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The Cube Root of Time by Herbert Cohen








Back There by Howard Waldman

Also by Howard Waldman:
Time Travail
The Seventh Candidate
Good Americans go to Paris when they Die



Disremembering Eddie by Anne Morgellyn

Also by Anne Morgellyn in the Louise Moon series:
Removing Edith Mary
Pincushion



All BeWrite books are available in both eBook and paperback formats

Review: Back There by Howard Waldman

Howard Waldman can write. This is a man in superb control of his material. A man who knows his characters inside out and who can bring them across to us with a sense of reality that is quite beautiful. He is also very funny. At times he has a wicked turn of phrase that can bring the reader from a smile to a laugh, usually at the expense of Harry .

Chris Williams

Howard Waldman’s Back There reverberates long after it’s been devoured and put back on the bookshelf. A novel too unashamedly individualistic and underivative to be easily squished into a genre pigeonhole, it offers a litfest of walking-talking-breathing-emoting characters set in the fuggy café ambience of mid-century Paris and country dacha retreat.

The protagonist, Harry, l’étranger from New York, is a memorable character. Howard subtly insinuates the reader into Harry’s convoluted thoughts and ambivalent heart. Arriving in la gaie Paris by a bizarre twist of fate, Harry engrosses himself in photography and at times his vision, or weltangshauung, is so warped that it seems as if he’s viewing life through a distorted lens. Ineffectual in the art of basic survival, Harry is – until self-made disaster strikes – an English tutor. There is much understated irony in his escapades, such as a pedantic grammar lesson serving as the springboard for steamy erotic foreplay.

Harry falls in lust, which he typically interprets as love, with a coldhearted but très belle mademoiselle. He eventually infiltrates himself into the belle’s home and we are given an almost voyeuristic insight into the private folds of a French mid-century family. The mother, the kindest woman and the worse cook in France, lavishes samples of her goodness and cuisine on Harry. The father sings opera arias at the dinner table and anoints his body with malodorous cod liver oil to achieve immortality. And not to forget the little grey sister who, with the passing of time, proves herself to be Harry’s eternal love. While this is a transatlantic love story, there is no suggestion of mawkish violins or hand in hand swoonishness.

Harry’s philosophical meanderings wend their way in and out of the narrative. This is done so sensitively that his quite profound and alarming thought patterns enhance the storyline rather than detract from it. Harry, while he is undoubtedly his own very idiosyncratic person, at times echoes and shadows Albert Camus’ unforgettable existential hero Meursault.

Back There is, without question, a literary tour de force which deserves a wide readership in English-speaking countries and, also, it would be a compelling and enlightening read for French bibliophiles.

Rebecca Latyntseva

Five decades ago I fell in love with a brick wall. Next to a bus stop I had ample opportunity to admire its colours, finger feel the rough texture, track the scurrying insects and over the years be astonished at how the mosses, lichens and miniature trees would burrow their roots in the desert-like substrate. Three decades ago I had my first article published. Yes, it was on walls: Detective work on the physical geography of sandstone walls. Thank you, Howard Waldman, for obliging these memories to flood back by having Harry Grossman be equally obsessed – in his case, photographing Parisian walls.

Harry is presented as such a self-deprecating anti-hero that I’m not sure I am supposed to care, but I do. It is tricky because we are not treated to his appearance until deep into the story. This is curious because we are regaled with vivid characterisation of others, including the liquid green eyes of his beloved’s brother.

There is no understating the plot. Waldman is a master of the ennui. His deep knowledge of mid-century France, both in the capital and in the sticks, oozes from the pages admirably. The American Harry, rudely bludgeoned by the police, discovers he has fallen in lust with a French beauty when his bleeding being recovers in her home. Does hapless Harry clutch his angel? One of Waldman’s writerly skills I am addicted to is his use of the conceptual double negatives in this book. Harry is after one goal but scores in another, then another. Linguistically too, he employs opposites brilliantly. For example ‘Addition is subtractive in the strange emotional mathematics of her language.’ Je t’aime is weakened to I like you when you add bien. Stop trying so hard, Harry. His girl knows this: It was always something else for you. This wonderful play with words permeate the whole novel in such delectable morsels.

Speaking of treats. Harry worms his way to the family’s rural farm. His New York life is poor preparation as illustrated with this gem: Where he comes from strawberries, once thawed, were in season all year round.

