When a musician is interviewed, very often they take the interviewer through their record collection for the music that inspired and influenced them. Authors are less directly forthcoming, since they tend to prefer to save such quoting for the body of their actual works themselves, burying references in the text to see who will spot them and who won't.
The author character in my latest novel "The Death Of The Author (In Triplicate)" is having none of this game playing (though me as the 'invisible' author behind him, could conceivably be up to such metafictional games). He is committed to showing his literary workings, though he is also struggling not to reveal too much behind his work and explain it away completely.
So in the spirit of the author character, I thought I'd share some books that either directly fed into my novel, or at least echoed it in some ways. Some of them I'd read before I sat down to type the first words of my novel, others I read during the novel writing process and one I have yet to read but am aware at least of its (non-fictional) argument.
A man has suffered so traumatic a brain injury, that he has lost all memory and has to be trained to walk again by his physios. We get a forensic treatment of that process of relearning basic everyday functions we take for granted. Into the void of his memory also comes these mental images he can't place. When he's released back into daily living, he has a sizeable compensation settlement and decides to devote it to recreate these visions inside his head in every tiny detail. From the architecture, to people paid to play the roles of the passersby in the street, doing precisely scripted things and the clothes they wear. Again this focus on a a forensic level of detail, which echoes the murder detective's process in my novel. McCarthy raises an interesting distinction, between a scene in a film which can be shot innumerable times until the Director is satisfied that it's right; versus the one-take of live performance and the protagonist of this novel trying to nail his image exactly in his live recreation. A detective is not dissimilar, in that at the start of an investigation, there are unlimited ways in which the crime unfurled and the task is to narrow that down to just one possible way the action of the event could have taken place.
Georges Perec's final novel, as he raced against time to complete it before his life was claimed by cancer. A novel in three parts; the first being a mystery thriller around a disappeared writer in French colonial Africa, using his abandoned manuscript as a clue to his fate. Part 2 turns to an historical event of betrayal among the French Resistance in World War 2, which completely flips Part 1 on its head, as we see that story was a code for this actual incident that was too incendiary to write directly. Part 3 supposedly is the uncompleted part choked off by Perec's death and is presented as the fragmentary source material and documents that informed the story in Part 2. These were curated by two of Perec's writer friends who were members of the same Oulipo movement as him. HOWEVER, the Spanish author Enrique Villa-Matas in his novel "Mac And His Problem" posits that this too is smoke and mirrors on Perec's part; that in fact Part 3 is exactly as Perec intended and that the legend of his friends completing his book deliberately masks this fact. Through such a disguise, Perec was giving the middle finger to Death, because he DID finish his novel before Death claimed him, but veiled that fact, so it was just between him and the Grim Reaper. And Perec won (or at least went to his grave conceiving that he'd won). I also mirrored this tripartite structure, in that my novel moves from a crime thriller Part 1, through into Part 2's fevered argument over the ownership of the unfinished manuscript that was Part 1 between widow and literary agent and into Part 3, centring around the author who is responsible for penning Parts 1 & 2.
This is the book I haven't actually read. But my own title clearly pays homage to this and I also touch on the central concept, as my author character muses on how he loses all control of his text once it is out in the world. Readers and critics will remake his text in whatever way they choose to read and interpret it, no matter what his original intentions for the story were. I do have fun with the concept as, per the "In Triplicate" of my book's title, three authors 'die' during the course of the novel, though an author can die, per Barthes, in metaphorical ways as well as in actuality.
The first remarkable thing about this novel from 1937s, is that it was written by a 19-year old German refugee and yet encapsulates eve of war London and its nascent film industry so expertly and authentically. In a second language to boot! A movie actress is murdered, two different men confess to the crime. A film editor called Cameron McCabe, the nom de plume of the real author, is co-opted by the investigating detective and by two-thirds of the way through the book, we get a successful court prosecution of the murderer having unravelled the labyrinthine truth from all these false confessions and a murderer existing in plain sight. But it's a post-modernist epilogue that turns the novel on its head, in the form of a literary interrogation of the character Cameron McCabe from the first part of the book, which takes the opportunity to discuss the present (1930s) state of detective fiction. It uses real critics' words, only inserting Cameron McCabe for the names of the other crime thriller writers, so that it appears to be critics discussing this book "The Face On the Cutting Room Floor" in the book "The Face On The Cutting Room Floor". In this way, the book was called 'the detective novel to end all detective novels' at the time. I loved how it inserted itself into predicting it's own literary criticism and my author character does similar.
So for my final book choice, it's one I didn't particularly enjoy as a reading experience. It's another book about a forensic description of the details of which the human eye sees in a city, as a detective is on the top deck of the bus as he follows the wife of a missing person he's ordered to get on the trail of. It's almost mathematical in its precision of describing people and objects interacting with one another, but ultimately one I found a little cold and dry emotionally. I much preferred the early works of Nicholson Baker, such as "The Mezzanine" and "Room Temperature", where he too looks at everyday objects and describes them and their taken-for-granted interior workings in minute detail, but there is greater warmth and humour than with Okotie I feel. Why is this forensic level of detail significant to me and my novel? Because there are presumptions about the material world which entirely lead and shape our thinking about it and the objects contained within, that detectives and forensic scientists have to get to the bottom of as the fundamental part of their work. Yet what happens if the investigative detective queries the very nature of matter and criminal evidence and refuses to accept those presumptions in the first place?
"The Death Of The Author (In Triplicate)" is available direct from the publisher Corona\Samizdat.
For more content on the book, including thematic discussions and quote cards.
