It grieves me that he will have no more stories for us.

The publishing industry has traditionally produced different editions of texts in order to market them to different kinds of customers, from lightly annotated popular editions to help readers with places, names, archaic terms, and unusual language, to heavily annotated academic editions that come complete with relevant historical material, critical essays, chronologies, bibliographies, and every other textual apparatus imaginable.  These editions are, of course, limited by the number of customers willing to buy them, so they tend to include mostly the major texts, and they tend to be edited by scholars who are more or less experts in their fields.  Texts that are not commercially viable or that are edited by people who are not experts in their fields are understandably left unpublished.

However, publish-on-demand style websites like Blurb or Lulu or Xlibris, among many others, now make it possible, at least in theory, for people to make their own editions of public domain texts quite easily.  The texts themselves are readily available from sites like Project Gutenberg and Digital Book Index, and they can be simply copied and edited and published as new editions with the tools provided by the publishing sites.  The cost is nil, except to have the new edition printed, and the result is an edition that meets the precise needs of the one who edited it.

The most obvious users of personal editions would be teachers.  In fact, the idea first occurred to me when I tried and failed to find a decent academic edition of G. K. Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill.  How hard would it be, I reasoned, to lift the text from Project Gutenberg and add my own introduction and notes specifically for my class?  As I thought about this, I also realized how easy it would be to make course specific collections of essays or short stories, so that I would always have exactly the texts that I wanted and not have to bother paying for anthologies that restricted my choices and never had the texts I really wanted anyway.  I am at the moment working on some of these kinds of ideas.

There are other less obvious uses for personal editions, however.  For example, I might make notes directly into a digital copy as I am reading it and include appendices of anything that it prompts me to write, so that I can publish a very intimate edition of the text.  A group of friends might read a text together and compile their responses into an edition.  A conference on a text might collect the papers that were presented and gather them into an edition.  Wherever critical or scholarly work on a text takes place, in other words, it should be possible to gather that work together and to create an edition of the original text that includes this work.

Of course, these editions would not often be interesting to anyone who was not directly involved in their production.  An edition prepared for my class or myself or my friends or my conference will likely only be interesting to my class or myself or my friends or my conference, but just because something is only locally valuable does not necessarily mean that it is less valuable.  In fact, for me, the one involved in the production of these editions, personalized texts of this sort might very well be an invaluable record of my intellectual practice through my teaching, studying, and discussion with others.  Their interest to third parties would hardly be relevant.

On the other hand, by publishing personal editions publically rather than just making notes privately, it becomes possible that someone just might find the personal edition useful and be able to access it.    As a teacher, I might be able to find an edition of The Napoleon of Notting Hill or a collection of Renaissance literary criticism that is in fact useful to me, because someone else has taken the time and the energy to make it.  As a reader, I might be able to find an edition with a style of notation and commentary that is particularly conducive to me, because someone has taken the time and energy to make it publically available.

So, there you have it: my idea.  Let me know if you think it has merit.

“What are you reading?” I asked him, because I always ask people this, even if I’ve already seen what they’re reading.  I like to give them the chance to say it out loud, to confess it with their own lips.

“It’s Bolano’s 2666,” he answered.  He said this quietly, only flicking his eyes away from the book for the barest of moments, annoyed, then hunched down with his brown corduroy jacket up around his neck.

“What do you think of it?” I persisted.  I still hadn’t ordered anything, and the bartender hovered across the bar from me, but I wouldn’t meet his eyes, wouldn’t give him the chance to ask me if I needed anything.  I turned my back to the bar to avoid him.

The reader looked up this time, set the book on the bar, open, hard covers spread, without its dust jacket.  “Are you really asking,” he said gravely, “or are you just making small talk, because if you’re just making small talk, I’ll probably punch you in the mouth.”

His eyes were dark and round and something else, speckled maybe, and I saw that he meant it, and I thought, “This guy reads for real,” and I wanted to talk to him even more.  “I really want to know,” I assured him, and I tried to sound as sincere as I could, because I’ve read 2666 twice now, and I love that book, and I’m always trying to get people to read it, so I really did want to know.

“Fine,” he said, gripping the lapels of his jacket like a child reciting a presidential speech, “let’s just start by saying it’s the greatest novel written by anyone in any language in at least a quarter century.”

“Good,” I answered, “as long as we don’t end there, I think that’s good.”

