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. When I was writing Gustave, I was frustrated by the lack of follow up by today's writers on (the novels of) Samuel Beckett, who was 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... 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.
"...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.... 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... 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 (important note: be sure to look for the latest edition, with the longer title, "To Create A Little Flower Is the Labour of Ages, the Aphorist, the Nihilist, and the Word-Anarchist of the City of Gustave") 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 infidelity 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. Recent editing and revision by the author at the request of BestSellersBook, as well as an expanded title, and new cover by Mishta Roy, make the finished book a literary event for serious readers.
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