By James Tookey.
The articles written in the wake of Svetlana Alexievich’s recent Nobel Prize win all made the point that despite her work being widely translated on the continent, there are few English translations available of the Belarussian’s “polyphonic writings”. In saying so, however, nearly all of the pieces also mentioned that in 2016, an independent press called Fitzcarraldo Editions will be publishing her book Second Hand-Time. For those in the know, this was no surprise. In the year or so Fitzcarraldo have been around, they have quickly gained a reputation as one of the most interesting and exciting presses in the country.
From its first publication, Mathias Enard’s Joycean tour-de-force Zone, Fitzcarraldo has carried over the editorial principles inculcated at founder Jacques Testard’s first project, cult arts journal The White Review; in both guises, Testard is committed to heavyweight, ambitious writing, in fiction and non-fiction alike, always elegantly presented and designed. With five new books being published between August and November, he’s also very busy, but nevertheless found time to talk to me.
3:AM: You must be thrilled that Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel Prize this year. How long has she been on your radar, and were you surprised at the news?
Jacques Testard: Of course, it’s probably the best thing that could happen to a publisher. She deserves it, too — the first non-fiction Nobel since Winston Churchill in 1953. I first read her in French a few years ago. Actes Sud brought out the French edition of Second-Hand Time in 2013, and it was a big deal in France. I read it before I set up Fitzcarraldo Editions, and it was one of those books that I was astonished to find didn’t have an English-language publisher, given its ambition, its importance even. I knew she was on bookies’ lists for the Nobel, but those lists don’t mean that much — Haruki Murakami and Bob Dylan are always quite near the top. So it did come as a surprise, especially as there’s no build up to the announcement, no longlist, no shortlist. They announced she’d won at 12pm on a Tuesday. At 12.01 my phone started ringing, and didn’t stop until I turned my phone off at around 6pm because I had to go set up the double book launch for Simon Critchley and Claire-Louise Bennett taking place that evening.
3:AM: So, to begin at the beginning: what was your entry into publishing?
JT: Like many people of my generation who work in publishing, I started with internships. After university, I moved home to Paris, where I could stay with my parents for free. (My parents are French, I was born in Paris, and I’m fortunate enough to be bilingual as we moved to London when I was young.) I did my first internship in Paris, assisting Henry Dougier, the founder of Editions Autrement. From there I went to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and then The Paris Review in New York.
3:AM: Internship culture is a subject of fierce debate among young people trying to break into the industry. Did you feel exploited in your internships?
JT: Though they were mostly unpaid (in France I was paid €400 per month; in the US nothing), not so much in the publishing world. At The Paris Review there was a real sense that the interns were integral to the running of the office. We read submissions, responded to authors, transcribed interviews, fact-checked, etc. The experience was definitely valuable.
The worst experience I had was at the Sunday Times. I did a two-week stint there back, getting paid £50 a week. They then kept me on, and after about a month, I was writing almost three full pages of the News Review section and working a sixty-hour week. I ended up staying on for six months in total, by the end of which I was on £250 a week. They paid me cash on a Friday at 10pm. One week, on the Friday night, after I’d just filed my copy around 10.30pm, the deputy editor on the desk told me that that had been my last day, and that she hoped I had something else lined up. Based on that experience I’d say journalism is more brutal than publishing in terms of chewing up interns.
3:AM: Can you tell me what led to you wanting to start The White Review?
JT: In April 2010 I moved back to London after six months in New York, and Ben Eastham and I spent about a year trying to get The White Review off the ground. I suppose the inspiration on my end came from spending time in New York, where I’d seen many successful, exciting magazines doing unusual things. There was, and still exists, a really diverse literary scene, with lots of avenues for young writers to submit to. Magazines like n+1, Guernica, BOMB… There were just so many. In London, there was comparatively very little. Ben and I felt like all the doors were closed to young writers and young critics. No publication was going to give you a chance to pitch something substantial. The best you could hope for straight out of university — if you were lucky, and if you knew people — was to get an ‘In Brief’ review commissioned by the TLS. You’d get paid £50 for 300 words, and would have to read an average book you wouldn’t normally have read.
