Literary bites
Two renowned literary names are in the news again.
AN American university has made more than 27,000 images from the late Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s archive available online.
They include materials from all of his works of fiction, personal scrapbooks, a memoir, screenplays, and photographs.
The project was carried out by the Harry Ransom Center, the literary documentation service at the University of Texas, Austin.
It purchased the archives for US$2.2mil (RM9mil) in November 2014, a few months after the death of the Colombian novelist known for works such as One Hundred Years Of Solitude
(1967).
The archive can be searched in English and Spanish at the address hrc.utexas.edu.
Part of the archive has never been published, such as a 32-page text for the second volume of Garcia Marquez’s memoirs, which never saw the light of day.
“My mother, my brother and I were always committed to having my father’s archive reach the broadest possible audience,” Rodrigo Garcia, one of the author’s sons, said in a statement released on Tuesday.
“This project makes my father’s work more widely accessible to a global community of students and scholars.”
“Spanning more than a half century, the contents reflect Garcia Marquez’s energy and discipline and reveal an intimate view of his work, family, friendships and politics,” said Jullianne Ballou, the librarian who oversaw the 18-month project.
It covers about half of the Garcia Marquez personal archive. For now there are no plans to digitise the other half, the university said.
Talent rejected
The French writer Claude Simon (1913-2005), who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1985, would not be published today, according to an experiment conducted by one of his fans.
Writer Serge Volle sent 50 pages of Simon’s 1962 novel, The
Palace, set during the Spanish Civil War, to 19 French publishers. The verdict was damning: Twelve rejected it and seven didn’t even bother to reply.
One editor said that the book’s “endlessly long sentences completely lose the reader”, Volle told French public radio on Monday.
Nor did the book have “a real plot with well-drawn characters”, the rejection letter added.
Simon was considered one of the fathers of the “nouveau roman”, an avant-garde style from the 1950s that rejected plots, characters, and omniscient narrator central to the traditional novel in an attempt to reflect more faithfully the sometimes random nature of experience. He was notorious for his meandering prose, with sentences often going on for pages in his masterpiece The Georgics (1981).
Volle, 70, claimed the refusals showed the philistinism of modern publishing, which is “abandoning literary works that are not easy to read or that will not set sales records”.
Paraphrasing Marcel Proust (1871-1922), he said that you have to be already “famous to be published”.
“We are living in the era of the throwaway book,” he declared.
Volle refused to say who he had sent the extract to, but a number of major French publishers also rejected The Georgics four years before it helped Simon win the Nobel.