“Anche questa notte passerà.” (Giuseppe Ungaretti)

“This night will also pass away.”

I feel I should be bashing out a Books of the Year, or 100 Best Books of 2008, or 1,000 Best Books of the New Millennium list, as it’s becoming more and more common at this time of the year.

But the truth is I’ve never believed in this sort of charts – so, forgive me, I won’t give you one. I don’t think you can claim that Dante is “better” than Shakespeare or Shakespeare “better” than Milton. In the same way, I don’t think it’s fair to say that Jane Eyre is “better” than Wuthering Heights or viceversa. No BBC-poll- or red-button-produced list will ever convince me that one author or one book is ranked higher than another one in any all-time chart.

I believe that a book speaks differently to different people at different ages. For example, when I was younger, I was strongly influenced by Keats, Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Dante and Ariosto, to name but a few. These days I only go back to Dante on a regular basis, and rarely read from the other four. I have also developed a kind of aversion to Yeats which was unthinkable a couple of decades ago.

If you had asked me to name my favourite three books in the genres of poetry, fiction and drama back in 1990, I would have answered, without hesitation: The Divine Comedy, The Idiot and Macbeth. If you were to ask me the same question today, I would be completely at a loss.

Not only have I read hundreds and hundreds more books since then, but my knowledge of certain languages and their literatures (as well as the context they fit in) has changed, and as a result of my daily editorial job I am a lot more critical and exacting. Keats was a demigod for me in my twenties – now he’s much more human, and I can see a lot of the flaws (even linguistic ones) in his poetry that other authors such as TS Eliot have pointed out.

So my personal chart is an ever-changing affair. But my new year’s resolution is to try and talk, on these pages, about some of the authors and books that I love or influenced me most.

Happy New Year!

AG

Where are the Dickenses?

Very good points, Sean. The centuries-old battle between the ancients and the moderns seems to have been degraded to a conflict between mainstream and non-mainstream, with the former signifying the commercially successful and the latter encompassing any literary production that doesn't sell.

But what is mainstream? Ahem. You'll be delighted to hear that Amazon.co.uk has just released its top ten best-selling books for 2008, and these are:

1. The Tales of Beedle the Bard (JK Rowling)
2. Dear Fatty (Dawn French)
3. Jamie's Ministry of Food (Jamie Oliver)
4. Delia's How to Cheat at Cooking (Delia Smith)
5. A Thousand Splendid Suns (Khaled Hosseini)
6. Jamie at Home (Good Old Jamie again)
7. The Book Thief (Marcus Zusak)
8. Dreams From My Father (Barack Obama)
9. Aliens Love Underpants! (Clare Friedman – I want to read this one to my kids)
10. A Quiet Belief in Angels (RJ Ellory)

So there's only three fiction titles in there, and six celebrity titles. Where are the Dickenses? Where are the Dostoevskys? Where are the Prousts and Joyces?

AG

I listened to the discussion about the relationship between mainstream and avant-garde culture (Radio 4, 29th Dec). Hari Kunzru and Tom McCarthy pitched their arguments very well to the middle-brow listener, but it says a lot about the BBC that we're only having this discussion now – when culture is at least 20 years into its 'post-avant-garde' phase – and at 07.47, on the 29th December, when no one's listening except farmers having their first tea break. A few years ago, this discussion would have been allowed to unfold over a half-hour slot at a reasonable hour (on the Late Show, say, chaired by Michael Ignatieff…) rather than used to fill a fallow news period.