I will not spoil the ending, but it is both a crucial key and confusing, as is the beginning. I collect recursive stories, and this novel is one. A self-referential essay extraordinaire. I recommend the reader to skip the prologue until the last chapter is read, twice. In fact I am reminded of that joke where a local is asked directions: If I were you, sir, I wouldn’t start from here. The smoothest flowing prose is in the middle, and the beginning is a mosaic of confusion, much not really needed.

This is a beautiful book, so close to being perfect. As it stands it should be recommended reading for all lovers of English, with French dressing. I have no hesitation giving it an 85% rating.

Geoff Nelder

Back There is a deeply moving quixotic story that leaves even the most hardened cynic smiling at love's foolish ways. This book is destined for greatness and I would not be at all surprised to see the name Howard Waldman on the bestseller list.

Alastair Rosie

Harry Grossman sees his world through the viewfinder of a battered camera. And he photographs it all, from the peeling posters and graffiti on grubby city walls to the most intimate moments of his mysterious French sweetheart. He becomes a permanent guest at her family’s ramshackle country cottage, thirty miles and a century away from modern Paris. Harry, the New York outsider, calls it paradise and photographs the Model T Ford on the roof, the archaic well and scythe, the top-secret wild mushroom spots, and the reluctant Lauriers themselves.

They assume that outsider Harry will soon be a member of the family, but the strange photographer with his growing mountain of prints and negatives and imperfect French is not a man for snap decisions. Aren't things already perfect in this paradise? Someone once said, though, that the only paradises are lost paradises.

Back There is a touching and powerfully nostalgic transatlantic love story, sometimes verging on the comic, sometimes on the tragic. France and the French, too often caricatures of their own special reality, are presented with absolute authenticity.

With soft-focus subtlety, Howard Waldman shows that Europe and America are two continents divided by a perceived common culture of art and love – and that light-years separate Paris and Manhattan and the lives and values of the Lauriers and the Grossmans.

Excerpt

A few years after the purchase of Manhattan from the Indians, Howard Waldman, then aged 22, left his native island for Paris and freedom, and in less time than it takes to say Je t'aime found himself married to a lovely Parisian. To feed his growing Franco-American family he taught European History for a France-based American university and later American Literature to suffering French students.

He lives thirty miles outside Paris in a once rural area undergoing deplorable suburban transformation. He spends his days enjoying his wife's cooking, listening to chamber music in his chamber and trying to grow old roses in inappropriate soil.

Review: Good Americans Go To Paris When They Die by Howard Waldman

Although the saying is ascribed to a number of writers, most sources cite the phrase “good Americans go to Paris when they die” to Oscar Wilde’s Woman of no Importance. For many Americans, particularly the well heeled, Paris might well be considered a kind of heaven, for others, the full irony and uncertainty of the notion of a “good American” might play out. So what if the saying were true? What if really good, that is, well behaved and nice, Americans ended up in a kind of Parisian heaven? What if a few bad ones got there too, by administrative mistake, and were held in a kind of purgatorial camp until a decision could be made on whether they were really good enough to be set free? It’s an odd premise for a book, and few authors would be able to make it work. Howard Waldman manages it. Taking his cue from Beckett and Sartre, Waldman creates a novel that is blatantly absurd, and yet somehow, it not only manages to be entertaining, funny and rich, but also pithy.

There were times, early on, when I thought Good Americans would be a painful novel to read – a kind of indefinite wait, like Waiting for Godot with no resolution – the ultimate existentialist hell, but it isn’t like that at all. The five stranded characters grow into their circumstances, changing and progressing towards resolution. Among the women, there is the practical, always nice Helen, who survives by attempting to lose herself in whatever book she can find, and a deliberate stoicism, and the beautiful Margaret, both tempted and tortured by her returned youth. The men are Seymour the intellectual, Max the truck driver who has never even been to Paris (the ultimate crime), and Louis, the handsome, ascetic Marine. Trapped in a Kafkaesque nightmare at the Préfecture de Police, the characters wait to see if death is permanent or if they will be allowed out into the endless springtime of their prime so they can change their bad decisions. Strange and comical as it might seem, Waldman manages to tease out the philosophical implications and complexities amidst the humour, so we end up with a read that is lighthearted and pleasurable on one level – will these characters escape, and where, exactly, are they – heaven, hell, or some kind of purgatory between? While on another level, there are all sorts of subtleties around how we get psychologically stuck in a place; about how we determine good and bad; about the arbitrary power of Bureaucracy over our lives, and even about what constitutes a life worth living/reward and above all, the intensity of nostalgia:

