A Chronicler in the Nobel's Sights

The word in recent days was that an "investigative journalist" might be in line -- with Alice Munro, the eventual winner, and Haruki Murakami, the perennial favorite of late -- to win the Nobel literary prize this year. But investigative journalists, as a rule, tend not to be great writers (an enviable wordsmith Bob Woodward is not), much less to produce anything approaching literature. Was it possible that the media was, in its usual makeshift way, trying to describe some sort of a modern-day chronicler instead — and could it mean that even the Nobel committee recognizes the value of literary nonfiction?

That does appear to be the case. Far from a straight journalist, much less an investigative one, Svetlana Alexievich of Belarusia is very much a chronicler, one who is consciously trying to go far beyond journalism to create art out of her deployment and shaping of documentary material. In her own words:

I've been searching for a genre that would be most adequate to my vision of the world to convey how my ear hears and my eyes see life.I tried this and that and finally I chose a genre where human voices speak for themselves. Real people speak in my books about the main events of the age such as the war, the Chernobyl disaster, and the downfall of a great empire. Together they record verbally the history of the country, their common history, while each person puts into words the story of his/her own life. Today when man and the world have become so multifaceted and diversified the document in art is becoming increasingly interesting while art as such often proves impotent. The document brings us closer to reality as it captures and preserves the originals. After 20 years of work with documentary material and having written five books on their basis I declare that art has failed to understand many things about people.

But I don't just record a dry history of events and facts, I'm writing a history of human feelings. What people thought, understood and remembered during the event. What they believed in or mistrusted, what illusions, hopes and fears they experienced. This is impossible to imagine or invent, at any rate in such multitude of real details. We quickly forget what we were like ten or twenty or fifty years ago. Sometimes we are ashamed of our past and refuse to believe in what happened to us in actual fact. Art may lie but document never does. Although the document is also a product of someone's will and passion. I compose my books out of thousands of voices, destinies, fragments of our life and being.

Tim Park's Notes on Trains

Tim Parks, who has a story in the latest Paris Review and a new novel out, The Server, is apparently at work on something that sounds infinitely more interesting than either, a non-fiction project or chronicle that he described in the Quarterly Conversation in this way:

It’s a book compiled from very old notes I have collected over fifteen years, right up to the present, a book where Italy is understood through dealings with trains. Train journeys, ticketing, the way trains have changed, the history of Italian trains, and my personal and long history of commuting with Italian trains. So that could seem like a very light project. But, of course, trains are places where we meet people we don’t know, and where we see the whole social spectrum. You can’t not be aware of the immigrant situation in train stations, you can’t not be aware of first- and second-class citizens in trains. It’s really a book about my belonging in Italy, or not belonging maybe, and about all the immigrants trying to belong in the country, and this constant movement of modern capitalism to invest everything where people have credit cards and nothing where they don’t. And again it’s also very much about maps and territories, because being on a train is, very much moving into a mental space where you leave the territory behind and you start to zip back and forth between places. There was a Pope in the 1840s when there was first talk of introducing trains in Italy. And he completely banned them immediately in the Papal States, saying the problem with the train would be that people would be able to move rapidly from one place to another. They would start becoming detached from their roots, they would start to have double lives, they wouldn’t be under the control of their priests and wives. (laughs) How right he was! Your first impulse is to laugh and say, how ridiculous, but when you think about it, you realize he had a point. At least he did understand what the consequences would be and how trains are emblematic of a larger change that comes with modernity and mobility. Trains are part of that whole communication movement which is splitting us from where we are. We’re sitting here, but we’re taking a text message from back home, or we’re with a friend who is reading an e-mail on his iPhone from his lover or his wife.

Praising James Agee

Over at Open Letters, Liza Birnbaum offers an appreciation of James Agee and in particular of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which, despite its anti-art bias, is perhaps the most artistically ambitious chronicle ever written by an American writer.Unfortunately, Liza's piece does not address the topic of how influential Agee was as a stylist. How clearly and completely many passages in the Agee book anticipated by about 20 years Jack Kerouac's more celebrated style is, by itself, worthy of at least a lengthy essay. The old influence-anxiety may have led Kerouac to conceal or "forget" Agee's impact.

