Dave Allen. Director, Interactive Strategy

Thinking about Nooks, books and oral history

With today’s news that Microsoft is investing a large chunk of money in Barnes & Noble’s Nook unit #, $300 million to be exact, it had me thinking about how B&N investors had been largely ignoring the Nook division as it soaked up profits from B&N’s bottom line.

I wrote about it here # where I had asked myself a question in terms of B&N competing with Amazon: How can a company worth $719 million (at the time) compete with a company worth $88 billion? And one that already has about 60% of the e-book business, not to mention a huge percent of the printed versions. And then there’s the shareholders, a good many of whom are institutional. They drove down the price of B&N stock when Lynch suggested spinning off the digital business. Lynch is right when he says “shareholders seemed to be underestimating the Nook’s potential.” The Nook might just be able to compete in the e-reader category as it already has a 27% share of the market.

Well Lynch, B&N’s CEO, gets the last laugh, at least for now as we won’t know how the Microsoft deal will help in the long run, and as B&N’s stock is up 52% today the investment community must be happy too. And perhaps I was right too, when I mentioned that 27% e-reader market share.

Microsoft saw value. It had to as it is being left out of the Tablet market.

We live in interesting times. With Apple being sued, along with a handful of book publishers # for suspected price fixing activities, and Amazon sitting pretty in the background with its own price fixing model at hand, i.e sell low, things looked bleak for the Nook. Yet one partner with deep pockets provides the momentum for the Nook to step up into the fray. The e-book, e-reader wars are on.

Whatever happens, the battle for e-book or e-reader supremacy won’t affect me until the demise of the book. Long form reading on back-lit screens is not for me. As much as I’ve embraced all things digital I still remain firmly committed to the tactile in both my reading needs and my audio listening preferences. Books and records; the heft of the hardback, and the fidelity of the needle for me every time.

Ok, let’s switch gears.

I have just finished two books. Novels that have enthralled me like no others in quite some time. Both debuts from two gifted writers- one Irish one French. City of Bohane by Kevin Barry and HHhH from Laurent Binet are so startlingly original it seems unfair to compare them to other literary endeavors, yet in literature as in digital actually, the new new thing is rarely completely new.

Page 5, City of Bohane:

‘Did he have it coming, Jen?’
‘Don’t they always, Cusacks?’
Logan shaped his lips thinly in agreement.
‘The Cusacks have always been crooked, girl.’

Jenni was seventeen that year but wise beyond it. Careful she was, and a saucy little ticket in her lowriders and wedge heels, her streaked hair pineappled in a high bun. She took the butt of a stogie from the tit pocket of her white vinyl zip-up, and lit it.

‘Get enough on me plate now ‘cross the footbridge, Mr H.’
‘I know that.’
‘Cusacks gonna sulk up a welt o’ vengeance by ‘n’ by and if yer asking me, like? A rake o’ them tossers bullin’ down off the Rises is the las’ thing Smoketown need.’
‘Cusacks are always great for the old talk, Jenni.’
‘More ‘n talks what I gots a fear on, H. Is said they gots three flatblocks marked Cusacks ‘bove on the Rises this las’ while an’ that’s three flatblocks fulla headjobs with a grá on ‘em for rowin’, y’check me?’
‘All too well Jenni.’

That conversation takes place 50 years in the future in a city in the Southwest of Ireland. Things have not improved economically. Being Irish, Barry clearly has an ear for the cadence and lilt of Ireland’s working class phrasing and further deconstructs it as if everything now, here in the future is only spoken, where words are no longer pressed to paper. The palpable violence that ghost-shades the entire book reminds me of Anthony Burgess’ ‘A Clockwork Orange’

Page 1, A Clockwork Orange:

‘What’s it going to be then, eh?’
There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry. The Korova Milkbar was a milk-plus mesto, and you may, O my brothers, have forgotten what these mestos were like, things changing so skorry these days and everybody very quick to forget, newspapers not being read much neither.

And as I consider the language and grammar deconstructions of both those chapters, the upending of rules as if rules in literature ever mattered, I’m reminded of Russell Hoban’s classic post-apocalypse novel, ‘Riddley Walker,’ a telling of history by the survivors that couldn’t be written – it was an oral history.

Hoban went beyond Burgess and Barry by taking the grammar deconstruction to its obvious place in a post-apocalyptic world, a place where there were no longer written words. Language then became free of grammatical constraint, where punctuation in oral history was not mandatory- it was personal. The speaker or narrator decided whether to pause or exclaim for effect, or not..

Page 1, Riddley Walker:

On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. He dint make the groun shake nor nothing like that when he come on to my spear he wernt all that big plus he lookit poorly. He done the reqwyert he ternt and stood and clattert his teef and made his rush and ther we wer then. Him on 1 end of the spear kicking his life out and me on the other end watching him dy. I said, ‘Your tern now my tern later.’ The other spears gon in then and he wer dead and the steam coming up off him in the rain and we all yelt, ‘Offert!’

In all three of these books the central characters are “telling” not writing. The only narrative they’re left with is oral history.

In future the digital version of this will be known as Twitter.

In HHhH, Laurent Betin goes back into history to the period in Nazi Germany just prior to World War 2. It is, ostensibly, a historical novel, one that follows the rise through the ranks of the SS and SA, of the cruel Nazi, Rienhard Heydrich, who became too well known as the sinister figure “the Butcher of Prague.”

Yet is it? Heydrich did exist and he did commit atrocities across Europe during the war, but Betin is not satisfied with the genre. He wrestles openly in the book with his fear of memory polluting his attempts, as Brett Easton Ellis puts it, at “neutral, journalistic honesty.” Or as Wells Tower says “HHhH is an astonishing book – absorbing, moving, for the agony and acuity with which its author engages the problem of making literary art from unbearable historical fact.”

Here’s an example. Betin is describing how fighters had slipped out of Czechoslovakia and into France where they joined with the French army to battle the Germans:

…a few months later it will be practically a whole division and it will fight alongside the French army during the war. I could write quite a lot about the Czechs in the French army: the 11,000 soldiers, made up of 3,000 volunteers and 8,000 expatriate Czech conscripts, along with the brave pilots, trained at Chartres, who will shoot down or help to shoot down more than 130 enemy planes during the Battle of France.. But I’ve said that I don’t want to write a historical handbook. This story is personal. That’s why my visions sometimes get mixed up with known facts. It’s just how it is.

Actually, no: that’s not how it is. That would be too simple. Rereading one of the books that make up the foundation of my research – a collection of witness accounts assembled by a Czech historian, Miraslav Ivanov, under the title The Attack on Heydrich – I become aware to my horror, of the mistakes I’ve made concerning Gabcik.

Remember this a novel about a true story. We know from history much of the story. Yet does the book by Miraslav Ivanov mentioned above even exist? Does/did Ivanov?

As David Lodge points out “Binet has given a new dimension to the nonfiction novel by weaving his writerly anxieties about the genre into the narrative, but his story is no less compelling for that…”

It is truly a work of art. And I believe that now I’ve read it, it deserves its place on my bookshelf as a future classic, where someone else can pick it up and consider its heft, both literally and figuratively.

Something that an e-reader cannot provide.

The Books:
City of Bohane: A Novel
HHhH: A Novel
Riddley Walker, Expanded Edition
A Clockwork Orange (Norton Critical Editions)