would have been so much easier to write, «One morning, in the Lecco area . . . » Well, so it goes: not everybody has the narrative gift, and even fewer have the ability to write in good Italian.
Still, the book is not totally without merit. But I warn you: it would take forever to sell out a first printing.
Proust, Marcel,
A la recherché
du temps perduThis is undoubtedly a serious work, perhaps too long, but as a paperback series it could sell.
But it won’t do as is. It needs serious editing. For example, the punctuation has to be redone. The sentences are too labored; some take up a whole
page. With plenty of good in-house work, reducing each sentence to a maximum of two or three lines, breaking up paragraphs, indenting more often, the book would be enormously improved.
If the author doesn’t agree, then forget it. As it stands, the book is too-what’s the word?-asthmatic.
Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Practical Reason
I asked Susan to take a look at this, and she tells me that after Barthes there’s no point translating this Kant. In any case, I glanced at it myself. A reasonably short book on morality could fit nicely into our philosophy series, and might even be adopted by some universities. But the German publisher says that if we take this one, we have to commit ourselves not only to the author’s previous book, which is an immense thing in at least two volumes, but also to the one he is working on now, about art or about judgment, I’m not sure which. All three books have more or less the same title, so they would have to be sold boxed (and at a price no reader could afford); otherwise bookshop browsers would mistake one for the other and think, «I’ve already read this.» Remember the Summa of that Dominican? We began to translate it, and then we had to pass the rights on to Sheed and Ward because it ran way over budget.
There’s another problem. The German agent tells me that we would also have to publish the minor works of this Kant, a whole pile of stuff including something about astronomy. Day before yesterday I tried to phone him directly in Koenigsberg, to see if we could do just one book, but the cleaning woman said the master was out and I should never call between five and six because that’s when he takes his walk, or between three and four because that’s nap time, and so on. I would advise against getting involved with a man like this: we’ll end up with a mountain of his books in the warehouse.
Kafka, Franz, The Trial
Nice little book. A thriller with some Hitchcock touches. The final murder, for example. It could have an audience.
But apparently the author wrote under a regime with heavy censorship. Otherwise, why all these vague references, this trick of not giving names to people or places? And why is the protagonist being put on trial? If we clarify these points and make the setting more concrete (facts are needed: facts, facts, facts), then the action will be easier to follow and suspense is assured.
These young writers believe they can be «poetic» by saying «a man» instead of «Mr. So-and-so in such-and-such a city.» Genuine writing has to keep in mind the old newspaper man’s five questions: Who? What? When? Where? Why? If we can have a free hand with editing, I’d say buy it. If not, not.
Joyce, James, Finnegans Wake
Please, tell the office manager to be more careful when he sends books out to be read. I’m the English language reader, and you’ve sent me a book written in some other, godforsaken language. I’m returning it under separate cover.
1972
Esquisse d’un nouveau chat
Count six paces from the corner of the room to the table. From the table to the rear wall, five paces. There There is an open door opposite the table. From the door to your corner, six paces. If you look ahead, your gaze crossing the room diagonally toward the opposite corner, when you are crouched against the wall, your mask to the room, your curved tail brushing both walls where they meet to form the corner, you will then see, six paces before you, at the level of your eyes, a cylindrical form, shiny, dark brown, carved in a series of fine furrows with a whitish line in the cleft.
A peeling surface about five centimeters from the ground spreads in an irregular circumference, tending to an im-precise polygon, its maximum diameter six centimeters. It has a base, also whitish, but a dimmer white than that of the furrows, as if the dust had settled there for a longer period and at a greater rate over the days or months, centuries or millennia.
Over the peeling surface the cylinder rises, its shiny brown still marked by furrows, until, at a median height of one hundred twenty centimeters from the ground, it ends, surmounted by a much larger form, apparently rectangular, although your eye, beholding the object along the diagonal that runs from your corner to the corner opposite, sees it as a rhomboid. And now, extending your field of vision, you discern three other cylindrical bodies arranged in symmetry with one another and all symmetrical with respect to the first, so that they seem the three vertices of another rhomboid, and therefore if they all support, as you believe they do, the large rectangular object at one hundred twenty centimeters from the ground, they are probably positioned also at the four corners of a perfect rectangle.
Your gaze does not see precisely what is resting on the rectangular surface. From it, in your direction, a reddish mass protrudes, its entire width surrounded by a whitish material. The reddish mass rests on a yellow, wrinkled sheet of paper dotted with red at several points, as if the mass were something live that has left part of its vital humor on that rough yellow surface.
You, who have constantly before your pupil the filiform and confused curtain of the hairs of your brow, which descend to protect the almond-shaped eyeball, and, farther, as if in perspective, the imperceptibly vibrating long whiskers, now suddenly and obliquely see beneath your nose a red and wrinkled mobile surface, a brighter red than the red of the mass that rests on the rectangle.
Now you lick your whiskers at the lure of the large reddish mass; now the reddish mass, prompted by your gaze, lets fall drops of humoral liquid on the crinkly yellow sheet; now both you and the reddish mass participate in a reciprocal attraction. It is futile for you to be hypocritical: once again you are staring at the meat on the table.
So you are about to make a leap that will enable you to take possession of the meat. From the epicnter of your leap to the surface of the table is six paces; but if you turn your gaze again to the table leg, you will now see, beside it, two other tubular surfaces also brown but less solid in appearance, more fluctuating. Now you become aware of the presence of a complementary entity that is not the table and not the meat. Below this entity you note at ground level a pair of vaguely ovoid brown shapes, the upper surface breached by a broad gap , whose lips are connected by a pattern of strings, also brown. Now you know him. He is beside the table, he is beside the meat. You do not leap.
Y QU ask yourself if you have not been in this situation once before, and if you have not witnessed a similar scene in the large picture that decorates the wall opposite the table. The picture shows a crowded tavern with a child in the corner; in the center there is a table with a big piece of meat on it, and beside the table the figure -of a soldier is visible, erect,
wearing loose, flapping trousers and brown shoes. In the far corner a cat can be seen preparing to leap.
If you take a closer look at the picture, you will discern, in the cat’s pupil, the image of an almost empty room, in whose center stands a table with cylindrical legs, and on it is a large piece of meat on a sheet of butcher’s paper, yellow and rough, stained here and there with the meat’s bloody traces. There is no one beside the table.
Suddenly the cat that appears in the clear reflection of the pupil of the cat in the picture makes a leap toward the meat; but at the same time the man beside the table in the picture grabs at the cat, and now you do not know if the cat that flees is the cat reflected in the pupil of the cat in the picture or if, instead, it is the cat in the picture. Probably it is you, who now flee with the meat in your outh after you have made the leap. The one chasing you
