So I could tell you what my favorite book of the year is, or I could make you do a crossword puzzle, solve a word scramble, then use that word to unlock a secret website first! It sounds like a mindfuck, but it’s actually really easy.
1. Solve the literary-themed crossword puzzle. 2. Unscramble the 7 yellow letters. 3. Use that word to unlock and-the-answer-is.tumblr.com 4. See my all-time favorite book of 2015!
It’s totally worth it, swearsies. (BTW, cheaters will be cursed by the ancestors of Will Shortz so that they won’t even be able to solve the People crossword.)
The word I’ve been using to talk about that lately is adequacy. My primary reader and consultant for Freedom was my friend Elisabeth Robinson, who’s been struggling with her own new novel, and one of her gifts to me was her saying, “You only have to make this book adequate.” To which she was nice enough to add: “Your adequate is very good.”
When I was younger, the main struggle was to be a “good writer.” Now I more or less take my writing abilities for granted, although this doesn’t mean I always write well. And, by a wide margin, I’ve never felt less self-consciously preoccupied with language than I did when I was writing Freedom. Over and over again, as I was producing chapters, I said to myself, “This feels nothing like the writing I did for twenty years—this just feels transparent.” I wasn’t seeing in the pages any of the signs I’d taken as encouraging when I was writing The Corrections. The sentences back then had had a pop. They were, you know, serious prose sentences, and I was able to vanquish my doubts simply by rereading them. When I was showing Corrections chapters to David Means, I basically expected his rubber stamp, because the sentences had a level of effulgence that left me totally defended. But here, with Freedom, I felt like, “Oh my God, I just wrote however many metaphor-free pages about some weird days in the life of a college student, I have no idea if this is any good.” I needed validation in a way I never had before.
I was admittedly somewhat conscious that this was a good sign—that it might mean that I was doing something different, pressing language more completely into the service of providing transparent access to the stories I was telling and to the characters in those stories. But it still felt like a leap into the void.
Above are a few of the typographically led book cover designs from the David Pearson exhibition, currently on in London.
I love the ‘redacted’ George Orwell, 1984, cover with it’s debossed title under black ink. I was also quite taken with the chilling cover for Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
There’s a week left to go, so if you find yourself in Shoreditch, London before the 28th June, drop in.
David Pearson is an acclaimed British designer, famed for his beautiful series of Penguin book cover designs.
David studied at Central St Martins in London (1999–2002) before taking a job at Penguin Books as text designer and later, cover designer. He left to establish his own studio – Type as Image – in 2007.
David played a key role in the recent re-emergence of Penguin Books through projects such as the multi-million selling Great Ideas series, Penguin by Design and thePopular Classics series. He has won numerous awards for book design, has been listed as one of Britain’s Top 50 Designers by the Guardian and nominated for the Design Museum’s Designer of the Year Award.
“Finire di scrivere un romanzo comporta alcuni, non molti, piaceri, e uno di questi è cominciare a dimenticarlo, a ricordarlo come un sogno o un incubo i cui contorni vanno sfumando, per poter affrontare nuovi libri, nuovi giorni, senza la zavorra di tutto quello che con ogni probabilità avremmo potuto fare meglio e non abbiamo fatto. Kafka, che è il migliore scrittore di questo secolo, aveva ragione quando chiese che tutta la sua opera venisse bruciata. Affidò l’incarico a Brod, da una parte, e anche a Dora, la sua amica. Brod era uno scrittore e non mantenne la promessa. Dora era abbastanza illetterata, e probabilmente amava Kafka più di Brod, e si presume che abbia esaudito alla lettera la richiesta dell’amante. Tutti noi scrittori, soprattutto in quel giorno-pianura che è il giorno dopo o quello che noi, vanamente, crediamo sia il giorno dopo, ci portiamo dentro due demoni o due cherubini chiamati Brod e Dora. Uno è piu grande dell’altro. Generalmente Brod è più grande o più potente di Dora. Nel mio caso no. Dora è parecchio più grande di Brod e Dora fa in modo che io dimentichi quello che ho scritto e che mi metta a scrivere qualcosa di nuovo, senza contorcimenti di vergogna o pentimento. E così I detective selvaggi sono più o meno dimenticati. Riesco a malapena ad azzardare qualche considerazione su questo romanzo. Da una parte credo di vederci una lettura, una delle tante che sono state fatte, dell’Huckleberry Finn di Mark Twain; il Mississippi dei Detective è il flusso delle voci della seconda parte del romanzo. Ed è anche la trascrizione, più o meno fedele, di un segmento della vita del poeta messicano Mario Santiago, che ebbi la fortuna di avere per amico. In questo senso il romanzo tenta di rispecchiare una certa sconfitta generazionale e anche la felicità di una generazione, felicità che a volte fu il coraggio e i limiti del coraggio. Dire che sono in debito perenne con l’opera di Borges e Cortazar è un’ovvieta. Credo che il mio romanzo possegga tante letture quante sono le voci che contiene. Lo si può leggere come un’agonia. Lo si puo leggere anche come un gioco.”
