What international marketing is doing to contemporary fiction
Good piece by Tim Parks on how the need for English-language success is gradually sapping the distinctiveness of local literary traditions and substituting a kind of vaguely liberal aesthetic posturing for real literary creativity. I have been bothered by this for some time — I think you see this pseudo-postmodern sensibility in English-language authors too, like Yann Martel, Zadie Smith, Angela Carter, and even T.C. Boyle. But postmodernism isn’t the problem — think Italo Calvino. And on the other hand, we still have talents like Jhumpa Lahiri writing in a related “global” idiom.
The Dull New Global Novel
Kazuo Ishiguro has spoken of the importance of avoiding word play and allusion to make things easy for the translator. Scandinavian writers I know tell me they avoid character names that would be difficult for an English reader.
If culture-specific clutter and linguistic virtuosity have become impediments, other strategies are seen positively: the deployment of highly visible tropes immediately recognizable as “literary” and “imaginative,” analogous to the wearisome lingua franca of special effects in contemporary cinema, and the foregrounding of a political sensibility that places the author among those “working for world peace.” So the overstated fantasy devices of a Rushdie or a Pamuk always go hand in hand with a certain liberal position
What seems doomed to disappear, or at least to risk neglect, is the kind of work that revels in the subtle nuances of its own language and literary cultureRead more at blogs.nybooks.com
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