One Man's Impossible Quest to Read—and Review—the World
By Karan Mahajan
The Complete Review, "a selectively comprehensive, objectively opinionated survey of books old and new," sits on the margins of the literary world, where it has flourished for sixteen years. As of last Friday, according to an analog counter on the site's decidedly unglamorous homepage, it had reviewed three thousand six hundred and eighty-seven books, from a hundred different countries, originally published in sixty-eight different languages—an average of two hundred and thirty books a year. Virtually all of this criticism, and everything else on the Complete Review, is the work of Michael A. Orthofer, a fifty-one-year-old lawyer who was born in Graz, Austria, and brought up in New York City. Orthofer built the site—it took about five months; he coded it with basic HTML—on a P.C. at his home, in Manhattan, in 1999. For years, his name did not appear on the site, which claimed to be run by an "Editorial Board." In 2009, on the site's tenth anniversary, he began signing some reviews; the next year, he unmasked himself, discreetly, on the "About" page. In April, the retiring Orthofer will make his first serious bid for mainstream respectability, by publishing a book with the Columbia University Press. "The Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction" is the culmination of his work so far, as well as a continuation and a promise.
"I've been reading since the age of six," Orthofer told me on a visit to the Metropolitan Museum this fall. Raised by his mother, a painter and interior designer who had left her marriage in Graz to move West, Orthofer, as a child, would walk from his home in Gramercy Park to browse beloved bookstores such as the Barnes & Noble Annex on Eighteenth Street. During summers in Austria, with his father and extended family, he started reading in German. His father "wrote for the cabaret in Austria and also published satirical books," Orthofer told me. He has the measured way of speaking that people with disappearing accents sometimes develop, and—with his goatee, tufts of white hair, and yellow-tinted glasses—the air of a graduate student. I first contacted him in 2004, asking him if I could write for the the Complete Review; I was an undergraduate at Stanford at the time, and thought that the site was an institution, like The New York Review of Books. I was politely rebuffed. Years later, I e-mailed to ask if I could send him a galley of my first novel. He already had it, he replied—he had picked up an advance review copy for sale at the Strand, for $1.49. He went on to review the book, giving it a B, and later e-mailed to soften the blow. "Bs always have something going for them," he explained, while a C grade indicates "steer-clear territory." All books on the site get a rating from A+ to F, part of the site's endearing, Robert-Christgau-like fustiness.
Orthofer majored in comparative literature in college, at Brown, where he got his degree in three years (and nearly completed a second major, in political science). He went to Japan for six months, trying (and failing) to learn Japanese, and then to Vienna, for a year, to study physics and "to get a feel for the European university system." It was at this point in our conversation, sitting with him on a bench in a blur of Cézannes in the Met, that I began to feel I had stumbled into a Sebald novel. But after that year in Austria Orthofer returned to New York and did what good American comp-lit majors do: he enrolled in law school. He tried Europe again after graduating—the Wall had just come down—but ultimately settled in New York City, and began practicing law.
Orthofer had the idea for the Complete Review shortly after the Internet became widely available in people's homes. He had been reading nearly five books a week since high school—two hundred and fifty books a year, about eight thousand over his lifetime, in English, German, and French—and he had an urge to share his enthusiasms, as well as to make a record of his reading. He also saw an opportunity in the links that the Internet provided: if a book was reviewed in ten papers in three languages, why not summarize each review, and bring them all together on a single page? This kind of aggregation was arguably more fashionable then than it is now; no one since has attempted a literary project of similar scope, which Orthofer attributes to the Internet's fragility, and the speed at which links rot. The first snapshot of the site on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine shows a site that is textual, stylish, and very much of its time—an amateur's attempt at professionalism, conceding to the demands of slow dial-up connections. In the decade and a half since, the site's design has changed not at all: the beige background, the blue underlined links, the Jackson Pollock-inflected banner, the pixelated GIFs—they're all the same. Orthofer says he hasn't had the time to update it and that he is proud of how fast the site loads.
When it went live, the Complete Review had forty-five books under review, among them Carlos Fuentes's "The Crystal Frontier" (C), Hilary Mantel's "The Giant, O'Brien" (B-), and Cynthia Ozick's "The Puttermesser Papers" (A+). There was, already, a decidedly highbrow European-modernist slant. In 2002, Orthofer cut down his law work and began to dedicate himself wholly to the site; by 2003, he had reviewed more than a thousand books. Through the Amazon Associates program, which gives a percentage kickback to a site for purchases made by users coming from it, Orthofer started making some money for his efforts, in 2004. The site appeared on Time's list of the "50 Coolest Websites 2005," an award that is still proudly displayed on its entrance page. Traffic swelled to eight thousand visitors a day.