In his Foreword to the 2006 edition of Infinite Jest, Dave Eggers puts David Foster Wallace forward as epitomising a kind of literature that speaks to both mainstream and what we used to call 'avant-garde' audiences; in other words, that encompasses accessibility and difficulty. It's a pity the discussion didn't touch on DFW's work, especially as, half an hour before, George Saunders and Jonathan Frantzen had discussed it on the same programme, in carefully crafted literary obituaries. What was needed, at this point, was someone in the chair to point out that DFW was precisely that intersection of mainstream and non-mainstream sensibilities that the discussion between McCarthy, Kunzru and Stewart Home seemed ready to explore. What's needed is a discussion that explores what we mean by 'accessibility' and 'difficulty': whether, by the latter, we still mean 'something one has to read a dozen times to "get"', 'not pandering to received wisdom' and so forth (in which case, why bother?), or whether contemporary artists are working to new paradigms of difficulty. The problem with what is called 'avant-garde' or 'experimental' writing is that it behaves as though the war against received wisdom has already been won, as though the opposition between accessibility and difficulty really did come out in favour of difficulty – ignoring the fact that the best writers have always arbitrated between private and public wisdom, between the world-views of citizen and populace.

“Thoughtless as monarch oaks that shade the plain.” (John Dryden)

“Patients to rate and review their GPs on NHS website” is the leader on today’s The Guardian. Aghast, I glance over the article and find exactly what I was dreading to read: Ben Bradshaw, the Health Minister, claims he wants the site “to do for healthcare what Amazon has done for the book trade … providing positive and negative feedback, warts and all, from consumers.”

Great idea, Ben, well done! This is the stuff of great policy-makers! We should all take example from Amazon, who have brought so much light, joy and happiness in the book world.

I know you’re too busy thinking up more epoch-defining reforms such as this, but I want to tell you a little story about Amazon’s book reviewing.

Pushkin Press published, a few years ago, Antal Szerb’s masterpiece, Journey by Moonlight, in a wonderful new translation from the Hungarian by Len Rix. Pushkin have exclusive rights for this work across the English world. Now, some US professor – without the shadow of a contract with the Szerb Estate or a publisher – took it upon himself to make another translation, called it The Traveler and self-published it using a large print-on-demand publisher. Then he reviewed his book – or had it reviewed by some of his students – two hundred and seventy-four times on Amazon.com. That’s right, two hundred and seventy-four times. These are long, glowing reviews of the professor’s translation, at times with a positive mention of the professor’s other unpublished works, and disparaging references to Len Rix’s translation.

Since the title is different from the canonical one, it was difficult for Pushkin to spot it in the Amazon jungle, and it took them years to notice it. The problem came to a crux this year. Pushkin sent a polite letter to Amazon and to the publisher, asking them to remove the book from their websites and giving the reasons. They got back a furious letter from the professor, with threats of a legal suit if they tried to prevent his book being on sale, because he claimed he was in possession of a valid contract from the Szerb Estate. The professor’s son is a lawyer, so it didn’t cost him much to resist any legal challenge.

To cut a very long story short, the result was that Pushkin had to hire a US lawyer and pay a lot of money to bring the matter to a close, as neither Amazon nor the publisher would do anything about it otherwise. In the end, the book was temporarily removed from Amazon.com, and the US professor was silenced and forced to disclose the sales figures of his edition. Pushkin received no compensation for loss of sales. As I write this post this morning, I see that The Traveler is back there online, with all its fake 274 reviews, warts and all.

Whoever thinks that this is the exception rather than the rule is wrong. I know that most authors ask their friends to review their book positively on Amazon on the day of publication. Many of the “impartial” reviewers are in fact people with an agenda of friendship, self-promotion, spite and rivalry, or a secret grudge against the author or the translator. Over the years, we had to ask Amazon.co.uk to remove quite a few moronic or nonsensical reviews of our books. Some are still there, for all our complaints. The only thing you can do, in that case, is to bury the bad or spoof reviews under a mountain of fake positive ones. So we end up feeding the system and wasting an inordinate amount of time on a “meaningless popularity contest”.

Where do our politicians live, I often ask myself? What have we done to deserve such inanity and short-sightedness? Cannot they see that Amazon, Facebook, Wikipedia and the like can be easily manipulated and abused? We need someone to check content, dear Minister, and it’s your job and that of your colleagues – not ours – to check the credentials and the performance of GPs and hospital staff.

AG

"Which, from the carcass of the old world free, Creates a new world." (John Donne)

Just a quick note to alert you to a very interesting Radio 4 discussion about "mainstream" and "avant-garde" between the experimental writer and anti-novelist Stewart Home, Tom McCarthy (at one point author of the bestselling novel "Reindeer") and Hari Kunzru.

