Last Sunday I presented a talk and workshop to the Bondi Writers’ Group, in the Waverley Library theatrette. It was a great session with a lot of audience energy and participation, some of which led, serendipitously, to the production of story fragments that could definitely go further. Workshops are such artificial constructs, yet their intensity and immediacy can generate very interesting outcomes, and the opportunity for constructive feedback — in a managed framework — is almost unparalleled. Next week, I return to UTS, teaching my favourite: Theory and Creative Writing. I’m really looking forward to it.

A favourite of mine is Albert Camus’ The Outsider. Lucian Robinson’s Guardian review of a new translation (by Sandra Smith, Penguin Translated Texts) reminded me how much I loved it. It also reminded me just how important translation is. Two of the most …

… memorable lines in the book, and I assume many others, are presented subtly differently. For me the changes have enormous effect, and, if these are anything to go by, I have to read this new translation.

The first instance is actually the opening line of the novel. As Robinson says:

In Joseph Laredo’s terse, widely read 1982 translation, he renders the opening as: “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.” In Sandra Smith’s new translation, she inserts a possessive pronoun: “My mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know”, thereby restoring Camus’s protagonist, Meursault, to a dislocating state of shock rather than the cold indifference of Laredo’s version.

The insertion of those two letters, “my”, is clearly significant, and to miss that point is to miss, I suggest, the point of literature. There’s a reason why writers sweat over a sentence or a phrase, and why they argue like billy-o when an editor wants to change a single word (or even a comma to a semicolon). If literature is anything, it is precisely the arrangement, word by word, punctuation mark by punctuation mark, of every part of a manuscript; every detail matters, almost always.

So what is the effect of this change? For my money, it immediately paints the character in a more sympathetic light. The usage of the possessive pronoun, by clearly indicating possession, articulates connection and intimacy, and perhaps also loss. That effect only lasts for that short sentence, because the following ones reveal more about Mersault’s character. Nevertheless, for that sentence, absence of the pronoun achieves the reverse. “Mother” on its own, bare as it were, has always sounded to me like something from 1950s or earlier, Victorian even, but always cold and impersonal. It’s not that the dating per se is important (after all the book was originally published in 1942), it’s that the rather formal English has always sounded emotionally stunted, alienated and alienating to me.

Of course you could argue that therein lies one important attribute of the narrator’s character, but I wonder. I can’t comment until I’ve read the whole thing. Either way, it’ll certainly put the story in a new, and fascinating, light.

In the introduction, visible in the Amazon preview, Smith discusses this change and the other significant change she’s made. In her words:

The second instance appears at the very end of the book, where Camus writes: ‘je m’ouvrais pour la première fois à la tendre indifférence du monde‘ (‘I opened myself for the first time to the tender indifference of the world’). For some reason, tendre is rendered as ‘benign’ in most previous translations, a choice that fails to capture the paradoxical nuance of ‘tender’.

I cannot agree more with Smith. At first glance, using the apparently identical French word for the translation seems like a trick: surely there’s something hidden. Perhaps the French usage is subtly different? Obviously, previous translators, and Smith herself, have their reasons and justifications; all I’ll say is that the substitution of “tender” for “benign” makes a good deal of sense. Again, it seems to alter the relationship of the narrator to everything else, in this case to the universe itself. Again, the new translation makes that relationship more intimate, more bearable, more sympathetic; the original is cold, distant, arbitrary.

Perhaps this too lies at the heart of the novel: existentialism pits the individual against everything else, eschewing sentimentality, dependency, contingency. The existentialist is on his or her own. The world is separate.

I am highly motivated to read Smith’s translation. It seems to humanise the narrator, rendering him less clinically and more sympathetically. How then will the key scene, the murder on the beach, read? Can Smith’s translation achieve what the earlier ones have failed to do for me, to convince me that this was a real person, a human person, and not a philosophical stick figure?