Ben and I wanted to give new writers a space to write about whatever they wanted to write about, whether fiction or essays or some form of criticism. We also wanted to put together a magazine which brought together art and literature. Everyone was constantly saying that print was dead at the time, even more so than today, and we didn’t think that was necessarily true. So we decided to put out a publication that would be a statement, of sorts, on the future of the book as a collectible object. Ray O’Meara, the designer behind The White Review, then came up with bespoke typeset and the foldout dustjacket and all of the things that mean people paid attention to the magazine in the early days, giving us time to find a readership.
3:AM: Does the book now need to be a beautiful artefact in order to sell?
JT: Not necessarily. I can think of quite a few badly designed books this year alone that have done very well. But generally book design is not particularly good, and an original design can help you stand out. With Fitzcarraldo Editions, Ray (who also designed a typeface for the publishing house) and I wanted something simple and austere to differentiate the books from the image-driven cover designs you see in bookshops everywhere in the UK. The idea, and it’s not a new one by any means (look at Gallimard, Minuit, Adelphi, etc.), is that you let the writing speak for itself, and that by having such a simple, recognisable look, you’re building up a readership based on trust. I’d like readers to feel that they can trust that a Fitzcarraldo Editions book is worth reading even if they don’t know the author, that it will be something unusual, ambitious, contemporary.
3:AM: Do you think The White Review is a success, in terms of both publishing the sort of writing you intended to when you started, and also reaching a readership?
JT: The critical reception has been positive. The thing is, we have no commercial pressures — or, to put it another way, we can publish whatever we want to because it’s a small operation and we’re not attempting to turn a massive profit. That means we can publish unusual, more cutting-edge stuff, and we’ve found a readership for it which enables the magazine to keep going — just about.
Our print run is at an all-time high of 1800 copies per issue, and we recently got a distribution deal in America. We’re getting more submissions than ever. Our short story competition has been getting more attention each year as well. And people don’t just come to our events for the free drinks anymore! For the prize party this year we had a lot of publishing people, agents and the like, who want to meet the shortlisted writers and are looking for new authors. So in terms of publishing young writers, and helping them get somewhere, we’ve hopefully achieved something. There are quite a few writers who we published in the early days who have gone on to get agents and book deals.
3:AM: Including Claire-Louise Bennett, right?
JT: Case in point! I’m really glad I got to publish the UK edition of Pond, particularly because when I heard it was on submission. They didn’t initially send it to me, and I would have been annoyed if someone else in London had published it. She won the inaugural White Review Short Story Prize in 2013, and I like the idea of publishing some of the writers we published in The White Review with Fitzcarraldo, there’s a nice continuity to it. With Claire-Louise there’s quite a nice narrative arc: we set up the prize, which she won, she went on to publish more and more stories, until Stinging Fly Press put out Pond, and now I’ve become her UK publisher. Pond is also the first debut book I’ll have published, and to start with that book feels as meaningful a statement as, say, launching the imprint with Zone was.
3:AM: Was setting up a publishing house always your plan?
JT: No, not at all. After I’d been working on The White Review for about two years I got offered a job at Notting Hill Editions, to work as a commissioning editor. I was working with an editor called Paul Keegan and he taught me a lot. At the end of 2013 I, along with quite a few others, left NHE. I didn’t really know what to do next; there weren’t any publishers I could really see myself working for — not that there were any jobs going anyway. So after a few months of hesitation, the opportunity to set up Fitzcarraldo Editions came up and I decided to go for it.
3:AM: Mathias Enard’s Zone was the first book you published at Fitzcarraldo. It’s a 520-page, heavily allusive, single-sentence stream-of-consciousness novel. The TLS review stated that it is “a modern masterpiece that is more likely to be admired from a distance than read”. To choose this as the first novel you publish with Fitzcarraldo seems like a real statement of intent.
JT: It was a statement of sorts, yes. When I launched the press, I had to find books to publish quickly. Zone had the advantage of already being translated, as it had come out in America a year or two previously. It’s an amazing book, and hopefully people took notice that there was a new press publishing this incredibly erudite and formally innovative book that no-one in the UK had dared touch, even though it had done very well in France.
