Name: Assume A Position: Considerations and Interviews
Rating: 5 (5 reviews)
ISBN: 9789619566893

1,500 reviews13.2k followers

November 10, 2024

Jeff Bursey - Canadian novelist, short-story writer, playwright, literary critic

A TREASURE FOR LOVERS OF EXCEPTIONAL LITERATURE

Jeff Bursey's Assume A Position: Considerations and Interviews contains a Preface and three parts:

Part 1: Writing on writing - Five essays addressing the state of fiction, specifically the nature and expansiveness of the novel;

Part 2: Fiction and Non-Fiction Reviews - more than three dozen individual reviews, including a number of books by Canadian authors;

Part 3: Interviews - Jeff interviews three writers: Sam Savage, Michelle Butler Hallett and S.D. Chrostowska.

For a fuller taste of what readers will encounter here, I've linked my comments with direct author quotes from the Preface and one piece from each of the three parts.

PREFACE
“Apart from taste, there's advocacy for the unjustly ignored who, willfully or not, travel the lumber and mountain roads that weave through the literary map.”

Many authors, including those from Jeff's home country of Canada, write in ways that will generally not harvest a large mainstream readership. But that's not what these singular writers are after; rather, they follow their own voice and vision. And it's these experimental writers challenging convention that Jeff finds most to his taste.

With this in mind, Jeff writes: “The essays and reviews collected here stem from that long-lasting objection, which includes resistance to the parochial nature of many (not all) Canadian journals, mainstream newspapers, and radio competitions as they try to determine the reading life of a country.”

Building on this, Jeff goes on to write: “Our literature needs healthy and, at times, rowdy arguments as authors, publishers, and readers balance the input submitted to Goodreads (often at great length and with erudition) and well-written blogs dedicated to keeping an eye on current writing against the dwindling national dialogue in papers about books as aesthetic objects.” Jeff maintains a high standard for works of literature: it doesn't matter what the subject, whether the book is fiction or non-fiction, if a book isn't well-written, it deserves a negative review complete with specific examples as to how and why the book falls short.

“Art doesn't reconcile a country's divisions; it speaks for and to people who are that country, and it often shows ugly truths that take considerable time to be raged against, met halfway, digested, and then accepted to some degree or else disavowed wholeheartedly.”

Ha! Jeff is clear – a work of literature is not meant to engender a crowd or nation of people to feel a sense of kinship the way they feel kinship when singing the national anthem at a hockey game. Not at all – a high quality work of literature can sting, can cause outrage, can prompt us to question our fundamental assumptions and even our very sense of identity, both individually and collectively.

PART 1 WRITING ON WRITING
The Cruft of Fiction: Mega-Novels and the Science of Paying Attention by David Letzler

Cruft is a word taking from the world of programming referring to things like convoluted, poorly written computer code or wiki entries. Applied to literature, cruft refers to sections of a text that can be seen as pointless, gratuitous, excessive, too complicated for its own good. Think of mega-novels such as William Gaddis' JR, John Barth's The Soft-Weed Factor, Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves or that ultimate doorstop, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Such mega-novels contain page after page after page of things like lists, extraneous dialogue, or the minutiae of financial data, scientific data, you name it.

Those reviewers and critics who dislike cruft write in a similar spirit of Jonathan Frazen's scathing essay of William Gaddis, Mr. Difficult. But David Letzler and Jeff Bursey take exception. Here's a key Letzler quote: “By creating a counterfeit world too expansive to process, what they (the authors of meta-novels) satirize is the limits of their readers' own minds.” And Jeff notes “it is important to stress that regard for writing as an art”, thus “cruft is not a flaw”. Indeed, Jeff continues: “Often, but not necessarily, cruft aims to help us consider the greater purpose of linguistic inventiveness."

PART 2 FICTION AND NON-FICTION REVIEWS
Kjersti A. Skomsvold The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am

A novel by a thirty-something Norwegian author that's written as a long monologue delivered by an elderly widow by the name of Mathea Martinsen who has had one remarkable thing happen in her life: back when she was a schoolgirl out on the school yard, she was struck by lightning.

A trio of quotes from the review:

“What we have is a study in willful isolation and a collection of often banal thoughts that become something higher, by virtue of the author's patience (and perhaps our own).”

