From The New Yorker:
The Croatian writer Dubravka Ugrešić, in an essay on the fickleness of the literary marketplace, discusses how she would dress up the classics of modern literature and submit them as book proposals to U.S. publishers. She makes a few alterations to “The Old Man and the Sea,” including stressing “the ecological aspect of the thing” and changing “the old man into a good-looking young Cuban exile, gay.” She finds success. A stab at “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is not so lucky: “ ‘Forget the contents!’ said the editor. ‘No one could possibly follow that story. But there’s no reason not to use that great title.’ ” Her whimsical essay is a bit inventive, Ugrešić admits, but she’s straightforward in her advice to would-be writers, that, unlike her, they should probably keep quiet about the absurdities of their chosen field, unless they seek to sever the branch they’re sitting on.
The hustle and randomness to literary success, its sense of interchangeability, are at the heart of a newly translated novella by Arthur Schnitzler, released by New York Review Books Classics last summer. Finished in 1895, the brilliant “Late Fame” concerns an aging Viennese civil servant who, virtually out of nowhere, is crowned a master poet by an eccentric coffeehouse group of striving writers and actors. The tale consists of little more than the man’s ascension and the orchestration of a public reading, yet in Schnitzler’s hands it becomes a distorted mirror onto the less-talked-about side of literary life—from workshopping to self-promotion, favor trading, and reviews. (“Was it even allowed,” the complacent and cipher-ish hero, Eduard Saxberger, reflects apropos of reviews, “to take a decent person who had done nothing wrong and treat him like this?”) Inwardly, Saxberger goes from feeling that life has passed him by to feeling awakened to his inborn specialness, that “he was indeed a poet!” The slim book that he bases this realization on, “The Wanderings,” was written more than thirty years ago, but never mind: it’s a good fit for the cultish and bickering Enthusiasm Society, whose members decry literary fashion and careerism while rallying around a conviction in their own criminally ignored gifts.
. . . .
The restless souls at the center of Schnitzler’s farce, mischievously and briskly delineated, were partly modelled on the group of writers known as “Young Vienna”: critics bring up names like Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Peter Altenberg, and Stefan George. But whatever human clay helped supply their quirks, the Enthusiasm Society amounts to a diverse repository of absurd writerly and creative types, reflected in their range of ages and specialties: in addition to poets, there’s a dramatist, two actors, a novelist, and a critic. “We are simply artists,” is how they are introduced to the pliant, clean-shaven Saxberger. Oblivious Romantics in a modernizing world, they say things like “I write what I have to,” “You, too, have been destroyed by the public,” and “I will permit myself to send you my ‘Zenobia’?” An oppressive heat and smokiness fills their favored coffeehouse. “I’ve been running around town all afternoon . . . something has to be done . . . people have to know about us,” an irritable ballad-writer declares, vocalizing the wider ache to be noticed. This being before social media, a solution is devised in the form of a reading. They find a site normally reserved for carnivals and small dances. Here, old literary work can mingle seamlessly with the unfinished, and the collective can be launched with a manifesto. (It’s titled “What We Want” and, in fact, airs one member’s grievances while being ghostwritten totally by another.) The plan is for Saxberger, benign and verifiably gray-haired, to bestow his would-be grandeur on this motley and largely unpublished troupe.
Link to the rest at The New Yorker