{"id":438732,"date":"2022-10-06T09:40:08","date_gmt":"2022-10-06T13:40:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/?p=438732"},"modified":"2022-10-28T07:32:23","modified_gmt":"2022-10-28T11:32:23","slug":"season-18-of-the-two-month-review-ann-quin-is-the-missing-link","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2022\/10\/06\/season-18-of-the-two-month-review-ann-quin-is-the-missing-link\/","title":{"rendered":"Season 18 of the Two Month Review: Ann Quin Is the Missing Link"},"content":{"rendered":"

Before we get into this post, I just wanted to congratulate Annie Ernaux and all of her publishers and translators on winning the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature. She’s a legend, and I have a special place in my heart for Cleaned<\/em> Out, since that was a Dalkey book. (And the first of hers I read.) And also want to send a shout out to Fitzcarraldo\/Jacques Testard, whose authors seem to win the Nobel almost every year. Kudos to all! And now on to this unrelated post.<\/strong><\/p>\n

For a year after graduation from Michigan State\u2014while I was waiting for my then future wife (aka, No. 1 X-wife?) to complete her degree\u2014I did nothing but read for the English GRE and explore all the books that I had been dying to get to, but never had time for when I was in school. I devoured every Pynchon book, Coover (The<\/em> Public<\/em> Burning<\/em> in particular), William Gaddis, Wittgenstein, every Kathy Acker book, any and all pop-sci books about quantum mechanics and string theory, and some random academic books since, at the time, I had aspirations of going on to get a PhD. (Foolish Young Chad! Bad at love, bad at career choices!)<\/p>\n

One of the academic books I really liked at the time was Fiction in the Quantum Universe<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>by Susan Strehle. (Two great obsessions\u2014fiction and “quantum”\u2014that taste great together?) There’s a chance I’m misremembering this (or applying quantum ideas, there’s a chance that I’m both right and wrong and no one will know the outcome until they observe Strehle “Schr\u00f6edinger’s” Index), but it was there and then that I first came across the name “Ann Quin.”<\/p>\n

In a book about Pynchon, Barthelme, Atwood, and the like, a reference to Quin\u00a0feels\u00a0<\/em>likely, although I think she was mentioned in a toss-away comment, one of those classic, “another author who mines this vein of theoretical underpinnings is Ann Quin, an experimental British novelist from the 1960s, who isn’t well-known these days” sort of bits. As vague as the reference was\u2014in Strehle’s book, or whatever actual book I’ve replaced with hers in my memory\u2014I was INSTANTLY INTRIGUED.<\/p>\n

This took place in the way back, pre-Wikipedia, squarely in the dial-up era of the “information superhighway,” but I remember reading\u00a0something\u00a0<\/em>about how Ann Quin could be considered a Kathy Acker precursor. Not a one-to-one comparison, but a fellow traveler on the experimental, NON-MALE, mode of storytelling. And that her “wildest” book was\u00a0Tripticks<\/em>, which included Goo-<\/em>era Sonic Youth illustrations:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

(All the illustrations in\u00a0Tripticks\u00a0<\/em>are by Quin’s lover, Carol Annand.)<\/p>\n

For whatever reason\u2014that her books were really only issued in the UK by Marion Boyars Publishers, that online interlibrary loan requests were a few years in the future, that\u00a0Amazon.com didn’t yet exist\u2014<\/em>I couldn’t get ahold of these books to save my life. Every new or used bookstore I entered I would pass by “P” for “Pynchon” and end up at “Q” for “Quindlen.” (I think Quindlen has lead a very successful life as a writer, but to me, she’ll forever be “the Q-named author who\u00a0isn’t\u00a0<\/em>Ann Quin.”) This is a specific flavor of Nerd Disappointment some of you relate to. (And the rest of you make money with your actual hands and bodies like smart folk.)<\/p>\n

Worth noting though that I did discover Raymond Queneau in this “Q”-related search.<\/p>\n

[Side-note: If any QAnon people end up on here because I’m Q-ing it up like a Trump-liever, spread the fucking word! For every one of you nutjobs who contributes to our Patreon<\/a>, we’ll find a Q-nugget in Quin’s books that presage your mysterious figure. Don’t worry: Quin’s poetic prose is dripping\u00a0<\/em>in potential conspiratorial clues. Tune in, weekly\u2014and donate $5 a month\u2014and we’ll enlighten you.]<\/p>\n

[[Three Percenters? You, on the other hand, can go fuck right off. I’ve owned Google search results over you before, and I will again. Eat my words, “patriots.”]]<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\"\"Fast-forward a few years, and I was starting out at Dalkey, recommending authors to reissue I had heard\u00a0<\/em>of, like, IDK, Ann Quin, and, lo and behold, John O’Brien pulls from his shelves all four of her novels. And thus a weekend is wasted.<\/p>\n

And a few conversations with Catheryn Kilgarriff later, Dalkey had put together a four-book project to reissue this unique author who, despite all her advances in the realm of what literature can do, she\u2014much like her compatriot B.S. Johnson (a future TMR subject? I could talk for, conservatively, 7 hours about House Mother Normal\u00a0<\/em>and the statistics describing the current abilities of one’s senses: “Sight: 10%”), died way way too young of suicide in 1973.<\/p>\n

RIP Experimental British Writing for a good couple of decades. (Or at least the best chance it had of going “mainstream.”)<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

It’s been twenty-one years since I read Ann Quin.<\/p>\n

Since that time, And Other Stories capitalized on Dalkey’s negligence (aka, a monomaniacally-run dictatorship of a press whose empire was slowly crumbling) and started reissuing her\u2014along with a collection of previously unpublished stories and fragments entilted, The Unmapped Country<\/em> after her unfinished final novel\u2014Bob Buckeye has written a critical book, Re: Quin<\/em><\/a>, the literary world has caught up to the spirit behind her works, if not the specific structures and twists of language and grammar, and she’s even been featured in the New Yorker<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