Geoff Dyer and the Exhaustion of Fiction

Even the supposedly avant-garde, or "experimental," novel appears stale when set beside the vitality of the contemporary versions of the chronicle form. As much is evident in this exchange in The Believer between Geoff Dyer, one of the best English-language chronicle writers today, and a former editor of his, Ethan Nosowsky:

GD: It seems to me that with someone like Sebald you really don’t know where you are, what those books of his are doing. And I like to think that something like that goes on with my books as well, and with Jeff in Venice. I mean, on every level it is posing the question of whether it’s really a novel.

BLVR: This makes me think of John Barth’s “The Literature of Exhaustion,” which argued that the novel of psychological realism had basically become a genre whose conventions had gone stale. But similarly, so many mediocre, supposedly experimental writers today are indebted to Barthelme and Pynchon and Borges and Calvino and Beckett and Kafka — and that kind of stuff has started to feel a little exhausted, too, in Barth’s sense. Any sophisticated reader who’s read these books sort of knows how they work—a story about the artifice of the story, or is this real or not, or is the narrator narrating or is he being narrated—I mean, all of these questions seem equally tired to me.

GD: And given the choice of that old-fashioned psychological realist novel or John Barth, I think we’d all go for the former.

BLVR: But it does seem that there are alternatives to either that I like to think that you’re exploring.

GD: Sure, I think I am, too. But not in that kind of “experimental” way.

Third Book of Roubaud's Great Chronicle

Over at The Complete Review, Michael Orthofer has favorably reviewed "Mathematics," the third installment of Jacques Roubaud's great chronicle that began with "The Great Fire of London" and continued with "The Loop." To his credit, Orthofer is astute enough to recognize the book as something other than a novel. He writes that "Mathematics" is "presented decidedly (or at least parenthetically, in the US edition) as: 'a novel', yet the first-person narrative is clearly autobiographical: it seems very much like a memoir of Roubaud's time at university, and then his military service. While creatively presented, there is little that is obviously fictional about it." In other words, it is a chronicle. Odd how many reviewers continue to do without a term (or without coining an alternative) which they so obviously need, choosing each time to describe the genre instead, usually at some length.

Frances Spufford Chronicle Gets Plenty of Ink

The New York Times has given its double-review treatment (one in the daily paper, another in the book review, and both raves) to "Red Plenty," a chronicle by Frances Spufford that came out a couple of years ago in England but has just been published in the United States by Graywolf Press, a well-intentioned but highly errant independent publisher with a dubious eye for indigenous literature (few if any of its American books have made much of a splash.) As usual with chronicles, reviewers are primarily concerned with just what kind of book it is, Andrew Meier calling it "a genre-bender — part novel, part history" and Dwight Garner, quoting the author's own tussle with explaining what he is up to, writes that the book is "not quite history and not quite fiction but something in between, a mongrel narrative in which an 'idea is the hero.' Those four words can make you scan for the exit signs." But though the subject of the chonicle could also not easily be less promising -- Soviet Russia in the 1950s and ’60s -- both reviewers were ravished by Spufford's creative treatment of it and the quality of his prose, Garner writing that he wanted, at the end of the first chapter, to give the author a standing ovation.

'Decidedly Not a Novel,' Writes Warren Motte

At World Literature Today, Warren Motte reviews Emmanuel Carrère's chronicle "Limonov" and accidentally offers up another usable definition of what a chronicle is: "decidedly not a novel (though it makes many gestures in the direction of the novel.)"

Motte's review is lukewarm, which may have something to with the fact that "Limonov" is indeed not a novel. He laments: "The fact that ["Limonov"] should win the Renaudot testifies to how embattled the very idea of the novel is on the contemporary cultural horizon, where in recent years that form has been influenced in key ways by genres once imagined to be quite distinct from it: biography, autobiography, testimony, travel writing, historiography, journalism, and so forth."