Outside of sleeping and wandering in the maze of corridors, the Five spend most of their time in the Common Room side by side in front of the window. Even in periods of acute intergroup tension, the physical proximity involved doesn’t bother them…Some of the longed-for faces are decades apart. So the spectators are decades apart.
The window is like a TV screen featuring three different channels for selective vision with no need to zap. Anyhow they can’t zap. They’re permanently tuned into Channel 1900 or Channel 1937 or Channel 1951 dpending on their Paris sojourn date. It’s like armchair time-travel. (104)

There is also suspense, as the characters work their way through the crumbling prefect, trying to find escape, developing relationships with one another, and playing off their individual terror against nostalgia, and a growing sense of the collective nature of their fate. The omniscient present tense of the book creates a simultaneous tension and ironic distance, so the reader is both drawn into the progression of events, the gathering of clues, and the discoveries and disappointments of the Five, at the same time as they begin to develop suspicions in a state of suspended belief. Good Americans Go to Paris When They Die maintains its consistency as a surreal fantasy, while never losing the realistic grounding in the fate of its characters. Taken metaphorically, the reader can relate to these people and the painful journey they take. The novel draws on everyman’s worst fears, at the same time as it pokes holes in our beliefs. However surreal the story becomes, and however slapstick the humour at the crumbling Préfecture, the novel never strays too far from the believable progression of its characterisation. There is serious pathos in the fate of Gentille, the cleaner, and serious terror in the demands of the Prefect. The setting too is rich with Waldman’s Paris, and the clever way the novel vacillates between the “real” world that the characters sometimes inhabit, and the misty dream world of memory, desire, and imagination:

One dark day a wet gale blows the treees to skeletons. The leaves lie plastered on the walks and tombs. The day after, All Saints’ Day, the rush-hour press of mourners bearing potted briars and chrysanthemums aggregates his sense of isolation and he retires to old graves no one visits.(326)

There’s a spare loveliness to Waldman’s prose, infused as it is with loneliness, humour, and a deep sense of irony in the cyclical prison of our nostalgia for the past. Good Americans Go To Paris When They Die manages a delicate, and all too rare, balancing act between entertainment and introspection.

Magdalena Ball

Upcoming interview with Howard Waldman

Magdalena Ball will be interviewing Howard Waldman on the Compulsive Reader Talks show. The author of Good Americans Go to Paris When They Die will talk about his latest novel, his unique premise, his settings, characters, themes, sales, next novel, and a whole lot more.

Listen to the show live here on 30th July 2008 at 02:00

A recorded version of the show will be available here after the show has been aired.

Compulsive Reader talks:
The Compulsive Reader's author interviews, book chat, literary discussions, readings and more. It's an audio haven for book lovers!

When it's Time to Type 'The End' - Part Two

Read Part One here

When he was thirteen, Howard’s mother died and he moved with his father into a Manhattan hotel apartment where he lived until he was twenty-two. Then he moved to Paris, where he fell in love with the country, the food, the language, the culture … and the girl who was to become his wife and

He said: “It’s true that the hero of my novel Back There falls in love with a French family via a girl … but then the book’s not necessarily a hundred percent autobiographical.

“We live forty kilometers from Paris on part of what was once my wife’s family’s chicken farm before the war. It used to be intensely rural like a scene from my book – no running water until the 1960s. Backward paradise.

“Now there are houses everywhere. The rabbits disappeared, then the garter snakes, then even the grasshoppers, no more fish in the streams. Still, an acre of lawn and roses is better than the noise and pollution and traffic snarls of Paris. Back There tries to resurrect the way things were, one of the functions of literature in my opinion.”

Even though all four of Howard’s novels have found their publisher, he has had his share of rejection slips. And that’s what inspired his short story, The Slush Machine.

He explained: “The genesis of The Slush Machine was still another form rejection slip from a Conglomerated Big Timer. This one was printed on recycled paper. At first I was irritated. It was a commendably ecological gesture on their part – but couldn't the bastards soften the blow with decent bond?

“Then I had this vision of the Machine and the self-perpetuating cycle of white manuscripts converted into gray rejection slips. I don't mean to discourage fellow-writers by this exercise of poetic license. It’s quite possible that the submission editors of the Conglomerates do read the first paragraph of manuscripts (or at least the first sentence). So they should go on submitting.

“But I'm French-based and the postage necessary to the US and UK for news of rejection amounts to the price of a bottle of good Scotch, so I now make the exclusive and consoling liquid investment.

