Pankaj Mishra, writing in last Saturday’s (August 23rd) Guardian book review, is reminded while reading obituaries of Solzhenitsyn of remarks by Philip Roth about some of the differences between the situations of writers East and West towards the (provisional and temporary, it now seems) end of the Cold War.
Mishra writes: “Roth summed up the marginality of literary novelists such as himself in the west with a neat little formula: ‘There nothing goes and everything matters; here everything goes and nothing matters.’”
Looking back at the review pages of British and American journals in the 1970s and 1980s, Mishra remarks, “is to marvel at the extensive and respectful attention paid to these writers, many of whom – Milan Kundera, Klima, Josef Skvorecky – are still being published, but not with the same fanfare”.
Mishra goes on to make the point that some dissident writers who were dissident against authoritarian regimes allied to what we used to call the Free World were not quite so feted in the West and hints darkly that political considerations might have entered – for the first time surely – into the heads of a Nobel jury (“Rarely has the … prize been awarded to a corpus as slender as Gao Xingjian’s Beijing Coma …”)
The points Mishra makes about links between dissidence, celebrity and consequent marketability are valid ones. It may however be the case that there is really no dark plot on the part of publishers – or rather that the dark plot is, as ever, to make money. And surely the best way to make money is to copy what someone else who is making it is doing. Well, the second best.
Back in the late 1970s Picador was the book imprint every young person wanted to be seen with. They did, after all, publish Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Soon they published everything else by Marquez too and everything they could find by any Latin American novelist with three names. So too did their publishing imitators, King Penguin, Flamingo, Abacus and others. Then the fashion moved to Eastern Europe and consonants were big for a while – Bruno Schulz, Josef Skvorecky, Tadeusz Borowski, Slavenka Drakulic, Ludvik Vaculic.
In a not so uncanny anticipation of Amazon’s “You liked A, therefore you might like Ab” gambit, publishers risked their cash on the fashionable wave of the time. Much of what was published was exciting or at least different from what had gone before (though there was probably too much magic realism). The only problem was that once it was gone it was gone.
It would be nice to think that someone might some day rake through the publishing ruins of the 70s and 80s and pick out a few of the now forgotten gems for republication. Gems there certainly are among the justly forgotten and the scarcely noticed. My eternal gratitude for a start to whoever “rediscovers” the great Russian Abram Terz and in particular his two satire/fables of Stalinism, The Makepeace Experiment and The Trial Begins.
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