I read in the magazineThe New Yorker about a book that has not yet gone on sale but already tempts me enough to sign up for the waiting list; is called Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel (“Stranger than fiction: the lives of the 20th century novel”) and basically, from what the note says The New Yorkerasks if there is such a thing as the 20th century novel. According to what he also says, the book answers yes, and that the novel more or less dies with the 20th century: for Edwin Frank, author of the aforementioned book and the magazine’s collection of classics New York Review of Booksthe 20th century is the one that takes the novel to its revolutionary stage; It is the authors of this era who complete the path that led the novel from entertainment to art, sometimes producing almost illegible novels, but always brave. This same century, says Frank, exhausts the novel. Frank says he was inspired, for this book he wrote, by The eternal noisemusic critic Alex Ross’s excellent essay on 20th century music. To me, who read several times The eternal noise and I consider it one of my favorite essays, the data helps me understand where his hypothesis is going. I don’t think novels are dead, any more than I think academic music is dead, but what he means is clear to me: the cultural relevance of a contemporary composer today is incomparable to that of Shostakovich. No novelist today, either, is going to have a cultural weight that comes close to that of Philip Roth or Gabriel García Márquez a few decades ago. One can love music and literature, but all that is undeniable. And it is probably just as undeniable that the vitality of an art form is linked, albeit in indirect ways, to its place in the culture of its time. It is not that it is not possible today to write an excellent novel or a chamber piece; but the conditions for these works to be vibrant and dialogue with the present are less in place than fifty years ago.
Louis Menand, the author of the note The New Yorkerdevelops a relativist thesis that I don’t quite understand if it is his own or if he takes it from the book (we will know after November 19): the novel effectively no longer fulfills the role it played in the 19th century nor the one it played in the 20th century. . That space, says Menand, has been occupied today by series: people no longer ask you what you are reading, but what you are watching. Menand wonders, then, how this influences the novels of the 21st century; if, for example, the novels of the 21st century are already written thinking about the sale of audiovisual rights (and are written, then, to “be filmable”). Personally, I think the issue is more complex, or more triangular: surely many fictions are already written with the film adaptation on the horizon, at a more or less conscious level, but I think that this way of thinking is missing an edge. The real issue, it seems to me, is that the novels that become successful are generally the ones that most resemble the experience of watching a movie or a series: short, visual, built around characters that one can follow with love or hate. Ana Karenina It is a novel that has been adapted many times, but reading it bears little resemblance to the experience of watching a series or a movie. The central plot has a lot of that, but you have to eat pages and pages of unintelligible discussions about running a field to get to it; It’s hardly an editor who wouldn’t cut out those crazy things today if he thought you had a book on your hands. best seller (If you are lucky enough to not have it, however, you can put everything you want). There are exceptions to what I say; I wrote last week about Fortuna, by Hernán Díaz, a series that has a lot of “adaptability” (and surely already has its rights sold), but also works with some very purely “textual” tools that shine precisely because it is a novel . I mean, with all this: it’s not just that the writers have their minds formatted by the series; Perhaps more important is the fact that audiences have them, and then, of all the novels that are published each year, they massively choose those, the most “visual” of all, to turn them into modest successes.
#supposed #novels
