prose magician, Mr. Wallace was capable of writing — in his fiction and nonfiction — about subjects from tennis to politics to lobsters, from the horrors of drug withdrawal to the small terrors of life aboard a luxury cruise ship, with humor and fervor and verve. At his best he could write funny, write sad, write sardonic and write serious. He could map the infinite and infinitesimal, the mythic and mundane. He could conjure up an absurd future — an America in which herds of feral hamsters roam the land — while conveying the inroads the absurd has already made in a country where old television shows are a national touchstone and asinine advertisements wallpaper our lives. He could make the reader see state-fair pigs that are so fat they resemble small Volkswagens; communicate the weirdness of growing up in Tornado Alley, in the mathematically flat Midwest; capture the mood of Senator John McCain’s old ”straight talk” campaign of 2000.

He was also a gifted teacher. May you rest in peace, Mr. Wallace.

Happy Bloomsday!

Grab yourself a bottle of Powers and celebrate the best novel of the 20th century that no one but a handful of English majors and Joyce scholars have ever read.

Yay! Book Meme!

Banned Book Project (via Belledame)

How it works: these are the 110 top banned books. Bold what you’ve read, italicize what you’ve read part of. Read more.

#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eyes by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 A Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Émile by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Émile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Heh, doing this makes me want to re-read a lot of books. There are some damn good books on this list. And with Bloomsday quickly approaching, it may be time to once again drag out the battered to all hell copy of Ulysses.