Above is video of the reaction of José Saramago to the filmed version of his book Blindness.

Said film got mixed, but mostly negative, reviews. Saramago reacts to it by wiping away tears.

“Didn’t he notice? Couldn’t he see what all the folks on Rotten Tomatoes saw? Did he have a blind spot for his own work? Did his ego throw a towel over the bad and only give him the ability to see the big budget, the marketing campaign, the big stars, the ‘serious Hollywood business’ that his book became?”

This feels cynical. Feels to me like the thing that is there in the greatest of artists is a surplus of gratitude. Like maybe we should all acknowledge all engagement made by anybody with the sort of gratitude that makes one tear up like that.

Like maybe when someone takes the time to make a movie of our work, good or bad or whatever, all we should feel is gratitude.

Like maybe when someone reviews our work, good or bad or whatever, all we should feel is gratitude.

Maybe if we were better people, we’d feel nothing but gratitude. Maybe if I was a better person, I’d feel nothing but gratitude.

I wish I was a better person. Youtube makes me wish I was a better person. I might be a better writer then, too.

This weekend on a trip to the New College of Florida, the most excellent Alexis Orgera and I got into a mini-discussion of our love for a good well-written mystery novel, one that asks more questions than it answers, and that doesn’t necessarily open and shut doors as much as it does fund eerie intricate descriptions and aura with a subtle pull that keeps you running along inside it. It seemed hard to think of a lot of books that fall into this category, though I recommended two I’ve loved in the past few years, Freidrich Dürrenmatt’s The Assignment (which I copped from a recommended list by the also mystery-making master Brian Evenson), and Jose Saramago’s The Double.

The Assignment is particularly interesting for its form, in that it is a set of chapters that are all one sentence, written to correspond with the movements of a piece of music that he composed the book to, I believe in a very short time, and yet the intricate form and wonderful sentences never falter from being a page turner. Saramago’s work as a whole, even when not based on premises so mysterious as the one in The Double (a man becomes obsessed with a minor character in a series of films who looks exactly like him, who he then begins to trace).

There is also Robbe-Grillet, and some of Paul Auster (I particularly love the mapmaking and patterns in the New York Trilogy and Oracle Night) and Dennis Cooper’s books have a distinguished mysterious pull. I am trying to think of more, here without my books.

What are some great mystery-style novels, pulp or literary, or ones that use that constantly updating confusion/terror/detective narrative drive to fuel their heart?

David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistess

William Gass, Omensetter’s Luck

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

Amy Hempel, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom

Dennis Cooper, Period

William Vollmann, The Rifles

Cormac McCarthy, Suttree

Jose Saramago, The Double

Gordon Lish, Epigraph

Barry Hannah, Ray

Brian Evenson, The Wavering Knife

Robert Coover, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.

Nicholson Baker, The Fermata

Diane Williams, Some Sexual Success Stories: Plus Other Stories in Which God Might Choose to Appear

Don Delillo, End Zone

This list, of course, is somewhat arbitrary in its compiling, as I just jotted down the first 15 towers that occurred to me, and there are many others that could have, should have appeared on this list, a list that likely could go to at least 30, maybe 50, and especially had I included authors with smaller yet still growing bodies of work. Here I stuck to people who mostly have published at least 8 books so far (I think here only one of them has less than that) (and if I opened beyond that this list would be easily twice as long right off the bat), and with a dearth of poets as I am not quite as done up in that area as in fiction, and therefore this list also clearly reflects my taste more than would a neutral and objective list of towering authors (i.e. a lot of people would easily switch out Lish for, say, John Ashbery, etc., or perhaps Diane Williams for J.M. Coetzee or Cynthia Ozick or John Barth): this therefore is more those who I feel towering among my own mind, in my history, but who also clearly have made their mark across the world at large. Feel free to comment and let me know all of those I left out, or make your own list, etc.

David Markson

William Gass

Thomas Pynchon

Amy Hempel

Dennis Cooper

William T. Vollmann

Cormac McCarthy

Jose Saramago

Gordon Lish

Barry Hannah

Brian Evenson

Robert Coover

Nicholson Baker

Diane Williams

Don Delillo