'the selected works of t.s. spivet' reif larsen

any heard of or read this?

apparently not, although according to the times "The Selected Works of TS Spivet has been a sensation in America, with a reputed $1m advance and a large publicity machine now rolling behind it"

Cover looks kind of like an ugly Cornell.

heard of yeah. . . has anyone read it?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/05/AR2009050503817_pf.html

The narrator, Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet, is a comically precocious 12-year-old boy on a secret trek to Washington, D.C., who speaks in a mixture of Victorian formality and eighth-grade goofiness.

nah brah

fyi i wrote this book

the book sounds like Extremly Loud & Incredibly Close (another book i haven't read) but with maps

max is comically precocious

hahaha so far it is a well-done book and I am totally happy for its author successwise but umm yeah, if you in any way share n/a's reaction there, run with that feeling

maybe i'll get this from the library--i dig yr other post in the other thread, brah, btw

btw when the Times says "The Selected Works of TS Spivet has been a sensation in America" I assume they actually mean "The Selected Works of TS Spivet has been a sensation in the American publishing industry" (though it does appear to be selling pretty well thus far, for a book)

"for a book" ow.

I kind of half-want to read this just because in my head it maps so closely onto the Safran Foer novel — but with drawings instead of typography — I'm finding it hard to find the mental space for it.

yeah it really does sound amazingly similar to the safran foer book

when i want comically precocious i can always reread Franny and Zooey and, you know, other Salinger

toward the beginning he makes this old-mannish statement about something like the scent of huckleberries not having been around in many a year, and it's like YOU'RE TWELVE

When he started writing the book on July 17, 2005, he conceived Spivet as a 57-year-old former cowboy writing drunk from a Paris prison. L@rs3n soon created the 12-year-old cartographer instead but didn't think of adding drawings until he'd almost finished writing.

http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2009/05/05/the_story_told_in_the_margins/

haha what? that is such a *huge* change in a character

hahaha nabisco i think i just discovered the reason for that

HES A 57 YEAR OLD COWBOY TRAPPED IN A 12 YR OLD PRECOCIOUS BOYS BODY

This'll probably be a long post, but I want to expand on something I said on that other thread:

Okay. I remember writing a paper in college about how I thought fiction should be more fictional, should use the full range of what's available to it, and why not more stories where people do things like turn into giant insects?, etc. I guess I still think that can be a decent impulse, and I think there's a free-floating low-level element of it in a lot of recent literary fiction that sort of bleeds into what this book does. It's very low-level, but I think that impulse bleeds into the desire to write something sort of magical or whimsical or like a fairy tale: you know, why not a 12-year-old genius cartographer, and why not sort of metaphorize his father to be like a movie cowboy, and why not have his mother be similarly stylized and quirk-filled -- why not have everything stylized and quirk-filled in that way, and then maybe have fun running that stylized stuff up against what we know of the real world? All fiction is heavily stylized, even the stuff we consider naturalistic! So I can totally understand this impulse, this habit, and how it can be generous on the writer's part; I understand that there's no reason quirkily stylized characters can't have stories just as rich and moving as naturalistic ones; I also understand that a lot of the fun in picking up a book, as a reader, is to immerse yourself in some sort of interesting world, and that's just the sort of thing this stuff aims to achieve.

So I think I find myself defending those habits on here sometimes, because in the end I view them as mostly neutral; I don't mind or not-mind that habit in itself. If the characters and story and prose work, then the whole thing works. If the characters or story or prose don't work, it can feel like those stylized quirks are papering over a lack of substance -- but the problem isn't the quirks, it's the lack of substance, you know?

But for some reason this book has been one of the first where a lot of those habits have seemed the opposite of imaginative -- this isn't fair to say, but it's true -- where those habits have presented to me as actually really calcified and stylized in a routine way, and where (early on in the reading process, mind you) I have yet to really feel like they're for anything; they don't yet present to me like metaphors, or rich ways of getting at ideas, but just as the stylistic norms of what a charmingly imaginative book is commonly presumed to be like. Maybe that'll change as I go on, but it doesn't really matter, because what I'm talking about here isn't really whether the book is good or bad, it's how those habits operate.

