Everything went pear-shaped

I recently read Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada, the story of a German couple’s quixotic campaign of resistance against the Nazis. Published last year, the book was a big success for Melville House Press. Primo Levi praised it (and Melville House made creative use of his testimonial) and there is much to say about how it conveys the experience of living as an ordinary German under Nazi rule.

Michael Hoffman’s translation of Every Man Dies Alone is mostly unremarkable. It renders a plainspoken book about working-class people, con men, and criminals in workmanlike no-frills English. But one sentence jumped out at me as I read it: “Everything went pear-shaped.”

What an interesting phrase, I thought. This is a good example of quirks in the original language that should be preserved. But when I read some comments on the book at Amazon, I saw that someone had noticed the same phrase (let it not be said that close reading is a thing of the past!) and complained about it as a “1990s Britishism.”

Sure enough, it’s a British phrase and not a German one, and it means the opposite of what I had thought.

Pears are smooth and rounded, so I figured that for something to go pear-shaped must mean that it goes smoothly and easily.

Not at all. “Pear-shaped” refers to something that has gone seriously awry. The phrase may derive from a lopsided loop by an airplane, a distorted aircraft engine, or the shape of a crashed plane. (Many of the proposed sources are aeronautical.) It may come from the shape of a collapsing balloon, a glassblower’s effort gone wrong, or a metal bearing that has worn unevenly. But wherever it comes from, it’s not good. 

Marketing smarter (not more expensively)

For some time, Dennis Johnson at the energetic Brooklyn publisher Melville House has been asking this question about Hans Fallada’s novel Every Man Dies Alone.

“How do you market a book written in a foreign language by an author who’s now dead, that was originally published 60 years ago, and has been overlooked by mainstream publishing ever since?”

Here’s one of his most creative answers to that question. As I saw in my brief career as an assistant bookseller, publishers print and distribute thousands of copies of Advance Reader’s Copies or ARCs for forthcoming books. Yet although the purpose of these ARCs is to drum up attention and enthusiasm, they are generally very boring. Title, author, and publishing details are printed on a light blue paper cover, and that’s that.

Melville House has shown that you can grab the attention you need not by spending any more but just by being a little bit different. Of course, being different can be scary and involves some risk—the risk that you will annoy people who are used to getting their ARCs the same old way. But in this case it paid off.

Even better, to my mind, is that it paid off by using a testimonial. Seth Godin argues in Purple Cow and elsewhere that what’s needed to cut through the noise in today’s media is a genuine voice.

Real testimonials from real people (not testimonials cooked up by the marketing department) can do that—especially when they come from a voice as significant as Primo Levi’s.

A tourist in Queens

Last weekend, while Jenn was in Ireland, I took the 7 train to Queens to check out the panorama of New York City at the Queens Museum of Art. (Photo is by Scott Gordon Bleicher. Here’s a bigger version.)

The panorama fills a room the size of a high-school auditorium, and you view it by going up a gradually sloping walkway that takes you from Inwood down to Battery Park, past the Statue of Liberty, over part of Staten Island (which you view through a glass floor), then around Coney Island and into the farthest reaches of Queens and the Bronx.

If you’re a tourist I imagine this must be overwhelming, but even if you’ve lived here for a few years the model reinforces the epic scale of the place, your own insignificance, and how little of it you’ve probably managed to see. There are all kinds of trivia to know, but the ones I remember are that the Empire State Building is 15 inches high, and that the major bridges are the most accurate element, each one painstakingly cast in bronze (then apparently painted white—why?).

While I was in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, I took in the other major sites: the Unisphere, the New York Hall of Science with the real rockets outside it, and the modest but pleasant Queens Zoo, featuring the animals of the Americas. My favorite animal was one I hadn’t heard of: a miniature deer called the pudu.

Celebrating squirrels

I was pleased to see that an article in the Times, celebrating the familiar gray squirrel, was one of the most popular items in the paper. (Photo is borrowed from this blog.)

