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Photo by Djflowerz.
I'm embarrassed to admit this, but ... I didn't know who Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio was prior to the announcement that he had won the Nobel Prize for literature. The descriptions of his work make him sound an awful lot like Steve Erickson to me, or maybe even Cormac McCarthy, at least the contemporary McCarthy, the man who wrote The Road. I'm sure some member of the Swedish literati will chide me for comparing Le Clezio to a couple of insular, pop-culture American writers, eh? In any case, I'm glad to know about him. After the bum rush on the bookstores for his work I'll go back in six months, pick up his novels, and read them (with some delight, I suspect).
Nobel Prize aside, we've got Missouri's splashiest literary event taking place this Saturday: The Big Read. I love that, unlike Swedish literary critics, it finds room under its tent for all kinds of book-lovers: kids, comic-book fans, poetry devotees and mystery novel addicts alike. I'm fully convinced that the omnivorous impulse is a healthy one, and it struck me a few years ago, while digging through kids' books in an attempt to buy a birthday present for my nephew, why people give up reading after they leave high school. There are just too many writers who abandon their sense of play, or fun, for the privilege of being Important, Serious and Tasteful. Which is why the biggest literary success of the 21st century - Harry Potter - has a fan base that spans the prepubescent to the postmenopausal. I love that this event blurs generational lines and realizes the power of good old fashioned things like story and character development, as well as a goofy sense of play. And it's saved me the trouble of having to establish a local chapter of The Society for the Abolition of the Idea That Dull Books are Good For Your Moral and Cultural Character, Not To Mention Your Conversational Skills at Highbrow Parties.
Some cool notes on The Big Read: our staff writer, Jeannette Cooperman will moderate author Adam Pituk's discussion of his book The Flood of 1993: Damned to Eternity, at the Maryville University Author Auditorium at Clayton High School at noon; at 11am at the UMSL Author's Tent, our frequent contributor, Byron Kerman, moderates David Sterry's presentation on how to sell your memoir. And who is the concluding keynote speaker? Freakin' Scott McClellan, who'll read from his new book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception. While St. Louis may not quite be the dead epicenter of American cultural and political life, between this and the Veep debates, it seems we're not as skewed afar from western civilization as we think!
One last literary note: Missouri-born novelist Charles Wright passed away this week. Though alcoholism cut his career short long before his death, he wrote three passionate, sorrowful books that should be read, reread, and remembered.—Stefene Russell
