New York, New York, U.S.A. 9/2/2008 5:59:00 AM
To Create A Little Flower Is The Labour of Ages: the Aphorist, the Nihilist & the Word-Anarchist of the City of Gustave is available@Stores.lulu.com/bestsellersbook
What do Hurricane Gustav and Rubin "Hurricane" Carter have in common? William Rubel, Paterson-born author of City of Gustave, a Columbia student who has written a hurricane of a novel.
Gustave was written when Rubel was a twenty-one-year old English Major at Columbia University, and was hailed by the late Raymond Kennedy as the best fiction by a Columbia student in over a decade. Author, William Rubel, compares it to hurricane Gustav:
“My book is a storm,” says Rubel, who is giving a presentation entitled Lao Tzu and Emily Dickinson: the cognitive basis of mystic poetics at Simon Frazer University in Vancouver, BC as part of the Annual conference of the Association of Graduate Liberal Studies: Culture, Consciousness and Nature — A Context for Climate Change (October 16-18). “Real books should contain a great deal of mental energy in condensed form. How fitting Gustave is finally touching down now, just as hurricane Gustav lands.When I was writing Gustave, I was frustrated by the lack of follow up by contemporary writers on the novels of Samuel Beckett, who was of course responding to Joyce, Dostoevsky, Kafka, but also Dante, the whole tradition of philosophical fiction.”
“Gustave is not one thousand pages long, like Ulysses, or like Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Sure it’s experimental, like those groundbreaking works, but it’s also minimalist, more in line with Beckett or with William Blake, who compressed the excess and the crazy wisdom of their artistic vision. Since Ulysses, people have been having difficulty figuring out how to write, with the result that we’re seeing a sad return to the conventional. Joyce broke with the classic form, but always in response to classic form, so imitators of Joyce have largely failed, because they’re simply responding to Joyce. The point is to assimilate Joyce’s wild excess back into classic form, not spit it out altogether.”
Asked about the influence of Columbia on his novel, and about Jewish influence, particularly Derrida, Rubel responds:
“Yes, well, hopefully, reading the book is a bit like plunging into a Columbia education in English lit, a crash course of sorts. I wrote Gustave as a renegade act, as a frustrated literary scholar and lover of literature, in an effort to resuscitate the philosophical novel, and I believe I succeeded. At least it made some waves at Columbia. And it was funny… I was the shyest young man on the planet, frequently approached by gorgeous young writers because my writing teacher told them I was some kind of genius. I think Raymond Kennedy was playing a joke on me.
"So you see it was as much an Irish influence as a Jewish one. Joyce, definitely, but also my mentor, Mr. Kennedy, an Irish writer who drank Jack Daniels, chain-smoked, and used to drive a cab with Philip Glass. I used to hang out with him at the West End Café on 113th St., and, by the time of his death, the New York Times obituary noted his reputation for meeting a lively circle of writers there nearly ever day. That all started with me, I'm afraid. He was a bit sour and taciturn when I first met him, but he seemed to wake up when I wrote a paper on his novel Lulu Incognito that blew his mind. After that, we started meeting at the West End to talk philosophy. Hilarious.“
“Mr. Kennedy loved Gustave, and I’m sure he partly inspired the main character. I thought of the book as the first deconstructionist mystery novel. There’s also quite of bit of alchemical/gnostic/Blakean philosophy in it. As a friend recently observed, Derrida was a lapsed Jew, and very much a mystic, but most professed Derridean scholars completely fail to note that. So, yes, Gustave was written at Columbia, at a time when Derrida was very hot, so it is definitely a Jewish novel. In fact, my mother, who is also in a way my editor, was born in the Maghreb, a ‘pied noir,’ just like Derrida. I had some remarkable teachers at Columbia, including Kroeber, Huyssen, Stade, Said, Viswanathan and Moretti.”
Gustave is the magic realist narrative of an old aphorist who has shut himself away in his flat for over twenty years, after the infidenlity and suicide of his fiancée, Princess Rachel Blanbekin IX, a high strung heiress blackmailed by his friend, the medical student, Lars. After twenty years, Rachel’s daughter, Sophia (released from a nunnery into ownership of her mother’s estate) commisions Lars to steal Gustave’s aphorisms, written, rumor has it, in the mother-of-pearl diary that belonged to her as a little girl.
Or so the omniscient “author” would have us believe. Secretly, Gustave is a manifesto written by one of its own allegedly minor characters, Montemorte, the word-anarchist!
A work of underground fiction in the tradition of Dostoevsky, Kafka, Beckett and Djuna Barnes, Gustave was first presented to the public in a staged reading organized by the Columbia Society at the West End Gate Café on Broadway & 113th St. in Manhattan. Recent editing and revision by the author at the request of BestSellersBook, as well as a new cover by Mishta Roy, make the finished book a literary event for serious readers.
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