If it's not obvious or anything, this guy and I went to the same writing program, and maybe part of what I'm responding to is its having habits that could be common in the same workshops we were both in; I dunno. In the interest of honesty, I would also be willing to bet that what I'm working on these days will wind up a million times less well-formed and entertaining for others to read as this book, so there's nothing, umm, begrudging about these criticisms. It's just made me do a lot of thinking about stylistic stuff in fiction, especially because, a few years back, I was working on something that I thought shared a lot of these habits, and something I was pretty confident was really entertaining and well-shaped, and some kind of dissatisfaction with this stuff made me scrap it and turn toward something else, someplace I'm way less comfortable and way less of a "good" writer and struggle a hell of a lot, but it seemed like ... there was some burden to turn away from something about this aesthetic. Maybe as I finish reading this I'll figure out more precisely what it is about these habits that's starting to feel somehow problematic to me, even when they're well-used.

Very interesting points there, Nabisco: this bit...

But for some reason this book has been one of the first where a lot of those habits have seemed the opposite of imaginative -- this isn't fair to say, but it's true -- where those habits have presented to me as actually really calcified and stylized in a routine way, and where (early on in the reading process, mind you) I have yet to really feel like they're for anything; they don't yet present to me like metaphors, or rich ways of getting at ideas, but just as the stylistic norms of what a charmingly imaginative book is commonly presumed to be like. Maybe that'll change as I go on, but it doesn't really matter, because what I'm talking about here isn't really whether the book is good or bad, it's how those habits operate.

..makes it almost sound like the sort of book that could have been written by a very cunning piece of software. Once all of the characters' initial fascinating quirks have been feed into the system as variables, the software writes the book, but can't add the element of surprising human imagination.

Oh, I wouldn't say that -- so far it is perfectly human and imaginative. If you want a software analogy I would say it's more like looking at really Photoshoppy image work, where you begin to wonder what the productive purpose is of a lot of creativity going through the same recognizable tools and stylistic defaults, and start wondering whether the artist might have come up with something better by sketching, or sculpting, or playing with an old camera.

awesome post, thank you. i want to respond to it, because i think about this stuff a lot too, but this line strikes me

fiction should be more fictional, should use the full range of what's available to it, and why not more stories where people do things like turn into giant insects?,

i feel like a lot of times in fiction where the "quirk' doesn't work is when the quirk tries to carry too much. it breaks down when the writer focuses too hard on the giant insects part and forgets about the telling a story part. i think it's the kind of thing that someone like Saunders does really really well--manages his quirk versus telling a story ratio, that is

Yeah, see, ideally the imaginative stuff isn't even just a natural outgrowth of the story, it is the story, is the content, inextricably; there are times I read things now (or read them in workshops) where that strives be to true, and maybe it's not easy to separate that stuff from the story, but it somehow feels like they got there in the first place in a decorative way. (I.e., Gregor doesn't turn into an insect in order to show something fascinating about his family; Gregor turns into an insect because the author thought that'd be an interesting idea, and only then started teasing out what that'd show about the world.)

yeah: someone comes up with a concept and then throws a bunch of stuff at it until it's a story.

nabisco have you read this book by any chance?

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/417W7WGSPKL._SS500_.jpg

have not!

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_7laTi_Z4eAA/SFsEjn0RfbI/AAAAAAAABMA/g2B3toor0dg/s400/locus_solus0002.JPG

descriptions make it sound like the kind of fabulist fictive imagination I'm always down for, assuming it's not doing that stuff in a more, umm ... Ben Marcusy way. (not a slam on Marcus, just using it as a descriptor)

^ that was an xpost about the first one

mmm, i'm not sure it's a very good book. i had to give up reading it, because it was annoying me. but it's kind of two attempts to join together the same sort of themes (the inevitability of time, progress, death, the normal sort of things 20-somethings right about), one of them ultra-quirk, one naturalistic; oddly enough, in isolation they're both very accomplished modes, but when they run together the result is excruciating.

that's assuming i have the right idea of what you mean by 'quirk', though.

also, the roussel cover up there is fantastic.

... write about, obviously. i've just filled in an application where i had to explain the difference between 'rain, dear' and 'reindeer' and obviously have thrown that part of my brain out of whack.