1) It is a wonderful novel, well-crafted, and well-deserving of both close attention and repeated reading, so do read it, all of you;

2) Someone (not me, but someone, probably with more time and energy) needs to think through the novel in relation both to the Ariadne myth and to the ancient Jewish account of the Holy of Holies, in relation to Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever; and in relation to Franz Kafka’s depiction of bureaucracy, though perhaps not all at the same time.

I apologize for saying so little, but if I were to say more, I might never stop.

Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn – This book has trouble deciding whether it wants to be a fairytale or a fantasy novel.  It has many elements of a good fairytale, and it sometimes approaches the sensibility of a good fairytale, but it is never quite able to attain to this level, always slipping back into mere fantasy.  I quite enjoyed the book as a whole, but it could have been and almost was something very much better.

Peter S. Beagle’s Giant Bones – These stories are not fairytales and make no claim to be.  They have too much detail, too much reality, and too little of the sense of nowhere and neverwhere that is necessary to fairytales.  One of the stories, “Choushi-wai’s Story”, is structured very much as a fairytale, and it may even have become a fairytale had it been written by another hand, but it too has a sense of time and place that prevents is from attaining to a fairytale properly.  This is not a failing of the book, of course, because it never sets out to be anything but anything but a collection of fantasy stories, but I was hoping for more when it was recommended to me.

Joan Aiken’s The Complete Armitage Stories – I have been told by many people on many occasions that I should read the work of Joan Aiken, and this was my first of her books.  Unfortunately, it does not live up to expectations.  The stories are simply too ridiculous.  I like fantastical stories, true, and these stories are certainly that, but they lack the gravity that I find so essential to fairytales and other tales of this type.  It is not that I object to a little silliness or humour, but the effect of a good fairytale, on the whole, must be of a certain seriousness and propriety, and the Armitage stories are silliness, pure and simple.  They amuse, but there is nothing really true in them.  I could not even finish the book.

Joan Aiken’s The Wolves of Willoughby Chase -  Despite my disappointment with the Armitage stories, I decided to give Aiken a second chance and to read her most famous work, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, and I was much better pleased.  I did find it a bit odd that the wolves, which give the book its title, and which play such a large role in the first chapters of the story, and which are distinguished by being the only obviously fantastical element of the novel, disappear completely after the first half of the book, never to return.  It is as if Aiken grew bored of them or could not figure how to work them into her conclusion and so left this seemingly central motif entirely unresolved.  Even so, the pace is good, and the story is quite charming, telling a tale of unfortunate children that is very much preferable to some other more recent attempts that I could mention.

E. Nesbitt’s The Magic World -  Nesbitt’s stories often approach and occasionally even attain the sensibility of a true fairytale.  They are generally too moralistic, I confess, and they are so very properly British that they will sometimes be unintentionally amusing to the modern reader, but I like many of them anyway.  There are many of them that I will share with my children.

Steve Augarde’s The Touchstone Trilogy -  These novels have much to recommend them.  The plot is interesting, and the characters are engaging.  The second of them, Celandine, does fall into an English public school novel for a time, which can happen in any British novel of any genre at any time apparently, since the British seem to delight in nothing more than to share the horror of their school days, but the story is otherwise very enjoyable.  Augarde manages to avoid the standard representation of fairies as delicate and dainty flower spirits, choosing instead to portray the little people as exactly that, as smaller people, and I count this as a strong point in his favour.  The book as a whole is pleasing, even to someone like me, who is twenty years older than the intended audience.

Paul Glennon’s Bookweird -  The concept of this novel, where a boy begins stumbling into the stories of his books by eating their pages, is interesting in its way, but I would not call its application a success.  The various stories that the boy enters are represented too briefly to make them very compelling, and they are written in the styles appropriate to their genres, so the prose often takes on the faults of the sources it is emulating.  I do not much enjoy reading genre animal fantasies or genre horse novels or genre murder mysteries, so being dropped into these kinds of stories one after the other, however briefly, does not make great reading for me, and the book has little else to it.  There is, of course, a sequel, and it is, of course, called Bookweirder, but I doubt very much that I will read it.

First, both stories centre around a small community that is terrorized by a monster who lives in the surrounding wilderness: Whoville by the Grinch and Heorot by Grendel.  This in itself is perhaps not very remarkable, not considering the vast number of other stories that are also structured in this way, and not considering the many historical and mythological and poetical reasons that make this plot structure narratively compelling.