In saying that, I am not implying that the book, in its original English translation, failed, even as a piece of writing: far from it. It’s a marvellous work, one that I read twice, almost committing to memory that final passage of Mersault’s as he waits in his cell for his final morning. But its literary value was always slightly elusive to me. I am certain that Smith’s translation will give me a new way to see the text. I can’t wait.

NB. I have to wait because the good folks at Penguin have elected to only release the wooden versions (hard and soft) of this translation. Of course they could put out the ebook, they just haven’t, yet. I assume they’re worried about cannibalising (the industry’s word) their print versions. I don’t blame them, but, man, it’s annoying. Oh well.

3G Keyboard	Nexus 7	iPad Mini	Paperwhite

I should say that I am looking here at e-reading only. If you want to consume a wider variety of media, the tablets are best. They’re fast and have a wider variety of uses. But thinking about reading … The iPad Mini is very impressive. It’s 10% lighter than the Nexus, and because the screen is bigger while the unit is actually thinner, it feels more than a tenth lighter. It’s an optical illusion, but we (humans) judge weight by surface area, rather than by volume. So a wide, thin thing “feels” lighter than a compact, solid thing. I am sure Apple thought carefully about this, and in my opinion, they got it right.

This thing is beautiful. It’s like holding a virtual book in your hands — just the page floats there — very pleasant. Not that I am buying a Mini just yet. While I found the screen perfectly adequate, others disagree and are hanging out for a high density display (“retina screen”). Yet that cNet review makes some excellent points, specifically that the wider dimension makes pages seem larger, and also that because all major e-book services can run on it, the unit is “the closest to a universal e-book reader”. I’ll definitely check out the iPad Mini 2 when it arrives in 2013.

The Nexus is an excellent and well-priced unit with a crisp if narrow screen, but of course the Kindle with its e-paper screen, is superior for actual reading. No headaches with e-paper. Plenty of headaches with any backlit screen.

Which brings us to the Kinde Paperwhite. It’s so called because there’s side lighting from small LEDs inside the case. They illuminate the screen pretty successfully, and they really bring up the quality of e-paper. Instead of that dull grey, the page is near-white, and fabulously bright. Coupled with a higher density screen, the unit looks very good indeed. Almost perfect.

Actually, it would be perfect if only they shipped to Australia! No doubt they will. They just have to get Christmas out of the way. While I am anxious about the touch screen — I find the positive feedback component of physical buttons more reliable, especially when I’m using the unit on the move — I can accept that the smaller overall size (since no keyboard required) is a very good thing. For my money, e-paper is infinitely superior for actually reading, and hanging out for the Paperwhite Kindle is the way to go.

Titles I’ve looked for over the years in electronic format are finally appearing. One such is The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot. There were the Selected and the Collected and the Four Quartets and of course The Wasteland, but not all in one volume. Now they are. Another is Proust’s mega-novel, In Search of Lost Time, which I started (in print) four years ago, and am still only a third of the way through now. When I decided to read it back then, I had the idea I’d pick up an e-reader … and I figured Proust would be a great opening choice.

Problem was, the only e-version I could find back then was this, from the Australian Gutenberg. And it was the original C. K. Scott Moncrieff translation, superseded first by Kilmartin’s revision, then by Enright’s revision (of Kilmartin’s revision).

Wanting a standard translation, I bought the paperback box set version of the Enright, from the Modern Library. I’ve read two and have good intentions about the remaining. But I’m finding I pretty much never touch paper any more … too heavy.

Hence I was pleased to see recently the six volumes in this series from Vintage. They’re still the Enright, but they’re electronic, and that means they’re weightless and always just a click away. Thing is, I’m really baulking at the combined cost, but I’ve a feeling I’ll do it anyway. Just to have them on my ebookshelf.

The 2012 Sydney University Anthology of new writing and photography, Sparks, is edited by Master of Publishing students of the University of Sydney. The all-important final proofing is happening now, and the anthology will be launched at 7pm on the 15th of November at the Co-op bookshop in the University of Sydney. Visit the website for updates.