Actually, all those genres that Motte mentions, when married to novelistic strategies, tend to yield chronicles. The chronicle genre is undoubtedly on the rise, but this rise is taking place incognito, under the smuggling mantle of the novel, confusing (and often dismaying) reviewers and critics.

Motte is yet another critic sorely in need of discovering the term "chronicle" and of labeling a work as such when he finds it to be such, no matter what the publishers claim.

Jacques Roubaud's Masterpiece of Literary Nonfiction

Among the great chronicles that, for English-speaking readers, have been mislabeled as novels is Jacques Roubaud's "The Great Fire of London." Although he is an Oulipian, Rouabaud is a great admirer of the conventional, middle-brow novel, particularly in its British incarnations, so he almost certainly is under no illusion that his great avant-garde work fits into the genre. It is indeed a chronicle, but one of the most complex and artful ever composed - and one of the least-recognized masterpieces of modern literature. For many years only the first volume was available in English, but a couple of years ago Dalkey Archive brought out another, "The Loop," and will soon release a third, "Mathematics:"

Nailing Robert Walser's Genre

The Guardian's Nicholas Lezard also got the genre right in his review of Robert Walser's "Berlin Stories." He writes: "You might remember that last week I compared islands to novels. It occurs to me that cities are, by a similar token, collections of short stories, or feuilletons like this."

A feuilleton is, of course, an alternative, French term (though it is also used in Germany) for what is otherwise known as a cronica, or chronicle.

Lezard was very taken with Walser's chronicles. He writes: "In this unbelievably delightful and timeless collection of short pieces, we can recover the delight of ordinary, uncondescending appreciation, places where the vacant-minded stroller can take 'peculiar pleasure'. The tram, the theatre, the train station, the park."

Pascal Quignard's Roving Genre Taunts a Reviewer

The concept of nonfiction literature has become so alien in the English-speaking world that it is always amusing to watch a critic tussling with an example of it, as happens in Three Percent's favorable review of Pascal Quignard's "Les Ombres Errants," now available in translation as "The Roving Shadows."

The reviewer, hilariously, spends much of his piece simply trying, and failing, to classify the work, getting into it with the very first sentence: "Les Ombres Errantes won the Prix Goncourt—possibly the most prestigious award a French literary work can receive—despite the fact that it is not a novel.[Bold emphasis ours.]" Really, despite the fact that it is not a novel? Scandalous!

Then, in the second paragraph, comes this gem: "Indeed, it is difficult to say which genre of writing it actually fits. On the one hand the book contains many examples of sensuous description and personal memoir—you know, the type of thing one expects to find in a literary work." And by "literary work" the reviewer obviously means fiction. It is highly irregular, in the reviewer's view, that one should encounter such writing in a work of nonfiction.

And the reviewer goes on, confessing perplexity: "The uniqueness of this work’s style presents a problem to the reader and the critic. Against which body of works should one judge The Roving Shadows, then, literature or critical theory?"

Not that the reviewer is seriously interested in judging it against any body of work (though it does sound impressive that he should wish to.) And in the end he resolves his literature-or-critical theory classification quandary with this hilarious compromise: "the work is best classified as a distillation of critical theory into literary form."

So, has the reviewer decided that the book is, after all, literature despite not being a novel? Not so fast. "For this reason," he writes, "it is an important work, an interesting work, and a landmark in French literary/philosophical thought."

Robert Walser 'Stories' Fail to Deceive One Reviewer

Kudos to The Sunday New York Times Book Review for correctly suspecting that Robert Walser's "Berlin Stories" (see here,) issued by the New York Review of Books as a fiction title, are not really stories, not really fiction -- although it is in the Fiction Chronicle column that The Times chose to review the book. When Jan Stuart describes the book's offerings as "essayish 'stories'" you can feel the reviewer groping for the term that has gone missing from the English-language dictionary of literary genres: the chronicle. Which is ironic since Jan Stuart is the author of a book with the terms in its title: "The Nashville Chronicles: The Making of Robert Altman’s Masterpiece."