3:AM: And you followed it with Memory Theatre, by Simon Critchley, which is an essay of not quite 70 pages, although incredibly dense. Was it a deliberate counterpoint to the hugeness of Zone?
JT: No. I’d seen Memory Theatre whilst at NHE, but for various reasons I couldn’t get it published there. Once I knew I was going to start Fitzcarraldo, I got in touch with Simon’s agent with a pitch along the lines of: “I’m starting a press. I don’t know what it’ll be called. Here are some sample fonts. Can I publish this book?” I published it as an essay even though there are some fictional elements to it, and in a sense it’s as much a mission statement as Zone in that it blurs the boundaries between genres and literary forms. So I wouldn’t say it was a deliberate counterpoint, but there does have to be some kind of internal coherence to the books you end up publishing — each book contributes to a whole, to the output of the publishing house. These two books are totally different, yet there is an ambition in both of them which means they (hopefully) make sense sitting alongside one another.
3:AM: You don’t actively advertise the link between Fitzcarraldo and The White Review. What’s the reason for that?
JT: Well, they are very much separate entities. I run Fitzcarraldo Editions on my own, whereas The White Review is still run by Ben and I with a small team of editors. You don’t have to dig very deep to unearth the connection: we always share a stand at book fairs, for example, and both are run out of the same place.
3:AM: Do you still find time to read outside of your work?
JT: Yes, I’d go crazy if I didn’t. As we were saying earlier, when one person makes the editorial decisions for a press, the output is very subjective. Agents don’t systematically send me stuff, because I’m sort of on the margins of publishing culture. When, for example, a ‘hot novel’ goes out on submission, I don’t get sent it because the agents either have no idea I exist or know that I can’t compete financially. And in any case I still haven’t acquired anything which I haven’t specifically asked to see (rather than been submitted to me along with everyone else).
For Alejandro Zambra’s book, My Documents, I knew it was coming out in the States and asked if I could have a look it. Likewise with On Immunity. I follow publishers in America, and certain others in Europe, and I have quite a clear sense of what I’m looking for, and tend to follow leads and recommendations more than anything.
And that gives me a bit of freedom to read for myself. I think editors need to keep a space open to read things outside of work. I certainly save books I know I’ll be into for those times when I’ve spent two months reading only bad stuff, because that can be pretty depressing. You’ve got to remind yourself why you work in publishing sometimes, after a poor reading spell.
3:AM: You talked about the hope that people will see a Fitzcarraldo book and trust that what’s inside is good because of the publisher’s name on the cover. Which publishers do you trust?
JT: In the UK, I like Granta Books. They publish some of the best American fiction writers: Ben Marcus, Ben Lerner, Donald Antrim, etc. They also published Alejandro’s Zambra’s first British release, and have nicked him back for his next book after My Documents got a really good James Wood review in The New Yorker. So, they’re annoying, but really good. Although I’ll still get to publish some of Zambra’s essays, so haven’t lost him entirely…
Who else? Hamish Hamilton put out some good stuff. And Other Stories are excellent too, a model for small publishers like Fitzcarraldo Editions. I like Tuskar Rock, who are attached to Profile and Serpent’s Tail, and run by the agent Peter Straus and the novelist Colm Toibin. They publish literary fiction only, and I think they’ve only published a handful of authors, including Laszlo Krasznahorkai, who I’m sure is a future Nobel laureate, and Chris Kraus, one of my favourite authors. I also really like CB Editions – a very interesting publishing house – where Charles Boyle really only does as he pleases…
3:AM: And in America?
JT: Definitely Melville House, based in Brooklyn, who publish people like David Graeber, Lars Iyer, Tao Lin. Then there’s Graywolf, who first published Eula Biss, and also did Leslie Jamison and Maggie Nelson, and some really excellent fiction. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, where I briefly worked, is probably the leading literary publisher in America on paper. They’re the equivalent of Faber & Faber in the UK. They publish a lot of new writers, first books by the n+1 founders, for example. They also have more Nobel Prize winners on their books than anyone else in the US. But New Directions is probably my favourite English-language publishing house.
3:AM: What are you currently reading?
JT: There’s a New American Stories collection that Granta just put out, edited by Ben Marcus, which is supposed to be a sort of survey of the best stories of the last decade. I’m working through that, and it’s excellent so far.
