At the New York Times, Laura Cappelle reports on the debate over French author Emmanuel Carrère’s new memoir-novel, Yoga. He writes, in the final pages, about his ex-wife Hélène Devynck—which, she says, violates a legal agreement that he not present her as a character in his books without her consent. Carrère claims that he did not break the agreement: the passage in question is a quote from an earlier book, his memoir Lives Other Than My Own, in which Devynck features prominently. Yoga has sold more than 200,000 copies in France, and will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US.
n+1 has published a transcript of a lecture by Amit Chaudhuri titled “Why I Write Novels.” “Today, I think again of how I have devised situations in novel after novel: situations in which there’s no drama, but which, for me, try to convey great, if contained, excitement,” Chaudhuri states. “It’s the potential that this paradox has that probably draws me to the novel. I’m dependent on its structure and syntax—which otherwise bore me—to lead me to this excitement. By novelistic syntax I mean a kind of sentence without which the narrative’s grammar—that is, the rules by which it is comprehended—falls apart. I mean a sentence like, ‘He got off the car and walked to the door’; or ‘I looked out of the window’; or ‘It seemed as if she was about to say something.’ The novel is full of sentences like these. You barely notice them, but they comprise the tools with which the narrative progresses.”
Douglas Stuart’s novel Shuggie Bain is being adapted for television. Stuart will write the script.
Book Deals: Chuck Klosterman has sold a book on the nineties to Penguin Press. Mary L. Trump, the author of the best-seller Too Much and Never Enough, has sold a book about national trauma and current events to St. Martin’s Press. And in a deal rumored to be in the mid-six figures, Hafsah Faizal has sold two novels to Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Tomorrow (Tuesday) at 8 PM, the New York Public Library will host the New York Review of Books’ Robert B. Silvers Lecture, in which contributors will “look toward a future of resilience and renewal for New York.” Participants include Molly Crabapple, Deborah Eisenberg, Michael Greenberg, Hari Kunzru, and Jana Prikryl. The virtual event is free. You can register here.