Fiction Tyranny Claims New Robert Walser Book

That dreadful, crazy If-It's-Literatue-It-Must-Be-Fiction compulsion strikes again in American publishing. The victim this time is Robert Walser's "Berlin Stories," which has just been published by the New York Review of Books, as part of its NYRB Classics collection. To judge by the one so-called story excerpted here,my suspicion that these would not really be stories but fuelleitons or chronicles was quite justified. The excerpt, "Good Morning, Giantess!" is in fact a classical chronicle, amounting to a poetically celebratory description of morning in the city, as people are heading in to work. Not a hint of fiction-making in it. Then why, why bury this under the "safe," homogenizing mantle of fiction rather that use it to help clear a much-need space in our culture for literary nonfiction?

The Evolution of Padget Powell

One of America's most interesting writers, Padget Powell, has brought out a new book, "You & I." But so far it has been released only in England, where his most enthusiastic readers are to be found. Is the title a nod to another innovative American writer, Nicholson Baker, whose first venture into the chronicle form was entitled "U and I: A True Story" and concerned his unhealthy fixation on his writing idol, John Updike? Powell's new work apparently is a run-on dialogue between two old codgers, and though called a novel it is described as by no means a conventional one. Of course, that probably means that it is labeled a novel only for convenience. Certainly, Powell's previous work, "The Interrogative Mood," was more chronicle than novel, consisting entirely of questions that were creative enough but in which it was hard to detect any out-and-out fiction-making. A good interview with Powell, in which he explains how he evolved from a "cuddly" realist into the sort of writer he is, can be found at the Guardian.

A New Chronicle From Geoff Dyer

After detouring back into fiction (ostensibly) with "Jeff in Venice," the very good Geoff Dyer returns to his exploration of the chronicle form with "Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room." To be released February 21 in the United States, it is concerned with the themes of Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 science fiction film "Stalker." In the book, Geoff Dyer attempts, according to the publicity material, "to unlock the mysteries of a film that has haunted him ever since he first saw it thirty years ago. As Dyer guides us into the zone of Tarkovsky’s imagination, we realize that the film is only the entry point for a radically original investigation of the enduring questions of life, faith, and how to live." It is a narrative, the publicist assures us, "that gives free rein to the brilliance of Dyer’s distinctive voice, acute observation, melancholy, comedy, lyricism, and occasional ill-temper."

Ernaux: It's Not Fiction

In France, Annie Ernaux's collected works have been published under the title "Writing Life." Ernaux, best known among English-speakers for her book "A Simple Passion," is one of the very best chroniclers out there, taking for her sole subject a sort of unembarrassed anthropology of the self. She has often pointed out that what she writes should not be misconstrued as any sort of fiction or even storytelling. To do so is to deny the novelty and rigor of her art, the way in which, in her short books, she deploys a lean but ingenious structure and style to make simple recountings of personal facts and observations sing. Yet publishers and reviewers on this side of the pond,incapable as they are of accepting the fact that fact can be artful, or lacking a labeled category into which to slot such work, insist on classifying her book as novels or novellas. (Even the usually more enlightened but fiction-loving M.A. Orthofer over at The Complete Review does so.)

Dillon on Koestenbaum

In the Guardian, Brian Dillon reviews Wayne Koestenbaum's book, "Humiliation," which he calls "an eloquent, fearless and frequently hilarious essay on the 'whimpering beast inside each of us', and on the urge to exploit its vulnerability." Incidentally, "Humiliation" in the UK is published by "the home of the essay," Notting Hill Editions.

Prose Sans Story

We have traditionally turned to poetry for the artful rendering of true experience and sensation. Why cannot prose offer the same? Why do we have to saddle artistic prose with the trappings of fiction? If anything is worth importing into a fiction then it is worth writing about directly. Prose should be read for its own sake, not as a medium to a story.

De Botton on Religion

Alain de Botton's newest, "Religion for Atheists: A non-believer's guide to the uses of religion," is coming out in March. Interestingly, the author, on Twitter, is offering a "dinky" signed nameplate if you tweet him a signed receipt proving that you have bought his book.

Michael Hoffman on Joseph Roth

A biography of Joseph Roth, a great chronicler who also wrote the odd novel, is coming out. Its author is the revered translator, Michael Hoffman. "Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters" is due out this month from W. W. Norton.