****
3:AM Recommended Reading:
Pond, Claire-Louise Bennett
This debut collection of short stories was reviewed in these pages when it originally was published in Ireland by Stinging Fly Press; there, William Harris compared the book to a writer’s journal, before reprimanding himself for this being a limiting likeness, and concluding that Bennett “transform[s] the modest, private concerns of the journal…into a total art form”. It is this totality, I agree, that is so impressive in Pond. Bennett captures something fundamental about our relationship with domestic space, and the physical world which we attempt to coerce into domesticity. No contextual information is given — no names or dates are mentioned, and we are not told where the narrator lives, although a mention of extreme west indicates Ireland — and as such, the stories become somehow unrooted from our reality. The further you proceed through the book, the narrator’s cottage becomes a cosmos, and her voice the only possible mode of expression. This, to me, is a hermetically sealed, and hence total, artwork, perfectly formed and impossible to question because it is so shockingly original and seems to have its own order which we cannot undo.
My favourite of the stories, and one of the best things I’ve read for ages, is “Control Knobs”, which begins with a description of the narrator’s Baby Belling oven, which has a broken knob, before reflecting on an unnamed novel (I have been told its Marlene Haushofer’s Die Wand) in which the female protagonist is trapped by an invisible wall “that occurred” one evening whilst she is in a hunting lodge. On the other side of the wall, she can see that everything has stopped, and is motionless, and the woman must live out the rest of her days confined to the space she has been given. The parallels with Bennett’s narrator are beautifully obscure and obvious. Whilst Bennett’s narrator isn’t trapped, as Haushofer’s is, she is also playing out her relationship with the world through her relationship to her private space. These two ideas weave in and out of each other as the story proceeds, the tactile nature of Bennett’s descriptions of mundane physical objects given a melancholic context by the description of Haushofer’s counting the 1000 last matches in the world, which gives a majesty to this mundanity. One of the epigraphs to the book comes from Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, but it is another quote from that book which comes to mind when reading Bennett’s noticing of things-as-objects:
Objects that are cherished in this way really are born of an intimate light, and they attain to a higher degree of reality than indifferent objects… For they produce a new reality of being, and they take their place not only in an order but in a community of order.
****
Memory Theatre, Simon Critchley
This beguiling little book, too thin to accommodate the name of the author on the spine, is housed between white covers indicating Fitzcarraldo’s essay series, as opposed to the blue covers which signpost fiction. And then you open the book to read the opening line:
I was dying. That much is certain. The rest is fiction.
Simon Critchley, a philosopher and academic, is clearing his old office out before leaving Europe for the New World. In doing so, he comes across five neatly stacked boxes, each marked with a sign from the zodiac. In one of them, there is a chart which accurately predicts his life up to that day and ominously continues to predict events into the future, up to his own death, which is eerily near. To say any more would be pointless, as the book itself takes little more than an hour to work its many charms on the reader. Critchley’s trademark irony and self-effacement pre-empt any criticism of smugness, and the density, and sometimes intensity, of the writing belies a cunning wit underpinning the whole piece.
****
Zone, Mathias Enard
A fair amount of hype — at least, what constitutes as such in literary matters today — surrounded the first publication brought out by Fitzcarraldo, mainly focusing on the formal qualities of the novel: namely the fact that the novel is ostensibly one sentence, which unfurls over 521 pages. This may sound like a gimmick, and to be fair, the full-stop is less craftily avoided than blithely ignored. Within three pages though, high-minded curiosity at the form vanishes, and Francis Mirkovic is right there in front of you, sweating and tripping and pathologically thinking, thinking, thinking. Through him, the last thirty years of violence which has plagued the ‘Zone’, the area comprising southern Europe, northern Africa and parts of the Middle East, is framed as the latest chapter in a bloody book which stretches back to the sacking of Troy. And Enard, as chronicler of this history, manages that most delicate of balances: to interrogate the patterns which constitute the macro, whilst honouring each individual part of the pattern as if it stood alone. This is an intoxicating, brutal, heady masterpiece.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
James Tookey is a reader living in London, after studying in Canterbury and Geneva. He splits his time between mixing martinis and metaphors.
