|
Literary Review
The Post-modernist Always Rings Twice and other titles
PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
GRAPHICS BY NETRA SHYAM
WHAT'S your favourite book title? Mine, I think, is First Love and Other Sorrows. Followed by More Die of Heartbreak and A Gentle Madness. Just saying them aloud makes me tingle. There's something thrilling about a good title. The best titles are small literary constructs in themselves, almost poem-like. And amazing for the way they can reverberate with meaning. I collect titles. Some of my other personal favourites are: Sometimes a Great Notion, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, The Ballad of the Sad Café, A Sentimental Education, The Object of My Affection, The God of Small Things, The Size of Thoughts, Six Degrees of Separation, Snow Falling on Cedars, The Secret History, The Long Goodbye, Will you Please Be Quiet Please, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Love and Death on Long Island, Mourning Becomes Electra, A Streetcar Named Desire, Totally, Tenderly, Tragically, Other Rooms, Other Voices, In Praise of Shadows, In A Dark Time, The Habit of Perfection, The Importance of Elsewhere, All You Who Sleep Tonight, Variations on Sleep, Black Rook In Rainy Weather and A Strange and Sublime Address.
The above titles are for me some of the most beautiful in the language. Some titles aren't remarkable in themselves but become special because of the book. Like Anna Karenina (Madame Bovary doesn't seem to give the same pleasure) Catch-22, To Kill A Mockingbird, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, The Catcher in the Rye, The Godfather, The Maltese Falcon, The Name of the Rose, A Clockwork Orange, 1984 — basically, classics best-sellers and cult books. What's special about David Copperfield or Oliver Twist or Pride and Prejudice as titles except for the literary reputation of these books? Franny and Zooey, Seymour, An Introduction and Raise High The Roofbeam Carpenters are special because they are about the Glass Family and carry a private meaning for those who know Salinger's literary family. Titles can fool you: I've so often been the victim of fantastically titled books that turn out to be duds as literature. A lot of contemporary fiction — particularly Indian fiction in English — falls into this category: often the title is the only remarkable thing about the book. And so they end up feeling pretentious — the books never live up to their titles. The more gimmicky the title, the less interesting the book! And I have to wonder: the simpler the title, the better the book?
Luckily, not always. Here are some books whose titles keep the promise of their ingenuity: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, My Legendary Girlfriend, Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?, Him With His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories, Murder by Death, Publish and Perish: Three Tales of Tenure and Terror, Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Killer Inside Me, Switch Bitch and A Confederacy of Dunces. It's fascinating when a title matches a book. To come up with a title that is not only fitting but one that is also evocative and stylish. The Gutenberg Elegies is about the fate of reading in an electronic age. The Bachelor of Arts is simple, pleasing, fitting. Hours in the Dark is such an evocative and stylish title for a book of film reviews and essays on cinema. A Year in the Dark is a year spent reviewing movies in the dark of a theatre. Joe Queenan's irreverent pieces on Hollywood is titled Confessions of a Cineplex Heckler. Love and Hisses is a collection of "for and against" film essays on the same movie! Nicholson Baker's U&I is a meditation on his non-existent friendship with John Updike.
It's delightful when titles are borrowed and played around with. The best example of such title-skewering is when culture critic Gilbert Adair called his book on literary theory bashing The Post-Modernist Always Rings Twice. A spin-off, of course, of James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice. Sometimes the same book will have two titles. In Britain, Salinger's collection of short stories was called For Esme, With Love and Squalor. But Salinger was insistent that he wanted the American edition to be called, simply, Nine Stories. As lovely as the Esme title is, I think he was right about Nine Stories — there's a quiet, unpretentious (Zen-like, I'm tempted to add) quality to it. The title of Peter Hoeg's remarkable Danish thriller was translated as Smilla's Sense of Snow (the one that stuck) but I prefer the other one — Smilla's Feeling for Snow. Simon Winchester's riveting book about the making of the Oxford English Dictionary was called The Surgeon of Crowthorne in Britian and in America, The Professor and the Madman. Agatha Chrisite's mystery title, Ten Little Niggers, eventually became controversial and had to be changed to And Then There Were None.
The mystery genre has its own set of rules when it comes to titles. The titles usually belong to a series that is coded: John. D. McDonald's Travis McGee series, for instance have a colour coding: The Deep Blue Goodbye, The Dreadful Lemon Sky etc. And then there's Sue Grafton's boringly titled alphabetical series: A is for Alibi, Q is for Quarry, L is for Lawless and so on. Do mystery writers resort to this because it solves the problem of coming up with a decent title? What will Grafton do when she runs out of alphabets? Raymond Chandler never took the easy way out: his books are some of the best titled mysteries: The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye and then there's his classic essay: "The Simple Art of Murder".
However, not everyone feels the same way as I do about titles: A poet friend of mine refuses to title her poems. (And that's long before she came across, say, Emily Dickinson). When she comes across a poem in an anthology, she avoids looking at the title if she can help it. The title, she feels, defines the poem too much. I suspect many artists would like to leave their work untitled if they had a choice. Writers also feel — when they start out — that the best titles are all taken. They know that coming up with a good title is itself half the achievement. The best titles, most writers will tell us, spring up out of nowhere. Working on finding a good one has been the surest way to come up with nothing. The best titles are always pure inspiration.
pradeepsebastian
@hotmail.com
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
|
