Jonathan Lethem writes about himself in the New York Times, using Italo Calvino as an excuse:
I took Italo Calvino’s death – 20 years and 5 days ago as I write this – personally. Though he didn’t know it, he’d broken a date. Calvino, one of the greatest European writers of the 20th century and among the only Italians (with Alberto Moravia, Luigi Pirandello and Umberto Eco) to have penetrated our shamefully translation-immune literary culture, had been about to visit the United States to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, when at the age of 61, sitting in his backyard garden, he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and, two weeks later, died. As well as the Harvard lectures, he’d agreed to a small American book tour, which was to have brought him as far as Cody’s Books in Berkeley. I was to have been sitting in the front row, breathless. Instead, I learned of Calvino’s death by reading a notice taped to Cody’s doors, explaining the cancellation of the event, together with a clipping of the obituary I’d happened not to see.
This has got to be one of the worst pieces ever written about a writer since Jacqueline Carey wasted six pages explaining that she “gets” English humor in an essay nominally about Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Trilogy entitled – I kid you not – “Yes, I Got It”.
Here’s some advice for the would-be literary reviewer or biographer. IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU, MORON!
I very much like Calvino. I’m interested in serious discussions of his innovative works. But I’m really not interested in someone telling me what he thinks would have happened if Calvino had ever been so fortunate as to meet him.
Had he lived a few more weeks, Calvino probably would have tolerated my effort to waste a few of his shrinking hours on earth listening as I bragged of how much he’d influenced my then-unwritten works.
Sometimes, I really loathe writers. When I see one of those supercilious, self-conscious artistes pontificating pretentiously about something he hasn’t even written yet in a coffee shop, it makes me want to punch him in the face.
Real writers smoke like Eco, shoot guns like Bethke and Rosenberg and drink like Hemingway. In other words, they actually live their lives and write their books, they don’t sit around talking endlessly about them.
And what’s so shameful about America’s supposedly “translation-immune culture”? Go learn another language, you monolingual slothard! It’s not that hard, and based on this essay, it’s pretty obvious that Lethem doesn’t have anything better to do. Why is his inability to read a foreign writer’s book someone else’s fault?