Anyway, Jack Kerouac, that novel, the long stuck-together-fax-sheet-roll-of-paper one. I first read the book in 1986 when I bought it in a second-hand bookshop in Edinburgh …

I was on a busking hitchhiking tour of England and Scotland, and this was my first stop. I picked it up along with Vasari’s The Lives of the Artists, a fairly odd combination, I admit, but there you go. I can’t remember if I was shaven or unshaven, but the man at the till remarked that I looked like I needed the Kerouac book. I remember glaring at him. I realise now it was probably the kind of literary sideways compliment bookshop people are rather good at.

Thing is, I hated it. I stuck with it of course, I’d paid good money, but really I found it rather dull and not what I was expecting at all. Growing up in the drama of Thatcher’s Britain, living through punk and two-tone, I was used to rebellion and funkiness; old Sal and Deano didn’t cut the mustard for me.

The point is, to be honest, it just wasn’t the right time for me to read it. You have to pick your moments — timing is as important as anything in book reading. Take The Alexandria Quartet, by Lawrence Durrell. I was recommend the title when travelling across Africa, and in Nairobi I picked it up in a single-volume form as soon as I could. From the first page, it wasn’t right. Too old-fashioned, too poetic and not enough action, too otherworldly. Fifteen years later, I’ve read two of the four volumes and loved them. I’ve changed, the books haven’t.

Which brings me back to Jack. This article by Stephanie Bunbury in this weekend’s electronic paper tweaked my memory and reminded me that I do need reread the story. There’s a reason why the big books are big, and more importantly a reason why they first attracted us — sometimes we just need to live up to our side of the deal. But if I don’t get round to reading, I promise I’ll go and see the movie. Either way, he can come back some more.

– update Feb 2013 –

Okay. So I read the book again … and … it’s fabulous. The poetic sensibility is intense, despite the fairly mundane business of travelling here and there, getting drunk, lusting after and occasionally getting together with young women. And it’s no story at all. They go west, they go east. They go west again. They go east again. A couple of times. Then, after all that, to really end it all, to really build up a climax befitting a Great American Novel … they go … wait for it … south. That’s it, basically. But it’s fantastic. Exuberant, funky, vigorous, lewd, romantic, pragmatic, essential. Undoubtedly a great novel. Yes, it’s true, I just had to read it at the right time. C’est la vie.

Following a heated discussion on Twitter over whether ebooks should follow the form and function of their print counterparts, Joshua Mostafa and Mark Rossiter agreed to a battle of ideas on our blog with the question “Should ebooks look like print books?” 

Anyone who frets about the form in which a text is displayed, by claiming for example that a beautifully produced print edition is superior to the same text presented electronically in a conventional-enough layout, is missing the point.

Text is only ever about content, not the way it is presented. All instances of written language can be seen as simulacra, a word the Oxford English Dictionary defines as ‘something having merely the form or appearance of a certain thing, without possessing its substance or proper qualities’. In short: neither the printed book nor the ebook is, in fact, the book. They’re just material representations. The book itself is something eternal, beyond any given physical implementation.

When you ask me if I’ve read, say, Pride and Prejudice, you don’t usually mean a particular edition or format (paperback or hardcover). Strange as it may seem at first glance, you don’t necessarily even mean any particular language. You’re talking about something beyond the concrete: the eternal text, ethereal, almost outside of language. It’s up there, in the sky, free from the caprices of nature, of water, wind or fire, free even from time.

Of course, without some form of representation, that eternal book is lost to us earthbound mortals. That’s why, if you remember, the premise of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is so compelling (the burning of books) and its conclusion so uplifting (books living within us, the word made flesh).

The particularities of a given physical manifestation, paper or otherwise, may well be pretty, beautiful and embody hundreds of years of design thought, but they’re still about materiality and not about the book itself. Judgements on the book-as-object are profoundly superficial, ignoring the text’s own aesthetic field: language, argument, narrative, representation, etc. Once you let yourself see the book in this essentially metaphysical way, you realise that clinging to rigid print formats is simply archaic and that there’s nothing to stop you embracing ebooks except your own inner old fogey.