Where the Grinch and Grendel are really similar, however, is in their reasons for attacking their nearby communities.  Neither are motivated be greed or revenge or instinct or even hunger.  Both are motivated solely by anger at the sounds of happiness that they hear in the communities from which they are excluded.  Grendel is enraged by the revelry in Heorot, and the Grinch is similarly unable to tolerate the singing down in Whoville.

The two monsters are not just angered because there are others who are perhaps happier than they are, nor just because there is happiness from which they have been excluded.  They are angered because the others who are happier than they are have had the temerity to make their happiness loudly and vocally public.  This is the crime for which the two communities are punished, the crime of proclaiming their happiness, and in this sense at least, these two very different stories are quite similar.

I am not sure what conclusions we might draw from this parallel, but it is exactly the sort of textual connection that I cannot resist marking, so I will simply mark it and leave the rest of you to make of it what you can.

It is in this sense that I can truly call myself a man of one woman. I am not sure that I have resources of spirit or psychological virtuosity beyond the common, but I have indeed found a woman of extraordinary quality, a woman of such quality that my life seems always to have been bound up in hers, always seems to have been dedicated to hers, as long as I have been with her. It is not only that we are well suited to each other or that we relate well with each other or that we are commited to each other, though all of these things are true as well. It is that she is an extraorinary woman, in every sense that I can imagine, and she creates a desire in me to be an extraordinary man, a man who is truly of one woman.

The passage begins with Hemingway describing how he has been so focused on tracking the big game that he has failed really to notice the local birds in the way that his wife has.  He says, “I realized I had only paid attention to the predators, the scavengers, and the birds that were good to eat and the birds that had to do with hunting.  Then as I thought of which birds I did notice there came such a great long list of them that I did not feel quite as bad but I resolved to watch the birds around our camp more and to ask Mary all about the ones I did not know, and most of all, to really see them and not look past them.”  This is a nice passage all in itself, with its exhortation really to see and not look past things, but he then goes on to say, “This looking and not seeing things is a great sin.”

This phrase, I think, sums up very nicely what Dave has described in his own writing on the act of seeing, and I think that Dave would agree with his next comment as well, that “we do not deserve to live in the world if we do not see it.”

Mario Vargas Llosa’s In Praise of the Stepmother and The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto – When Llosa won the Nobel Prize for Literature this year, I had never heard his name, so I noted it as one of the many glaring gaps in my literary education and promptly went to my local bookshops to see if they had any of his books.  I eventually found two: In Praise of the Stepmother and  The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, but they were nothing like what I expected.   All of the discussion I had heard about Llosa had emphasized the deeply political nature of his work, but these two little novels are far more erotic than political.  Both are extended reflections on ideas of fantasy and fulfillment, fetish and taboo, innocence and seduction, and they are both certainly the work of a very talented writer, but I was expecting something very different, and I intend to see if I can find some of his other works as well.

Robertson Davies’ The Deptford Trilogy – I remember enjoying these books when I was in highschool, but I enjoyed them even more on my second reading.  Davies writes books that combine mythology with realism in marvelous ways, and the stories of his characters embody this ability, being told and retold so that fact and myth fold inextricably into one another.  There are some bits of each novel, especially the second, that I could very easily do without, but the effect of the novels are not greatly diminished by these narrative lapses, and I would rank them as highly as any Canadian novels I have ever read.

Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity – The narrative voice of this novel is so engaging and so amusing that it almost makes up for the story’s lack of substance.  Beneath the narrator’s banter, however, there is really only a self-absorbed, faintly neurotic, mostly aimless, middle-aged, otherwise average guy, and the climax of the book is really only his realization that he is indeed a self-absorbed, faintly neurotic, mostly aimless, middle-aged, otherwise average guy, which is rather less than earth-shattering.  Now, it is still a very amusing book, but unless you need help learning that you should probably give people the music they like rather than the music you like, it is not a very profound book.  I would save it for reading on the bus or on the toilet or any other place where you will not likely have the chance to think about it too deeply.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s I Will Marry When I Want – Ngugi wa Thiong’o was a finalist for this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature, and another writer whose name I had never heard before.  Ngugi is Kenyan, and so I asked a Kenyan friend of mine about him, only to discover that this friend had met Ngugi personally, had traveled with Ngugi’s daughter when she came to Canada, and had acted in one of Ngugi’s plays, I Will Mary When I Want, which he was then kind enough to lend me.  The story takes place in Kenya during the rule of dictator Daniel arap Moi, and it explores the injustices that remained in Kenyan society as a result of colonization and that were being retrenched by the new Kenyan upper-class.  It is a simple story, in many respects, but a powerful one, and I enjoyed it very much.

Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s – The Club Dumas – This is a book for which there is no ready genre.  It is a mystery, certainly, but it is also a literary homage to the person and the work of Alexandre Dumas, a kind of literary mystery, perhaps, so that its ideal reader would not be the traditional mystery aficionado (who might understandably be bored by the many allusions to the serial novel culture of France in the 1800s), nor the traditional reader of literature (who might understandably be critical of its many generic elements), but the unabashed lover of story in its many guises, generic and literary both, the kind of reader who made Dumas so popular in the first place.   The novel has its faults, to be sure, and I would myself have separated its two plots into independent novels, but it is a good read nevertheless, one of those rare books that stimulates the mind and the imagination in equal measure.

George Herbert’s The English Works – I took this book off the shelf, where it had been sitting since university, mostly because Dave kept telling me how big an influence Herbert had been on him when he was younger.  Try as I might, however, I was unable really to love Herbert.  His poems, however sincere, and I do think that they are very sincere, seem too morally obvious to me, too contrived.  They seem too much like exercises that he had set for himself and too little like true feeling.  I will withhold any final judgment until Dave and I can speak further, but I am not hopeful that I will ever appreciate Herbert in the way that he does.

Ernest Hemingway’s True at First Light – This was, by complete coincidence, the second book set in Kenya that I read in less than a month.  After going thirty years and change without reading anything at all set in that country, I feel that the word ‘coincidence’ is almost inadequate here, but it will have to do.  The novel, based more or less on Hemingway’s experiences as an unofficial game warden in Kenya, is set decades earlier than Ngugi’s I Will Mary When I Want, during the early stages of the Mau Mau uprising against the British, sometime about 1953.  It has all the vivid simplicity of image for which Hemingway is justly known, but there is a greater easiness about it than some of his other work, a sense of something like contentment.  This may be because it remained unfinished at his death and was edited for publication by his son Patrick, but whatever the reason, it has a decidedly different quality about it than his other work, and it makes a truly interesting addition to Hemingway’s body of work.

The story is told by many of these characters at one point or another, taking on their perspectives for a time, lengthy or short, but the voice that it inhabits most often is that of Clumly, a small town Police Chief who is struggling to maintain a life that is inexplicably deteriorating around him.  His marriage is quietly withering.  His job is increasingly dominated by paperwork that he can never bring himself to do and by budgetary and procedural restrains that keep him from being able to police the town as he used to do.  He is at odds over these things with the mayor and the townspeople and even his own officers.  He is filled with doubts and uncertainties, paralyzed, unable to do even the things that seem simplest and most obvious.

This personal malaise is brought to a crisis by the Sunlight Man, a mysterious vagrant who is arrested for spray painting the word ‘LOVE’ on a city street.  The Sunlight Man is a character of the highest order, an immense and impssible character, like Dostoyevsky’s Mishkin or Melville’s Ahab.  He is both saintly and devilish, brutally sane and dramatically mad, an embodiment of the moral impulse that has been driven by our modern culture past the thresholds of both logic and feeling.  He is the desire for justice and truth made schizoid or even psychotic by the relentless injustice and deception of the world.  Clumly sees something strangely familiar in him, the key to the questions of his life, and the novel revolves around Clumly’s attempts to understand his own life by finally understanding who or what the Sunlight Man really is.

This is not the sort of book where mysteries become solved, however, not in the ways that really matter.  While the identity and the motivations of the Sunlight Man are eventually made clear, the deeper questions that his character poses remain unsolved.  The Sunlight Man might be said to have accomplished his aims before he is killed, but these aims are ethically ambiguous at best, and Clumly is never able to find satisfying answers to the questions of his life, not unless his final speech of the novel arrives at conclusions that I am not able to decipher.  Instead, Gardner leaves the lives of his characters as complex and ambiguous and unresolved as he found them, and he leaves his readers in this place also, contemplating the intricacies and the ambiguities of lives that strive to be what they ought to be in a world that often seems at odds with their purposes.

It is this, I think that makes the novel so compelling: we recognize ourselves, not in the specificity of its characters perhaps, but in their complexities of their humanity.  We recognize their striving and their longing and their confusion, and we discover ourselves among them, for better or for worse.