“Incidentally, that bit about the submission people reading no more than the first sentence isn't just a sour wisecrack. There's a publisher who requires a one-sentence résumé plus the opening sentence of the novel. ‘Hook us with that first sentence and we'll ask to see the whole manuscript!’ I really tried. The hook must have been blunt.”

Howard tells us a little about his books.

Back There: “A number of readers of the novel noted the resemblance between the name of the author, Howard Waldman, and the name of my anti-hero, Harry Grossman, the young American adrift in mid-century Paris. They fished for the possible autobiographical tie-in with the events and characters of the novel.

“They asked: ‘Did you have a ferociously possessive older sister like Ida, determined to make you conform? Or a culture-crazy ex football-playing brother-in-law like Jerry? That ex-Trotskyite nut, Roger; did he really pet a tiger in the Central Park zoo? Were you too, like Harry, clobbered in a demonstration and brought to a leftist’s apartment where he met his great love? Did Pascale's haughty model sister really exist and if so were her breasts all you say they were? Did their father really anoint his body with olive oil in hope of immortality? Were you, like your anti-hero, a middleman for an abortionist?’

“The indiscreet questions went on and on. I always assumed a befuddled expression and muttered: ‘All that was so long ago. Can’t remember.’

“It's a lie, of course. I remember it all, even the menus of the marvelous 90-cent Paris restaurant meals and the obscene graffiti inscriptions on the walls of that shabby, gray, beautiful mid-century city. But as for the book, what’s autobiographical and what’s invention is a secret between me and me … and, possibly, my wife.”

Time Travail: “Despite the title’s transparent allusion to time travel, I don’t consider Time Travail to be science fiction, at least not in the common understanding of the term.

“Most of the time travel novels I’ve read don’t convey a sense of the difficulty of breaching the temporal barrier. Just press a button and there you are, swapping chitchat and spaghetti with Julius Caesar, no more strenuous an undertaking than taking the subway from Manhattan to Queens, only the end-station’s more picturesque.

“Actually the operation is more like a minnow trying to breast a tsunami, a butterfly a cyclone. That’s what makes my character Harvey’s effort to recapture the past both pathetic and comic.

“Incidentally, maybe it might be wise to emphasise the humour in this novel … too much metaphysics might scare some of you away. The book’s about its characters wrestling with their own time – or lack of it – not an attempt to whisk the reader into the mighty future or quaint past.”

The Seventh Candidate: “The publisher’s blurb says: ‘In an age of plummeting morals and urban chaos verging on civil war, businessman Edmond Lorz makes a precarious living by removing obscene graffiti from underground railway advertising hoardings.

“‘It’s during a recruitment aptitude test for extra porn-purging staff that a terrorist bomb rips through Ideal Poster’s grubby headquarters, leaving Lorz and one candidate – the seventh – fighting for life in hospital.

“‘Lorz recovers completely, but the strikingly handsome young job-seeker wakens from his coma a blank-faced, unspeaking automaton with total amnesia and a blind obsession with his new employer’s clean-up campaign.

“‘Adopted by Lorz and his wildly unpredictable secretary, Dorothea – each driven by pity, love and stark fear – the mysterious Seventh Candidate wages a private and manic war on disorder in a subterranean maze of tunnels beneath a city gone mad.

“‘Howard Waldman’s latest novel, set against a backdrop of social disintegration that’s almost too close for comfort, swings from lunatic hilarity to heartrending tragedy … and often the reader may struggle to tell the difference in a story with more twists and turns than a subway map.’

“And I suppose that pretty well sums it up. All I can say is that it was the hardest of the novels to do, a source of no end of sweat and discouragement. I revamped it three times and the final version bears little resemblance to the initial one.

“I had to create an imaginary society on the brink of chaos, invent the techniques of grafitti removal, etc. The seventh candidate character was as delicate to handle as Frankenstein’s monster because, unconsciously, Lorz programs the boy for eradication of disorder, including eradication of the individuals who embody that disorder, and all this complexity had to be conveyed indirectly instead of baldly stated.”

Good Americans Go to Paris When They Die: This is my fourth, my latest … and my last novel.

“Heaven has been downsized to the city of Paris. And a tired old God has decided he can cope with only a fraction of the dead he used to process – so he picks Americans as his chosen people … and only good Americans get to go to Paris.

“To help in the selection process are bureaucrats … and you know what they say about French bureaucrats! Paris turns out to be no paradise for my five lead characters.

“The novel comes round full circle to my first, Back There, where the expatriate hero misses out on the great love of his life. In Good Americans, Seymour (as he’s named this time) has killed himself and awakened to a gigantic otherworld Préfecture de Paris.