A Convergence of Chroniclers

One of the best collection of chronicles out there is Cees Nooteboom's Nomad's Hotel. In it you will find a chronicle about his pilgrimage to visit another great chronicler, Tim Robinson, author of the Proust-sized, sui generis The Stones of Aran. Robinson's new book is Connemara: a Little Gaelic Kingdom, which is reviewed in The New Statesman by none other than Brian Dillon, the author of In the Dark Room and The Hypocondriacs and the best chronicler to emerge in England after Alain de Botton.

The last paragraph of Dillon's review can fairly stand as a detailed definition of the chronicle genre:

As ever with Robinson, the pleasures of his vagrant, exacting style are many. The seductive accumulation of stories or topographical details frequently culminates in reflections at once abstract and lovely, as in his concluding remarks about the intricacy of the coast: "The natural world is largely composed of such recalcitrant entities, over which the geometry of Euclid, the fairy tale of lines, circles, areas and volumes we are told at school, has no authority." Long, digressive tramps through natural or cultural history terminate in aphoristic clarity: "There are places where place proliferates . . . There is no overarching story other than the dominance of story itself." Except that, for Robinson, such sudden vistas and insights are preludes to the renewed work of immersion in place. As he wrote in his diary 30 years ago: "I could wander onwards up here for ever."

Errol Morris and W.G. Sebald

The documentary-maker Errol Morris's book, "Believing Is Seeing (Observations of the Mysteries of Photography)," has been getting on quite a few Best of 2011 book lists, including those of The New York Times and The Washington Post. It does sound like an interesting project, and it is always good to see examples of the chronicle's close cousin, the essay, do well in the marketplace. But, to judge by a few excerpts from it, the New York Times reviewer went a little overboard when he stated that "Morris's book feels less like traditional photography criticism than like the novels of W. G. Sebald, which are similarly obsessed with truth, memory and war." It would indeed be like Sebald -- if Sebald were the sort of writer who cared as little about the art of prose as someone who is principally a filmmaker. Morris's talky writing does not rise above the standard of your average newspaper column or blog.

Stunt Journalism and the Chronicle

Literature's genres are echoed in writings' lesser forms, and like a novel, short story or essay, a chronicle can be a piece of writing that does not exactly qualify as literature. A recent example of this is reviewed in this past Sunday's New York Times Book Review: "Man Seeks God," by Erik Weiner. The concept of Weiner's chronicle does have a lot of literary potential, but he does not come close to fulfilling it, instead turning out a piece of stunt travel journalism. It has the basic flaw of most books derived from a journalistic, rather than literary, inspiration. As Joshua Hammer writes, Weiner's "quest for a religious identity isn’t particularly convincing; in fact, it often seems less a heartfelt search than a device cooked up by an enterprising journalist and his editors, a way to get him on the road again. We never believe, for example, that Weiner is genuinely drawn to the spirit world of shamanism or the spooky ceremonies of modern-day witchcraft. His peripatetic approach doesn’t allow for much depth."

Emmanuel Carrère's Chronicle Takes All

The chronicle is not only very much alive and well and living in France, its is beating all comers. Limonov, Emmanuel Carrère's chronicle which had already won the Renaudot prize, has proven the form's potential by beating even prize-winning novels to the Prix des prix littéraires -- the prize awarded to the best of the year's award-winning literary works.

How to Write About Literary Nonfiction

Sub-genres of the chronicle or the essay: the note, the fragment, the diary entry, the maxim, the aphorism, the anecdote, the column, the blog entry. Whether these constitute chronicles or essays depends, of course, on whether they are essentially observational (chronicles) or argumentative (essays.)

It would, I think, simplify book reviewers' lives to know this. It might even save them from succumbing to the sort of genre name-calling frenzy that obviously afflicted the writer of this unsigned piece at Littrix.de online. It's about what sounds like an interesting German book, Henning Ritter's "Notebooks," albeit one unlikely ever to be translated into English (but the site does have a bit of it translated and available in PDF form.)