You can find it here (it's the 7:47 slot, ten minutes long):

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7802000/7802586.stm

They all expressed valid points. Unfortunately, when the subject is so vast and the time so limited, speakers cannot avoid making broad generalizations.

My own point of view is very similar to Hari Kunzru's, but I also agreed with Tom's idea of "vanguard", although I didn't know any of the names or works he mentioned, with the exception of Joyce's Finnegans Wake.

AG

“Mal tu par l'encre même en sanglots sibyllins” (Stéphane Mallarmé)

“Badly silenced by ink in sibylline sobs.”

I’m often asked “How do you select your books for publication?” or “What do you look for in a novel?” This is a question that I find rather awkward to answer in a few words.

I believe that publishing is an incredibly subjective business, and that publishing programmes are an idiosyncratic expression of their publishers’ tastes. Having said that, I also believe that there are – or at least there should be – some recognizable and universally accepted standards concerning grammar, style, characterization and plot.

For me, a book must work on a number of levels: be ambitious in terms of themes and scope, but not over-intellectual. Style is certainly the most important variable in the equation, and what I generally look for is a distinctive voice, like an artist’s brushstroke.

I am not particularly keen on experimental writing, with multi-perspectives and stream of consciousness. I don’t like conceits such as a turtle or a dog being the narrator. I think that the simpler and the more linear the narrative, the more satisfactory is the result for the reader. What I also love is to detect a touch of humour – so long as it doesn’t verge on the clownish, the grotesque or the absurd.

I’m not interested in detective stories and gory thrillers. Science fiction doesn’t turn me on – I usually find historical novels boring. I prefer third-person narratives to first-person ones.

Whenever I receive a submission, I try to read it cold, without looking at the author’s CV or any endorsements. If the work is good, it should grab my attention and sustain my interest from page one. I hate anything that is predictable or formulaic.

Above all, I try not to follow the general taste or any particular fashion, and to be as critical towards a new work of fiction as I would be towards a classic, continually asking myself: “Would this stand the test of time? – Or at least ten, twenty years?”

So, you see, it’s actually pretty easy after all.

AG

“This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.” (William Shakespeare)

One of the most frequent questions I am asked is: “What brought you over to England?” I generally say, to keep my answer short and simple, that Elisabetta and I wanted to set up a publishing house, and decided to do so in the UK, where we could see a gap in the market for short classics in translation. But this is not strictly true, and if I wanted to be more accurate I should answer that it was a combination of things.

Our love of the English language and its rich literature certainly had a great part in it. I originally came to the UK because I was offered a PhD in comparative literatures at Leeds University, which I then turned down to work in London as a translator and bookseller. The title of my proposed thesis was going to be ‘Erasmus’s influence on Shakespeare’s plays’ – a grand project on which I would be probably still working if my underlying diffidence of academia had not prompted me to decline the post.

Another factor in our choice to live in Great Britain is our rejection of many Italian attitudes such as clientelism and nepotism. It would have been difficult for us, with our mentality and approach, to fit in a society that doesn’t promote talent and is not based on fairness and merit. And probably, in ten years, we wouldn’t have achieved a fraction of what we have achieved in UK.

But I believe that the real reason of our move to Great Britain is much more difficult to pin down. A few weeks ago, I chanced on an old letter which I wrote to a German friend when I was around eighteen. In it, my idea of moving to England was expressed for the first time. This document suggests I must have been thinking about moving abroad from very early on. Elisabetta, on her part, spent most of her summers in UK from the age of fifteen onwards, and has always adored English language and culture above any other, so moving to UK was for her only a natural consequence.

So the real answer to the question “What brought you here?” – if we are totally honest with ourselves – has nothing to do with publishing. Publishing just happens to be the job we are in at the moment, and one of the ways we express our ideas and the values we believe in. The real, simple answer is probably that, as many other things in our life, it was just written in the stars.

AG