Homo Sum » Blog Archive » Patience is rewarded, at least sometimes.

Patience is rewarded, at least sometimes.

I see from John Crowley’s Livejournal that the 25th anniversay edition of Little, Big is a go.

I’ve been waiting to hear that for something like a year and a half. Originally the go-no-go decision was supposed to be made in March of this year, but the subscription period was extended, and then in July the limitation was reduced (and extra material added). It was looking dodgy there for a bit, but it looks like the project is definitely on now.

Which means I will be getting my sweet, sweet numbered copy sometime in “Spring” next year. And, since I actually paid for the book way back when, and have long since considered that money as spent and gone, it will be almost like a free fine edition appearing when it does come.

The trick now will be to simply not think about it in the interim. Fortunately, as I age I seem to be getting better at forgetting about things…

Some quotes and fun facts about Crowley and this book:

Crusty old Harold Bloom, who hates everything¹ really likes Little, Big. Indeed, he’s writing the “critical introduction” to the 25th anniversay edition. A press release on the edition quotes Bloom: “Little, Big seems to me as miraculous as Shakespeare or Lewis Carroll”
James Hynes, from an article praising Crowley: “When ‘You’ll love this’ isn’t recommendation enough, I have proceeded to claim (as I’m claiming here) that Little, Big is an Important American Novel that bears comparison to such works as One Hundred Years of Solitude and Nabokov’s Ada.”
Nick Gevers on Crowley: “John Crowley is a giant, not only of American fantastic literature but of American literature generally. His novels have a poetic complexity of style, a breadth of symbolic reference, a depth of characterization and an intricate mastery of narrative structure with few contemporary parallels; reading them can be daunting, but the rewards of doing so are enormous.”
Despite that, the “concordance” page for Little, Big at Amazon (where the paperback is still in print, and in stock) says that for all that he is a “daunting” read, Crowley is very readable. Or at least Amazon’s computer says that 80% of the books out there are harder to read, and 85% use more complex words. Somehow I don’t think the algorithm used there gets the same results that, say, a Sterling professor of Humanities at Yale might get.
That page also tells us that in the $10 paperback, you get 21,250 words per dollar. I’m sure that’s very important for someone to know. This also means that the $250 numbered edition only gets 850 words per dollar. Still seems like a good deal, if they are good words. (The lettered edition has an additional 350 words hand-written, and that costs another $650 dollars. Getting 850 for a dollar is clearly a steal! Heh.)
For something completely different, you can read the text of Crowley’s speech “Practicing the Arts Of Peace“, which was given as a Branigin lecture at Indiana University in 2005. In addition to being a lovely lecture in its own right, it has commentary on Little, Big and how it fits into the “Arts of Peace” concept, as well as a couple of lovely swipes at the realities of bookselling (as opposed to writing). Here’s a quote on that latter topic:

The original title of the book was Little, Big; or, The Fairies’ Parliament, which I thought was expressive of its nature, but the publisher who first issued it objected; this was to be a book for general readers. “If we put fairies on the cover,” she said, “this book’s going right down the toilet.” Whether she was right or not I’ll never know; the book did not do very well in its initial fairy-less appearance as a general fiction title. Later it was reissued, with fairies, and migrated to the back of the bookstore, where the kinds of books are kept for readers who read no other kind. It has lately returned to the general-reader shelves for people to find who rarely or never read that kind.

… or at least thinks there are only five authors in America today worth of praise.(back)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 13th, 2006 at 11:14 am and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “Patience is rewarded, at least sometimes.”

Fred Says:
September 13th, 2006 at 1:51 pm
1

I picked up a copy from the local library recently, on Neil Gaiman’s recommendation, and I have to admit I had some trouble getting into it. If I’m lucky, I read one hundred pages. Of course, that might have just as much, if not more, to do with when I actually do most of my reading — on the train commute to and from work — and that I was using the book to take a much-needed break from Ian M. Banks’ Consider Phlebas (which, while interesting, has also been very slow going for me).

I think once I’ve cleared my plate of the two or three books I’m reading (and the couple other I’ve requested from the library), I will have to give Little Big another go. I hear good things.
Mr. McLaren Says:
September 13th, 2006 at 2:22 pm
2

I think both of those–the Banks and the Crowley–as probably not commuting books. They, and the Crowley significantly more so than the Banks–are books that reward savouring and reexamination.

I’m actually quite looking forward to using the new edition as an excuse to reread Little, Big next year. And who knows, maybe Crowley will finish the Aegypt quartet sometime soon as well, which would give me an excuse to reread all four of them.
Kira Says:
September 15th, 2006 at 8:42 pm
3

1. eeeeeeeeeee!!!!!

2. Little, Big is actually quite a tough read for a lot of people. Not in the language, not in the sentence complexity. I think it’s a genius of ellipsis that makes it difficult.

Let me try and explain what I mean in the longest way possible because (as you have experienced) if I do it the short way I will inevitably leave out things.
a. Poetry is a miracle of ellipsis. The thing that makes at least some poetry great is that the space between words has been so forcefully and narrowly constrained that you can’t help but catch a feeling from it, like a disease, but not from what is stated - instead, from that which has been left out.
b. Narrative (particularly the “straightforward” narrative whose history Crowley marches with) is a miracle of telling - it’s about what gets put in rather than what gets left out.
c. Completely aside from the poetics of the phonetic - i.e., the writer’s attempt to build a consistent and compelling voice (and yes, I know ‘phonetics’ is wrong, but I couldn’t resist the alliteration) - aside from the poetics of the phonetic, lots of serious fiction attempts to communicate highfalutin conclusions via themes and subtext and literary allusion - the stuff in between the words. In fact, I will put out as an assertion to play with the idea that any fiction attempting to be literary consciously attempts to be poetic, in the sense of trying to control and shape the stuff it leaves out.
d. Writin’s hard an stuff. most people aren’t very good at doing c) without sounding like completely pompous asses.
e. Little, Big is a triple miracle because it manages to be a simple, straightforward narrative (miracle 1) that is poetic in sense a above (miracle 2) completely without being pompous (miracle 3).
f. Thing is, that means there’s a ton to get your brain around that isn’t really on the page at all. And maybe if you don’t know it’s there to be shaped, to be digested and thought about, it’s much harder to get your brain around.
Mr. McLaren Says:
September 15th, 2006 at 9:19 pm
4

We should talk about poetry and communication sometime. I have this whole big thing about how language develops from concrete learn-word-by-pointing, to more abstract learn-word-by-generalization, to even more abstract learn-word-by-generalizing-from-abstractions, etc., and how that process means that the further “up” the chain a concept is from something concrete, the more likely it is to “mean” different things to each person. This means that communication using words directly about non-concrete things will always be flawed.

I have this notion that the brevity of poetry allows us to communicate more directly by avoiding some of the baggage each person has accreted around each word. Instead the poet dances around the edges, activating whole bundles of concepts, and the audience has to “fill it in”. What you fill with comes from your experience, which makes the connection very real to you when it works.

But, I could go on about that for a long time, and there is no beer here.

Let me say instead that your 2e is bang on the money as far as I’m concerned. And I’ll be impressed with Amazon’s geeks when they figure out an algorithm to detect those three miracles.
Homo Sum » Blog Archive » Sunday night quick book links Says:
June 9th, 2008 at 12:31 am
5

[...] The 25th anniversary edition1 of Little, Big is getting closer and closer to real. In the June 6th update you can see a PDF preview of the layout and art placement for the first chapter. When the book finally is finished, it’s going to look lovely, and reward my patient waiting. [...]