Writes the reviewer (emphases mine) :

It is rare for the author's “I” to address the reader in any of the philosophical and political précis, reading notes, maxims, and anecdotes that have been compiled in his Notebooks. Ritter deals sparingly with autobiographical details and direct self-ascription, allowing them to dissolve almost entirely within the cosmos of his stupendous erudition. Rare as well are his commentaries on the conditions of our age. Over the course of more than four hundred pages, there are at best a dozen entries pertaining to concrete current events and cultural topics. The catastrophes and developments that now hold the world in suspense, or did only a few years ago, merely serve Ritter as keywords to fan out surprising historical or ideological interrelationships. To illustrate, in one passage he spans an arc from the cultural policies of the GDR to Germany’s age of small states. One of his longer entries, which begins by mentioning the September 11 attacks, turns out to be a trenchant commentary on the special theological problems surrounding Islamic intellectual Sayyid Qutb, who was executed in 1966. This book’s predominant perspective is that of looking into the past. As Ritter explains at the outset, he is presenting only a selection of his personal observations, about one tenth. The writing of the notations coincides roughly with the quarter century during which he set the standard, in an official capacity so to speak, for contemporary cultural debate—the years from 1985 to 2008 when he headed the humanities desk at Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. His notes served as the intellectual counterpoise his temperament required and were originally not intended for publication. Unfettered by the topical focus and reader orientation his position demanded, his writing allowed him to conquer the domain of associations and to soar intellectually; he was able to indulge himself with abandon and examine both well known and less known thinkers of bygone epochs in a way that was not in keeping with the times.


Two excerpts from the translated portion of Ritter's book:

According to Carl Schmitt, no human thought is safe from reinterpretation. This holds true for one's own thoughts as well. They are infinitely adaptable, and one must therefore protect them from one's own reinterpretations. Novelty has long ceased to be what it was at the beginning of the twentieth century—a shock that promised an increase in knowledge.

The idea that newness is authentic per se has lost some of its sheen. What once amounted to productive provocation of a customary way of viewing things, has turned into the custom of looking away whenever the promise of something new is held out. Novelty became repetitious the moment it turned into an artistic convention.

A Julian Barnes Chronicle

The Economist's More Intelligent Life.com has a nicely done chronicle by Julian Barnes concerning his visit to Sibelius's old house in Finland.

John Jeremiah Sullivan, James Wood and What We Talk About When We Talk About Essays

Reissuing a piece of magazine journalism in book form and calling it an essay adds literary cachet to it, making it seem indeed worthy of a place between book covers. I've noted this happening in the case of Joan Didion and now it's happening with John Jeremiah Sullivan and his book,"Pulphead."

I admit that I have not read Sullivan's book yet, but I suspect that although it is sub-titled "Essays," most of the magazine stories collected in it did not appear under that rubric in GQ and wherever else they were published. The pieces most often mentioned by reviewers do sound like they are indeed magazine stories -- i.e. narratives based on reportage.

An essay is, by definition, not a story, not a narrative. And if Sullivan's pieces do contain strong essayistic elements in them,and you do not wish to call them simply magazine stories, then you would have to call them chronicles. When a narrative turns essayistic, or an essay turns narrative, what you are reallly talking about is a chronicle.

Still, "essays" were what Sullivan or his publisher chose to call his pieces, and in I way I find this encouraging. It could mean that publishers have begun to realize that essays are not sales poison. Not too long ago, the conventional wisdom in publishing was that essays rated beneath even short stories among genres to be avoided.

Perhaps publishers have cottoned onto the fact that essays do indeed have literary cachet, so much so as to lead even an eminent literary critic like James Wood of the New Yorker to review Sullivan's magazine pieces as though they were indeed examples of the literary essay. (Of course, in getting the God-obsessed Wood's attention, it must have helped that one of Sullivan's stories was about a Christian rock concert.) Which works out to be unintentionally funny at times, because Wood seems unaware that many of the story-telling strategies that he remarks in Sullivan, including what he calls "the postmodernity" of showing us a story's workings, have long been hackneyed ploys in magazine writing (though I'm sure Sullivan is talented enough to have freshened them up a bit.)

