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Speaking of reissues, two of Peter Handke's books have just appeared in the handsome NYRB format: Short Letter, Long Farewell, with an introduction by Greil Marcus, and Slow Homecoming, introduced by Benjamin Kunkel (both translated from the German by the late Ralph Manheim). The first of these is among other things a tribute to Raymond Chandler (the title alludes to Chandler's The Long Goodbye). If you haven't read Handke, these two would make an excellent introduction. (And if you have—well, these are such lovely little books, you should pick them up anyway.)
Not exactly a reissue is In the First Circle, a new translation of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novel, now given the title he intended, and including sections that were cut in order to get the book published in the 1960s. I'm jumping the gun on this—it won't be out until October— but I want you to have it in the back of your mind or in your PDA or wherever you store such vital information. This has always been my favorite among Solzhenitsyn's novels. I love the very conception of the book, its setting, the camaraderie of the zeks (that above all), the whole cast of extraordinary characters, the cross-cutting narrative, the pithy proverbs, the savage irony, the astonishing portrait of Stalin.
And on the theme of translation, look for David Skeel's review (later this year) of Songbook: The Selected Songs of Umberto Saba, a beautifully produced volume from Yale University Press, and Love Lessons: Selected Poems of Alda Merini, from Princeton University Press. Both books are bilingual. (The poet Susan Stewart, who translated the Merini poems, has a very fine review of the Saba volume in the April 6 issue of The Nation.) I don't know whether these books are the result of benefactions, but however they came about, I'm very grateful.
If you're like me, you'll have some crime fiction handy too. Michael Connelly's latest, The Scarecrow, is due out on May 26, meaning that I haven't seen it yet as I write. It features newspaperman Jack McEvoy, the protagonist of Connelly's 1996 novel The Poet. In an interview on his website about the new novel, Connelly is asked why he decided to make McEvoy a central character again:
Being a former newspaper reporter, I've watched in recent years as the newspaper economy has crumbled and newspapers have tried to figure out ways to deal with advertising and readers shifting to the Internet. Along the way, many people I worked with have lost their jobs to buyouts or layoffs. I am also a big fan of the television show The Wire. In its last season, the show explored in a secondary plot what was happening to the newspaper business. Watching that show made me want to take a shot at a story that would be a thriller first and a torch song for the newspaper business second.
McEvoy's old beat was in Denver—in The Poet, he was a reporter for the Rocky Mountain News. In the new novel, Jack's job at the Los Angeles Times is about to end. Even so, Connelly explains, it was hard for him to keep up with the pace of real-world events as he completed the novel:
As with any sort of downward spiral, the closer you get to the end, the tighter the circles become. In the writing process and thereafter, I kept hearing of things that were happening and had to try to get them into the story. The Times is meant to represent the entire business—all newspapers. So I might hear of something happening at one paper and I would incorporate it into my story of the Times.
But after the book was finished, the spiral continued. The day after I turned in the manuscript, the Times's parent company filed for bankruptcy. This necessitated several changes in the manuscript. Three days after the book was supposedly locked and ready to be printed, the Rocky Mountain News closed. This meant we had to unlock the book and make changes. Since then, the Times has announced plans to close more foreign bureaus this summer. Sadly, it goes on and on. In many ways, I wish the book weren't so timely, because what is making it timely is all of this bad news for newspapers.
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