"I can't imagine not doing it," Orthofer told me. "A day in which I don't read or write, I have trouble falling asleep." His goal is to read a book a day, though he confesses that this is "unrealistic." He works on weekends, too, and has written four novels that are in the drawer. His main interests, according to the site, are inline roller-skating in Central Park and building snow sculptures, some of which are big enough that he carves staircases inside them to get to the top. When he tires of working, he steps out to a library or bookstore, "to see, be around books." Last year, and this year, he worked through Christmas.
Orthofer's project has the self-swallowing pattern of a Borges story: if you set out to read the world, how can you stop? Though the site calls itself a "survey of books old and new," it is driven by an antiquarian zeal for record-keeping, with titles under review indexed by nationality, genre, and several other categories. It is as if Orthofer is building a snow sculpture or wunderkammer of literature on par with the completist masterpieces he admires. He reads not just wide but also deep, engaging again and again with such literary giants as Naguib Mahfouz, Juan Goytisolo, and A. S. Byatt. To curl up inside the Complete Review is to feel comfortable with world literature—to not feel it as a foreign. In a hilariously detailed review that he issues annually, like the director of a large company, Orthofer reflects on which languages he's reviewed the most from (English, French, Spanish), where the site's visitors reside (New York, London, Los Angeles—and New Delhi), and why he isn't reading enough women (just fifteen per cent of the authors under review). He frets about his eclecticism, but is also proud of his international stature. (In a self-published memoir, "The Complete Review: Eleven Years, 2500 Reviews—A Site History," he notes that "one of the first press-mentions" of the site was in the Bangkok Post.) He writes the reviews in the mornings, in his small Upper East Side apartment, with its piles of books (about four thousand, he says), and at night he writes a gossipy blog called the Literary Saloon, where he ponders, for instance, the purpose of a Punjabi literary prize not based in Punjab, and the possible reasons for a lack of translations from Ethiopia.
The goal of Orthofer's upcoming book, "The Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction," is to reveal the "elusive" overarching trends of world literature. It serves as a relaxed, riverine guide through the main currents of international writing, with sections for more than a hundred countries on six continents. Portuguese fiction, according to Orthofer, is "inward looking," a surprising quality, he thinks, for a country that was once "the seat of an outsized empire." The Spanish have a predilection for books about books, and have experienced "a remarkable explosion of popular historical fiction." Publishing flourished for a while in Zimbabwe after it became an independent state, in 1980. Chinese novelists, free of the restrictions of the Mao era—"an average of only a dozen new novels a year appeared from 1949 through 1976"—display "a sense of transgression in showing greater concern for the individual." In Singapore, there is a rash of writing about sex and violence. And check out Indonesian author Habiburrahman El-Shirazy's "Ayat-Ayat Cinta" ("The Verses of Love"), if you want a "romance novel that adheres closely to Islamic principles."
Orthofer makes the usual complaints against mainstream publishing for ignoring books in translation, and he provides overviews of the publishing scenes in each country under discussion. But you can sense his hunger to get to the books themselves. And, despite the occasional upwelling of reviewer-ese (Irvine Welsh's stories "have a striking immediacy," and so on), he is quite good on the books. He points out, for instance, that Naipaul's protagonists are nearly always "overwhelmed," and that his works are studies of "contemporary anomie," a nice (and accurate) break from the conventional wisdom about Naipaul's stately omniscience. Sebald's novels, in contrast to the works of his German contemporaries, are untouched by national reunification, Orthofer observes. He recommends "Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals," by Ivorian author Ahmadou Kourouma, as one of "funniest satirical novels to come out of Africa." He can go deep into cultures, brandishing the sort of warnings about Chetan Bhagat and Vikas Swarup that an Indian critic might offer. And he unearths wonderful old stories, such as the odd tale of the Romanian author Mircea Eliade and the Indian author Maitreyi Devi, who each published a book, forty years apart, about an affair they had in Calcutta, in 1930, when Eliade was twenty-one and Devi was sixteen.
It is out of such encounters, of course, that world literature has always been born. Shakespeare remixed Boccaccio. Dostoevsky loved Dickens. Marquez said, "Graham Greene taught me how to decipher the tropics." Mohandas Gandhi, a brave and direct writer of Gujarati prose, came to many of his ideas reading Tolstoy, who came to his ideas from Schopenhauer, who said that the work that influenced him the most was the Upanishads. As an émigré and a transplant, a person divided between worlds, Orthofer is in an ideal position to chronicle such encounters today. He is, on some level, neither here nor there, and he has chosen, through his reading, to be everywhere.
Sign up for the daily newsletter.Sign up for the daily newsletter: the best of The New Yorker every day.
| Evernote helps you remember everything and get organized effortlessly. Download Evernote. |
No comments:
Post a Comment