{"id":14456,"date":"2016-05-20T08:06:43","date_gmt":"2016-05-20T12:06:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=14456"},"modified":"2016-05-20T08:14:58","modified_gmt":"2016-05-20T12:14:58","slug":"novelistic-sloppiness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/novelistic-sloppiness\/","title":{"rendered":"Novelistic Sloppiness"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"p1\"><a href=\"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?attachment_id=14460\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-14460\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-14460 lazyload\" data-src=\"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/51jMf5n-jOL._SX321_BO1204203200_.jpg\" alt=\"51jMf5n-jOL._SX321_BO1,204,203,200_\" width=\"323\" height=\"499\" data-srcset=\"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/51jMf5n-jOL._SX321_BO1204203200_.jpg 323w, https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/51jMf5n-jOL._SX321_BO1204203200_-194x300.jpg 194w\" data-sizes=\"(max-width: 323px) 100vw, 323px\" src=\"data:image\/svg+xml;base64,PHN2ZyB3aWR0aD0iMSIgaGVpZ2h0PSIxIiB4bWxucz0iaHR0cDovL3d3dy53My5vcmcvMjAwMC9zdmciPjwvc3ZnPg==\" style=\"--smush-placeholder-width: 323px; --smush-placeholder-aspect-ratio: 323\/499;\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span class=\"s1\">On my mind, this morning? Last night\u2019s irritation: I had walked into McNally\u00a0Jackson, my last (not least) favorite Manhattan bookshop, to browse new books &amp; came upon Max Frisch\u2019s <em>Montauk<\/em> (which I had reread twice in the last 6 months for a project I had been working on). Somewhat surprised that it had been reissued, I picked it up to see if their was any pressing reason for this. Well, there is a new introduction by novelist Jonathan Dee, so I casually started reading it. I never got to Dee\u2019s explanation of why it was thought useful to reissue this book now, if he actually gave one, as only a couple pages into the intro I came across a serious blunder: Dee explains that Frisch\u2019s book, besides the love affair with his US publisher\u2019s young publicity assistant, is a rumination on, among others, Frisch\u2019s recent horribly failed affair with Ingeborg Bachmann \u2014 whom he calls \u201cthe Swedish poet.\u201d Bachmann was of course Austrian, and, as anyone even half-educated in European literature knows, the major Austrian writer of the post-WW2 decades. Dee \u2014 notorious mainly as the gofer for George Plimpton at the Paris Review \u2014 will no doubt know of Thomas Bernhard and possibly Peter Handke. But Bachmann? A woman poet \u2014 &amp; thus clearly interesting only as the ex-girlfriend of the Swiss male novelist, so no need to even fact-check who she is. And yet, Bachmann (stopped writing poetry after her first two volumes were published)\u00a0left us a major prose ensemble\u00a0(the <em>Todesarten<\/em> project, including the novel <em>Malina<\/em>) highly admired by the likes of Thomas Bernhard, that surpasses Frisch&#8217;s staid, traditional, irony-clad middle of the road prose-works by a mile. I closed the book, put it back on the shelf &amp; walked away. Such sloppiness, such ignorance! Even a high-schooler with wikipedia could have fact-checked this \u2014 and the publisher (Tin House Books) should certainly have done so.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><a href=\"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?attachment_id=14459\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-14459\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-14459 lazyload\" data-src=\"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/Montauk-1-e1463745315491.jpg\" alt=\"Montauk\" width=\"500\" height=\"183\" src=\"data:image\/svg+xml;base64,PHN2ZyB3aWR0aD0iMSIgaGVpZ2h0PSIxIiB4bWxucz0iaHR0cDovL3d3dy53My5vcmcvMjAwMC9zdmciPjwvc3ZnPg==\" style=\"--smush-placeholder-width: 500px; --smush-placeholder-aspect-ratio: 500\/183;\" \/><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On my mind, this morning? Last night\u2019s irritation: I had walked into McNally\u00a0Jackson, my last (not least) favorite Manhattan bookshop, to browse new books &amp; came upon Max Frisch\u2019s Montauk (which I had reread&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64,1],"tags":[1794,1851,1850],"class_list":["post-14456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature","category-uncategorized","tag-ingeborg-bachmann","tag-jonathan-dee","tag-max-frisch"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14456"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14456\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14465,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14456\/revisions\/14465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}