“Along with four other posthumous Americans (the Americans must have spent time in Paris during their lives to qualify for this pint-sized heaven) he is placed in administrative suspension, awaiting judgment: return to void or return to the individual’s Paris of youth and the possibility of salvaging lost love. In the end, Seymour … But let me keep the cat in the bag.”

These four novels now form the “complete book-length works of Howard Waldman.”

He said: “After an exploration of the other world, how could I return to another 300-page exploration of this one?

“So I do short-shorts now. It’s a different kind of challenge, in a way more demanding than novels. In a novel you can roam and ramble away from the main road as you can’t with a short story. It’s an exercise in restraint, where each word counts; very close, sometimes, to poetry.

“I never forget what Faulkner said: ‘You can be more careless, you can put more trash in [a novel] and be excused for it. In a short story that’s next to the poem, almost every word has got to be almost exactly right. In the novel you can be careless but in the short story you can’t. I mean by that the good short stories like Chekhov wrote. That’s why I rate that second – it’s because it demands a nearer absolute exactitude. You have less room to be slovenly and careless. There’s less room in it for trash.’

“As with my novels, I’ll avoid any pre-conceived genre identification. And I won’t be ‘targeting’ markets. That can sound imbecilic or arrogant, I know. But if a few people like my short stuff I’m happy.

“It’s not exactly a new form of the art for me. I started with short stories. In my young days I wrote quite a number of them. When I reread the things recently I winced and sometimes cringed. At present I’m salvaging stuff from a 7,000-word piece that I think I can get into 2,000 words.

“Names of other short story writers and their titles come to mind and inspire me: Chekhov, Bernard Malamud (The Jew Bird), Herman Melville’s Bartleby and Benito Cereno, Hawthorne’s Goodman Brown, Sherwood Anderson (not just Winesberg, Ohio, but the marvellous Death in the Woods), J.L Borges (Labyrinths, in Penguin Modern Classics), certain things by Hemingway, like A Clean Well-Lighted Place, the frightening stories of Flannery O’Conner (A Good Man is Hard to Find), certain of Faulkner’s stories, like Barn Burning and Pantaloon in Black.”

Something Howard has no illusions about is the unbounded wealth short-story-writing will bring him. He’s not splashed out the deposit on a penthouse in Monte Carlo.

“It’s not about money. It never has been,” he said. “It’s about satisfaction – my own and the reader’s. Satisfaction and the quest for perfection.

“Although my work from now on will be short … I can promise that it won’t be written in a flash. I’ll be submitting to wherever I believe there’s an astute readership – like here.”

Interview by Alexander James

Interview first appeared in Twisted Tongue Magazine

Read an excerpt from Back There, Time Travail, The 7th Candidate, Good Americans Go To Paris When They Die


Click here for Howard Waldman's biography

When it’s Time to Type ‘The End’ – Part One

Back There was the title of Howard Waldman’s first published novel … and it’s also the direction he’s taking in his career.

While developing writers hone their skills on shorts in preparation for the main event – the novel – old hand Howard is turning his back on full length work after a string of books, and returning to basics: the flash fiction he wrote in his youth.

And after twelve years of intensive and painstaking work that produced Back There, Time Travail, The Seventh Candidate and Good Americans Go To Paris When They Die, the decision to return to his short story roots wasn’t a hard one to make.

“No harder,” he says, “than deciding to hit the sack after running four marathons.”

Because, while some full-time authors churn out novels every few months, each of Howard’s takes three years of draining hard work and smoking midnight oil just to reach first draft.

New Yorker Howard, who’s lived in France for decades and taught American Literature at a prestigious Paris University, broke the news of his retirement from novel writing to his publishers just as his The Seventh Candidate is about to be released and with Good Americans Go To Paris When They Die slated for spring 2008.

“With things at last seeming to roll for me on the novels front,” he said, “they were surprised – in fact, my editor has even tried to talk me out of it. But my mind’s made up.

“I started to write novels when I retired a dozen years ago – before that other pressing things always got in the way – and now it’s time to concentrate on retirement and all the things that freedom has to offer. I work less intensely, less obsessively on short stories, and I have more time for other things like reading and photography and gardening with my wife.”

But while he’ll never give up writing, even Howard’s shorts are likely to be short-shorts; most of them under 500 words long – flash fiction – aiming to complete each piece of work within a week. He does plan some longer stories running to 5,000 words or more but foresees the same compositional difficulties as with novels.