But what do Ann Quin’s works mean today? Can a contemporary writer draw from her, from her poetic play, her constant urge to expand and explore and truly experiment? How do readers relate to, in Danielle Dutton’s words<\/a>, the author who “turned\u00a0On the Road\u00a0<\/em>on its head”?<\/p>\n

Well, if you listen along, you’re about to find out.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\"\"Ann Quin\u2014originally published in the 1960s and early 1970s, then again in 2001-2003, and now in 2018-2022\u2014is the subject of the next season of the Two Month Review. We’re going to include\u00a0a record-setting\u00a0five\u00a0<\/em>books in this season: Berg<\/a>, Three<\/a>, Passages<\/a>, Tripticks<\/a>, The Unmapped Country<\/a>. <\/em>All are available from And Other Stories<\/a>, Bookshop.org<\/a>, hopefully your local indie, Amazon.com, most libraries, the Dark Web, etc.<\/p>\n

Not sold? Here are the opening lines from her novels:<\/p>\n

A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father. . . .<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

A man fell to his death from a sixth-floor window of Peskett House, an office-block in Sellway Square today.<\/p>\n

He was a messenger employed by a soap manufacturing firm.<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

Not that I’ve dismissed the possibility my brother is dead.<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

I have many names. Many faces.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So many men dying!!!! How can you\u00a0not\u00a0<\/em>want to buy and read all these?<\/p>\n

*<\/em><\/p>\n

Well, if you’re\u00a0still\u00a0<\/em>not sold, here’s a bit from Dutton’s\u00a0New Yorker\u00a0<\/em>piece specifically about\u00a0Tripticks<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Tripticks<\/em>\u00a0chronicles a nameless narrator\u2019s exploits as he drives across America pursuing his \u201cNo. 1 X-wife and her schoolboy gigolo\u201d\u2014or else the ex and her lover are pursuing him. Let\u2019s just say that they\u2019re following each other, perpetually, in Buicks and Chevrolets, back and forth across a dystopian U.S.A. The America that we find in Quin\u2019s novel is a place of rampant consumerism, religious hypocrisy, gory violence, and New Age self-help bullshit. It\u2019s also sex-mad, drug-addled, racist, and riddled with the language of advertising clich\u00e9s. When we do glimpse the natural environment out a car or motel window, it is often almost terrifyingly beautiful, a not quite surreal prehistoric vastness of mesas and rock formations, \u201csheer walls of symmetrical blue grey basaltic columns\u201d and \u201csalt pools with crystals forming on their surfaces\u201d and \u201cbare broken peaks.\u201d But any romance of the American West is always immediately cut through, chopped down, and pressed up against something else, like \u201c6 packs of fridged beer\u201d and a \u201cU-Drive Inn,\u201d or a \u201clead-filled baseball bat\u201d and a \u201changing tree.\u201d Of course, the setting of any novel, no matter how experimental, is made out of nothing but words, but that truism feels somehow truer of \u201cTripticks.\u201d Language is the landscape that we\u2019re traversing in this book, a shifting vista of TV commercials, political rhetoric, sexual fantasy, and sand dunes. Language is what\u2019s happening<\/em>\u00a0in here.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

*<\/p>\n

\"\"In addition to\u00a0Re: Quin<\/em>, Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940\u20131980 <\/em>by Francis Booth, a scholarly book that’s a who’s who of great mid-century writers, includes a significant piece on Quin and all of her works, and, thanks to the efforts of the And Other Stories, there’s a solid number of recent academic pieces and reviews of her books for us to consider throughout the course of the season. Which, I truly believe, is going to be so fun.<\/p>\n

As in the past, we’ll be releasing special interviews first on Patreon<\/a> for subscribers (no, this venture isn’t funded, and exists mostly because of my unwillingness to let it die, so please, a couple bucks a month?) and in the podcasts the following Friday. If you want to watch us LIVE AND UNEDITED <\/em>tune into our YouTube channel<\/a> on the days below. And follow TMR on Twitter for more specifics and random stuff.<\/p>\n

Let’s blow apart the male narrative model together!<\/p>\n

October 26:<\/a> Introduction<\/p>\n

November 2:<\/a> Berg (pgs. 1-82)<\/p>\n

November 9; Berg (pgs. 83-END)<\/p>\n

November 16: Three\u00a0 (pgs. 1-75)<\/p>\n

November 23: Three (pgs. 76-END)<\/p>\n

November 30: Passages (pgs. 1-56)<\/p>\n

December 7: Passages (pgs. 57-END)<\/p>\n

December 14: Tripticks (pgs. 1-103)<\/p>\n

December 21: Tripticks (pgs. 104-END)<\/p>\n

December 28: Unmapped Country (ALL)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Get your copies now<\/a>, and get ready! And if you like what we’ve done in the past, please consider supporting us through our Patreon<\/a>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Before we get into this post, I just wanted to congratulate Annie Ernaux and all of her publishers and translators on winning the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature. She’s a legend, and I have a special place in my heart for Cleaned Out, since that was a Dalkey book. (And the first of hers I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":438772,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67426],"tags":[49736,1536,66206,69262,67366],"class_list":["post-438732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-two-month-review","tag-and-other-stories","tag-ann-quin","tag-brian-wood","tag-katie-whittemore","tag-tmr"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=438732"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438732\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":438842,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438732\/revisions\/438842"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/438772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=438732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=438732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=438732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}