booklab

Ever wanted to look across the shoulder of a real Nobel laureate as she (or he) writes? Austrian Elfriede Jelinek (Nobel Laureate in 2004) decided to post her forthcoming novel “Neid” (”Envy”) online, chapter by chapter.

The text starts with this sentence: “Kleine Lebenswelten stürzen nach außen, die dazupassenden kleinen Lebensweisheiten nach innen. In der Mitte treffen sie einander.” (Which translates, word by word, as follows: “Small living worlds crash to the outside, while the fitting small truths of life (dive) inward. They meet in the middle.”)

But if you consider this an act of public writing, you’re dead wrong. Elfriede defines her new book as a “private novel”. Two chapters are already available, with a lot more to come.

The writer who always walked the fine line between public fame and private retreat has been an avert reader of international writing (provided it has the kick of, for example, Thomas Pynchon - whose “Gravity’s Rainbow” she translated into German) when hardly anyone outside the German speaking audiences had ever heard of her.

It is interesting to see how large corporations now start to allow (or even encourage) their thinking staff to do their thinking in public, hence online. Remember when journalists in the field were first allowed, not so long ago, to blog about their reporting?

Now I was pointed to a blog titled “Print is Dead” - which states in the opening, a bit paradoxically, but rightly so, I guess, that print, in fact, is not dead at all for some time - where Jeff Gomez, the director of marketing of the Holtzbrinck publishing group (Germany / UK / US) collects bits and pieces and thoughts about his title statement in order to prepare a book on that matter to be published later this year by an (Holtzbrinck owned) imprint, Palgrave Macmillan.

 Frankly, a good source of information to be in the loop of an interesting, yet highly fragmented debate.