When it comes to writing a text what I am trying to do is to move everything forward at the same time. That is plot, setting and character have to evolve together, not one after the other. This is especially important at the beginning of a book where you are trying to draw a reader into your world. The writer must give them as little excuse (or time) to slip away as possible. If a reader feels they are putting in too much time on stormy weather, baroque architecture or rocky escarpments their mind can wander. If you go into dense characterization or, worse, heavy back story, you will hear the thunder of readers hooves moving off to new pastures. I reckon you have a maximum of ten pages in which to position your central character in his/her life with friends, family and relationships, in an atmospheric setting with a plot up and running. You can (partially) fail on the first two counts but you must not fail with plot.
read all his thoughts here
(Hat-tip: The Rap Sheet)
The argument that America’s presence in Indochina was dangerous had a long pedigree. In 1955, long before the United States had entered the war, Graham Greene wrote a novel called, “The Quiet American.” It was set in Saigon, and the main character was a young government agent named Alden Pyle. He was a symbol of American purpose and patriotism — and dangerous naivete. Another character describes Alden this way: “I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.”
After America entered the Vietnam War, the Graham Greene argument gathered some steam. As a matter of fact, many argued that if we pulled out there would be no consequences for the Vietnamese people.
In 1972, one antiwar senator put it this way: “What earthly difference does it make to nomadic tribes or uneducated subsistence farmers in Vietnam or Cambodia or Laos, whether they have a military dictator, a royal prince or a socialist commissar in some distant capital that they’ve never seen and may never heard of?”—George W. Bush, speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention
just went live. It’s a nice piece, and I think Jeff did a great job. How does one boil down an hour’s worth of a rambling author into something that makes sense? You get Jeff Salamon on the job.
I’m surprised that he got the sequence of bio-materials correct. As I read some sentences, I kept predicting a flub of some sort. None existed. And as a writer myself, I appreciate how he constructed the piece, beginning and ending with a quote, so it starts & stops on a dime.
But no matter how good it is, I think one is probably always surprised by how an interview sits on the page. For example, I kind of forgot that I’d told a lot about my personal life, some details of which haven’t made it out to readers of this blog, or some old friends I need to get around to emailing. And the line about Austin friends wasting their talent on the altar of dope smoking—what I meant was that it became too easy for friends to fall into the wake, work, bake, sleep lifestyle, leaving little-to-no time for their paintings, music, etc. Given the talent of the people I’m thinking of, that was more of a crime than the actual illegality of the pot-smoking.
And of course there’s the opening quote, which a Romanian site has pointed to within minutes of this post…well, yeah. I did say that. I also said that this was how I saw it in 1999, and from what I’d heard things were looking up there these days.
Jeff lamented to me that he didn’t have enough space to deal with the books themselves in much depth, and had to focus on bio, but I think the result’s quite nice, and I’m pleased to add it to my clippings.
(Originally posted at the Contemporary Nomad)
Over at Collected Miscellany, true to his word, Mr. Holtsberry has read them all once again, reached the conclusion, and returned to report on his adventures.
… Victory Square is an exciting and thought provoking fictional portrayal of the historic events of 1989. It is both a suspenseful espionage thriller with enough twists and turns - and surprises and betrayals - to keep you frantically turning the pages and an insightful meditation on the corruption and compromise that comes with totalitarianism; and the difficult personal choices such a system involves.
Olen Steinhauer has brought this series to a successful conclusion and should add to his deserved high reputation among critics. If you haven’t yet discovered this gem of a series, I can’t recommend them enough. Anyone with an interest in the Cold War would be foolish to miss out, but they are much more than simply Cold War spy books. Let’s hope that this final book helps get that message out.
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In many ways, Paley wasn’t a typical American writer. Her characters did not suffer “identity crises.” Instead of living on the road, they stayed home, in Greenwich Village. They discussed politics, dared to take sides and belonged to clubs anxious to have them as members.
“People talk of alienation and so forth,” she said in a 1994 interview with The Associated Press. “I don’t feel that. I feel angry at certain things, but I don’t feel alienated from it. I feel disgusted with it, or mad, but I don’t feel I’m not in it.”
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Paley’s fiction set an easy, informal tone, but was developed out of weeks and months of careful refinement, all sentences read aloud before being committed to paper. Many stories were not so much “stories” as conversations overheard, with fitting titles such as “Listening” and “Talking.”
Periodically, Foreign Policy magazine produces what it calls the Terrorism Index, a poll of “more than 100 of America’s most respected foreign-policy experts”. It’s an interesting project, if only to note the movement of confidence over the years. Here’s a link to the third such Index, which, over ten pages, gets pretty detailed, while suggesting that things are only getting bleaker.
(Originally posted at the Contemporary Nomad)
A quick non-me subject just arrived. You may remember that last year, a freak hurricane descended on Budapest during the St Stephen’s day festivities. Remarkably, it is now again St. Stephen’s day, and another freak storm has landed, cutting off our satellite TV, hailing, and brutalizing the trees in our garden. What th’?
(Originally posted at the Contemporary Nomad)
(I’ll do some non-my-book posts soon, but right now that’s all I’ve got.)
Victory Square
Truth is, I’d meant to actually print up the book in a limited edition to send to supportive reviewers and give away to readers, but the intersection of poverty and life put an end to that. But putting it up as an e-book was a fine enough fallback plan.
The second extra I put up is textual. As plenty of you well know, Victory Square started life as a 1000-page book called Falling Sickness, and 400 were written before the plans were changed. It includes the image to the left (the fictional local car that, in the original book, was going to play a central role) and about 95 pages of excerpts. Never know who might be interested in those. And anyway, I didn’t write those pages thinking they’d be shoved into the back of my computer for eternity.
(Follow the images for links.)
With still another day to go until the book’s release, Victory Square has gotten a couple more notices. First, in Canada’s Chronicle Herald, Paul Fiander includes the book in a list of upcoming titles, where in a brief write-up he says,
For some reason, the writing talents of Steinhauer have not been well publicized. Victory Square is the fifth in this brilliant series set in Eastern Europe just after the Second World War…
Los Angeles Timesthe book gets lots of space
It would be a disservice to slot this particular series of books into the “spy fiction” genre, if only because so often spy fiction concentrates on a comfortable pastiche of heroes and neither the reality of the times nor the sense of consequence that shines through Steinhauer’s clipped, economical prose.
When one realizes that, at any given time, one-fifth of the country’s populace — the real People’s Militia of Emil Brod — was engaged in spying on one another, the romance of the spy novel fades into insignificance. This banality of evil rarely offers closure, because its appearance is so normal and its normalcy is inherently rationalized.
Steinhauer offers a concrete end to the sins of the past, but he’s too shrewd a writer to communicate anything other than this end as a necessary fiction. That’s the luxury of fiction, historical or otherwise: The ink ends on the final page, but the effects of these real-life events travel onward for many decades, the consequences of which only time will tell.