Still, I would like to believe that Wood is correct when he writes in this review: "The contemporary essay has for some time now been gaining energy as an escape from, or rival to, the perceived conservatism of much mainstream fiction." Of course, when he talks about the contemporary essay he is really talking about the contemporary chronicle.

Pulphead: Essays
by John Jeremiah Sullivan

More on Joseph Roth

Having recently learned about Harry Mount and Notting Hill Editions (the Home of the Essay,) I explored their Web site to find that they publish a book about the great chronicler Joseph Roth ("Wandering Jew: The Search for Joseph Roth," by Dennis Marks) which is in itself a chronicle. Though, of course, Notting Hill doesn't call it that. What does the publisher call it? Presumably, since Notting Hill is the home of the essay, it considers the book an essay, but the promotional blurb avoids the label -- perhaps because Harry Mount has stated that an essay has to be shortish, not book-length. So the blurb reads: "In this revealing ‘psycho-geography’[inverted commas not mine], Dennis Marks makes a journey through the eastern border­lands of Europe to uncover the truth about Roth’s lost world. The result is a riveting and involving documentary that reunites Roth with his creative and spiritual landscape."

Jeffrey Eugenides Describes Joseph Roth's Chronicles

What I call a chronicle, the Portuguese, Spanish and, I believe, Italians call a cronica and the French (along with many other Europeans) a feuilleton. And one of the great masters of the chronicle/cronica/feuilleton was Joseph Roth. In fact, translator Michael Hoffman has argued that Roth's masterpieces were not his novels (of which I am no fan) but his chronicles, which he took very seriously and are indeed excellent. They are collected in English translation under the titles "What I Saw" and "Report From a Parisian Paradise." In the subtitle of the latter his pieces are, typically, misnamed essays. But in a New York Times review of "What I Saw," the writer, who is none other than the novelist Jeffrey Eugenides,  knows he is dealing with a different sort of animal. He writes: "A feuilleton is best described by what it isn't. It isn't news. It isn't the metro report. The opposite of an editorial, a feuilleton is descriptive, philosophical, meandering and poetically inclined. Though the word is French, the form reached its apogee in fin-de-siècle Vienna. An early master, Alfred Polgar, said, 'Life is too short for literature, too transitory for lingering description . . . too psychopathic for psychology, too fictitious for novels.' The feuilleton could never have prospered without the Viennese cafe, a place where the waiter brought over, along with your customary drink, your favorite newspaper. Roth wrote his first feuilletons in Vienna."

What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933
by Joseph Roth

Report from a Parisian Paradise: Essays from France, 1925-1939
by Joseph Roth

Will Self and the Essays That Are Travelogues That Are Columns That Are Fiction That Are Chronicles

Will Self is another fiction writer who has been increasingly drawn to the chronicle form. His "Walking to Hollywood" was picked as a "paperback of the year" by the Independent of London. Of course, the paper did not call it a chronicle. What did the paper call it instead? Lacking the mot juste, it obviously couldn't decide, writing: "The three essays collected in Walking to Hollywood are non-fictional travelogues that spiral slowly into abstraction, similar in many ways to the 'psychogeography' columns on which Will Self collaborated with Ralph Steadman." 

But even more confused is the book's American publisher, Grove Press, who calls it "a new and stunning work of fiction" in which "a British writer named Will Self goes on a quest through L.A. freeways." Astounding, American publishers' inability to believe that the reading public can cope with the notion of nonfiction that is written in a literary manner.

Solzhenitsyn and a Dubious Nod to the Genre

Finally, someone refers to the chronicle as a genre, even if he doesn't mean to flatter it.

In the Observer in England, reviewing Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Apricot Jam and Other Stories,  Adam Mars-Jones calls it "a posthumous collection of rather hefty, lumpen chronicles written in the 1990s – I say 'chronicles' rather than 'stories' because there's so little sign of the ruthless shaping the short form requires."

And good on you, Adam, for tilting against against the genre of the chronicle, which has become far too ubiquitous and successful. About time someone cut it down to size.