We are put into the mind of someone who deliberately estranges herself from others or has been estranged; the book doesn't contain an explanation that would satisfy the curiosity. And there's no reason for it to do so. Without round characterization or background we are adrift, or more accurately, encouraged to see Mathea in isolation.”

“Perhaps Mathea doesn't have a sense of humour and merely expresses herself in ways we categorize as humourous. Her contentment at staying home and doing a bit of housework now and then rather than, for example, walking through a park or working underlines her emotional distance from people; her seemingly humourous remarks may in fact be very straightforward ones that lack emotional content. How they sound to us consequently would be different from what Mathea means to communicate.”

The way Jeff provides an overview of Skomsvoid's authorial voice and digs into the detail of the author's novel with a focus on Mathea's psychological states brings to mind a quote from another essay included in the book, Beyond the Blurb: On Critics and Criticism by Daniel Green. “Like Green, when reading Wood (literary critic James Wood) I'm conscious that he is reducing the work of literature down to one preferred method of approach, that this is ungenerous to those who think in alternate ways, and that the aim of making anything different conform to a critical perspective rather than choosing to learn something new is to limit oneself needlessly.” Reading this review and all the other reviews collected here, this is the difference that makes all the difference: Jeff opens himself completely to the author's vision, no matter how radical, and this openness gives Jeff's reviews an undeniable freshness.

Other authors in this section of book reviews include, for example, Evelyn Hampton, Michelle Tea, Larry Foundation, Lance Olson, Harry Mullish, Anne Garréta, Félix Fénéon, Harry Mathews, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Merilyn Simonds, Olga Tokarczuk and Gina Frangello.

PART 3 INTERVIEWS
It Is Not a Novelist's Job to be Merciful: An Interview with Sam Savage

Here's a batch of excerpts from this 2015 interview Jeff conducted where American author Sam Savage shares his reflections on a number of topics:

On what he rebelled against during his teenage years -
“Against everything and nothing—mindless encompassing anger, a condition of such unrestraint that parents would not let their sons and daughters get in the car with me for fear I would entangle them in some catastrophe. It’s a miracle I got out of that alive.”

On his characters -
"The characters in the novels are searching for meaning in the world and in their lives. I regret if that sounds terribly old-school and cliché. Meaning is not something you can invent, something you can freely choose. If you can choose it you can unchoose it just as easily. It has come from without in some sense. It has to make a claim upon you. Nothing I have seen in the world as I understand it (the natural-scientific world) is capable of making such a claim, and all my protagonists experience that."

On illness -
"Illness is a world of its own. Everything is colored by it. I have outlived my prognosis by many years, but for decades the illness would not let me contemplate a “normal” life stretching into a vague and distant future. All my narrators are, one way or the other, in the process of dying."

On becoming a writer -
"I was eighteen when I first imagined becoming a writer. By the time I dropped out of college at twenty I saw writing as what I essentially did, everything else being ancillary to that. And so it has been ever since except for the five or six years I was obsessed with philosophy. I wrote a great deal, mostly poetry, but fragments of novels as well, and disliked what I wrote, and threw it out. I was not discouraged by rejections."

On the nature of writing -
"Genuine writing, writing that is true and good, is a product of compulsion. It possesses the shape and content it does because you can’t do it any other way. It took me a long time to feel that what I wrote was coming out of that kind of necessity."

On listening to music while writing -
"In fact I don’t understand how some people can do that. When I write I have rhythms in my head that are impossible to hear when other rhythms are being laid on top of them."

On the writing process -
"I know it isn’t going well when it stops going, when further paragraphs fail to appear. I struggle with it for a while – where “struggle” means staring out the window – and if nothing comes, I drop it. That’s the usual way. Lots of false starts. But now and then the character takes over. It’s a feeling many novelists have, I think – that the character, or the writer’s unconscious mind, takes command of the story to such an extent that you feel you are taking dictation."

On his future biographers -
"I am a very private person (weird in this day and age, I know). I don’t like the idea of strangers rummaging without restriction in my life, in my past, or in work that I thought not good enough to publish."

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Again, if you're a lover of literature after a fresh infusion of energy, this collection of essays, reviews and interviews is your book.

Assume A Position: Considerations and Interviews

Jeff Bursey

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