The e-reader is the perfect place (so far) to store, transact and consume text, as long as appropriate presentation norms are maintained. Depending on your platform, these can be somewhat crude at present, but in time e-readers will allow further user customisation in terms of fonts, spacing, alignment, etc.

Meanwhile my e-library is growing, up there in the cloud, ready for me to pull down onto any device I want. I lose my e-reader, I buy another one. Everything is still there, in the ether. Remember, from the moment it’s printed, your beautiful paper book is slowly burning, oxidising, its pages turning yellow and brittle. My ebooks are safe, up there in the sky, for ever.

Mark Rossiter is a writer, lecturer, doctoral student, freelance editor, anthology coordinator and manuscript assessor. You can see his e-library here. He tweets on @xmarkr.

Am reading from this excellent anthology from Coeur de Lion publishing. I picked up my e-copy on Amazon, but you can also find it on Smashwords and on the CDL website. I’ve read two stories so far, ‘Beautiful’ by Cat Sparks and ‘Hatchway’, Simon Petrie.

Both stories are impressive in detail and mise en scene. The beautiful are gorgeous shimmering creatures and everyone wants at least one at their party … and Mija, being the hostess with the most, has five at hers. We follow Nin as she enters the room, and through her eyes we see the sumptuous setting. Cleverly working in necessary back story, Sparks takes us on a tale of self-actualisation, a kind of ugly duckling story. Very beautiful!

‘Hatchway’ is another story of discovery, one even darker in tone. Kalpana is going for a walk on the moon, that’s Titan actually, and considerable preparation is required. You see, she’s not wearing the proper T-suit. Instead, she only has a single layer. If she’s fast, she’ll survive, as long as she knows the password for the other hatchway so she can get back in to safety. It’s something of an initiation rite and the other kids are helpful. Or are they?

Great stories and I look forward to reading more.

This is a snapshot* of my e-library, built up over the last year or so. The question is … does a pretty picture like this replace the joy of having physical books in a bookshelf? Does the utility of the ebook replace the tactility of a pbook?

Post originally written 2011, pic updated 9 July 2012

For me, it does. Let’s agree there’s no difference between reading the actual text of an ebook or a pbook. But what about the complete book experience? The joy of holding a pbook, one that reminds you of when you first got it, or first read it, or whatever. Can an ebook ever carry these wider associations?

I think the answer is yes, once you can visualise your books. In my e-library, the images glow, the colours don’t fade, the spines don’t break and there’s no need to worry about creasing or someone else’s notes in the margin, and there’s the bonus that I can sort them in a variety of ways just by pressing a button.

This patchwork of colour is what I’ve been missing in my e-literary life which thus far has been very e-ink black-and-white. This view gives me a quantifiable measure of my life in books; each image reminds me of why I bought the ebook and what I was thinking and hoping, and therefore who I am — or have been — and that is exactly what a bookshelf does, isn’t it?

Sure, the weight’s missing, the roughness of the page ends and the smoothness of the cover, and, I admit, the smell, but while those things do add, they’re not the core of the book’s associations for us … are they? The associations that matter (outside the text itself) are with the title and the cover image, I think. And the author’s name. These are the triggers which link to the feelings we have about the text we read.

And sometimes I have strong feelings about a book I’ve bought but haven’t actually read (ebook or pbook); I still treasure it and the associations I get from it. Having the e-cover image available in my e-library, I can access that feeling, just the same as I could from a physical book.

I understand and share the nostalgia for pbooks: I have bookcases full of the things and I still buy them when I have no choice. I just think that the utility of ebooks, coupled with a visual e-library bookshelf, goes far beyond the tactility of the paper object.

This post responds to this piece by Tom Chivers on telegraph.co.uk.

Read Me is the 2011 University of Sydney student anthology and it launches in late October. Submissions for 2012 are open soon.