The article mentioned the squirrel’s kinship with my favorite animal, the woodchuck, as well as its skill as a hoarder: “They’ll gather acorns and other nuts, assess which are in danger of germinating and using up stored nutrients, remove the offending tree embryos with a few quick slices of their incisors, and then cache the sterilized treasure for later consumption, one seed per inch-deep hole.”

Thoreau also paid tribute to the squirrel’s skill with seeds.

January 25, 1856
If you would be convinced how differently armed the squirrel is naturally for dealing with pitch pine cones, just try to get one off with your teeth. He who extracts the seeds from a single closed cone with the aid of a knife will be constrained to confess that the squirrel earns his dinner. It is a rugged customer, and will make your fingers bleed. But the squirrel has the key to this conical and spiny chest of many apartments. He sits on a post, vibrating his tail, and twirls it as a plaything.

But so is a man commonly a locked-up chest to us, to open whom, unless we have the key of sympathy, will make our hearts bleed.

No wonder George Templeton Strong was so fond of his pet squirrel, a melanistic variety of the gray.

Swords & Roses

Now and then while reading about American literature of the 1920s, I’ve run across references to Joseph Hergesheimer, often mentioned in the same breath as Hemingway and Fitzgerald. And in used bookstores I’ve sometimes seen old copies of his novel Java Head.

My curiosity finally overcame my inertia enough to look into who this man was. According to Wikipedia, “Hergesheimer’s reputation fluctuated wildly in his own lifetime, from a peak of acclaim and popularity in the 1920s to almost total obscurity by the time of his death.... Tastes changed decisively in the 1930s ... with both critics and writers favoring a more terse, tough-guy style.”

But remarkably, “When asked in 1962 what was his favourite American novel, Samuel Beckett replied ‘one of the best I ever read was Hergesheimer’s Java Head‘.” (For a thoughtful piece on Hergesheimer and the difference between flowery writing and writing that is simply bad, see The Simpleton.)

The New York and Brooklyn libraries don’t have any copies of Java Head that can be checked out, but Brooklyn was able to find me a copy of Swords & Roses, published by Knopf in 1929. I had thought this was a collection of short stories about the Civil War, but instead it’s a work of nonfiction: a kind of love letter to the Confederacy, featuring mini-biographies of figures like Generals Johnston, Beauregard, and Jeb Stuart, as well as Confederate naval hero John Newland Maffitt.

The first essay, “The Deep South,” gives a hint of why Hergesheimer was admired for his descriptive writing, and why Clifton Fadiman said he was “deficient in mere brain-power.” Hergesheimer is describing the great plantation houses of the antebellum South.

There were excessively fine houses, houses with the woodwork, the stair rails, of rosewood; with marble columns and classic ballrooms, elaborate marble mantels and Florentine mosaics; with all the door knobs and window catches and light brackets run from pure silver.... The wells were so deep that the water, drawn in a cedar bucket, was cold as ice water. Perishable food was lowered into them. The wells were haunted, they were the subject of negro legend; but the legends were all beneficent; when the slaves slowly drew up the water they commonly sang. Their songs and the sound of the winding chains were a part of the early spring morning. There were dippers at the wells—gourds for the negroes, beautifully wrought silver for white people. The negroes, it is conceivable, were not more unhappy than the whites; they were negroes, remember, on plantations, in the country; in a country that was seldom cold. They worked in the fields, or in the house, and slept in small cabins. They were, within the rigid fact of their slavery, free—they had no responsibility, they had no debts, and when they were old they were safe: they cleaned the ornamental brasses, they tended the making of tallow candles, polished and filled the lamps, and with soft cloths rubbed brilliant the cut prisms, the teardrop prisms and the pendentive prisms of the girandoles and crystal chandeliers.

Not bad, right? Who wouldn’t want to be a slave when you could drink ice-cold well water from a gourd, and polish the pendentive prisms of the girandoles with a soft cloth?