Howard explained: I’m a desperately slow worker. The first draft of a novel is a big hurdle. I have a theory about that. My critical sense is probably more developed than my creative urge. Subconsciously I probably compare my projected first-draft efforts to the finished products of admired authors. I have no way of seeing their defective first drafts. If I could, the paralysis would lift.

“I suspect that this syndrome is common with writers and partly explains their frequent addiction to alcohol to combat that sort of inhibition. Among the Americans, the roster of alcoholic writers is impressive. But I’m too prudent a man to use alcohol as a dissolvent of writer’s block. That bottle of Jameson Irish whiskey in the photo that goes with this article shouldn’t lead you to false conclusions.”

During a working life surrounded by literature and talented, creative students, Howard put dreams of the novel aside to settle down to his first only when the day-job was behind him.

“Why a start so close to the end?” he said. “Laziness, I guess, other things to do that seemed more urgent. Maybe the sense of time past and passing.

“It’s not accidental, I think, that three of my novels are concerned with the passage of time and the attempt to capture and undo it – most obviously Time Travail with its machine-assisted evocations of America in the thirties and forties of the last century.

“Also (with that title) Back There, a memory of a vanished Paris and a vanished love. Finally Good Americans Go to Paris When They Die where the protagonists have the possibility of returning to their youth and repair damaged love.”

Intellectual input apart, a dedicated writer’s working schedule can be gruelling. Howard’s day begins with four o'clock insomnia when story ideas come to him … the very sentences, as though dictated, scenes acted out as in a half-waking dream.

But, even producing just four published novels in an intensive dozen years as a novelist, Howard made sure every book he started was finished and signed for publication before he downed tools. There are no dead manuscripts gathering dust in his attic.

He said: “Once I had the basic idea for a novel I stuck to it to the bitter end. The demolition operations occurred within the shifting framework of the novel. There were all those false starts and dead ends that were scrapped, things kept but radically revised. What was chucked out of any given novel amounted to another novel in terms of pages and effort.

“I envy novelists who come up with a book a year, regular as clockwork. It’s admirable to be able to work efficiently, to engineer a novel and construct it according to blueprint. My novels have a slow gestation, longer than an elephant’s (twenty-two months for the pachyderm, often twice that for one of my books).

“I work intuitively but am suspicious of intuition. I chip away, carve and polish myself dizzy and often end by chucking out the result, whole chapters, months of work. But I’m never completely directionless. I do know where I’m heading. I generally write the last chapter first, subject, of course, to constant revision.

“Revision is the key word. Some scenes I rework maybe thirty times. The constant danger of that process is the loss of spontaneity, the faint smell of sweat and midnight oil that’s given off. When that happens, I revise again to try to create an illusion of spontaneity (in writing everything is illusion, I think). I have to curb a natural tendency to lyric outbursts so part of the revision process consists in toning things down, using the indirect approach, understatement. Less is better than more.

“A reviewer recently called one of my novels ‘idiosyncratic.’ I take that as a compliment. I’m wary of trends and fashions, the possibly contagious sound of other writers’ voices. Maybe that’s why for the past few years I’ve largely limited my reading of fiction to French and German. I want the voice that comes through in my work to be my own voice.

“There’s another reason why I neglect reading fiction. I taught American Literature at a Paris University for twenty years and it had pernicious side effects. The perverse pleasure of dissection – close reading, structure, symbolism and all of that – replaced the spontaneous pleasure of reading for the sake of reading. But for emotional kicks I have music.

“Since retirement, I’ve read very little fiction, despite the ambitious reading list I drew up on the eve of the event: it included Proust’s multi-volumed hunt for lost time, Finnegan’s Wake, all of Balzac’s Human Comedy, etc.

“One reason is that I started to write seriously at about that time and the activity soon became obsessional. Since it takes me at least three years to write a novel, I felt I didn’t have time – in a long-term metaphysical sense – for anything else. In the process, I lost the habit of reading.

“But I used to be a compulsive reader, a citizen of Bookland – it was so much more real than the so-called real world about me.

“I discovered Joseph Conrad at fourteen and by sixteen had read all of his novels. I recall a subway ride, plunged in King Lear. I overshot my Manhattan station and emerged from Shakespeare in the depths of Brooklyn. Other authors come to mind: Jane Austin and Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, the Henry James of the marvelous novellas like The Altar of the Dead.

“A novel that no amount of analyzing and rereading ever harmed for me is Huck Finn. That invulnerability to time and repetition is rare. I remember how impressed I was by The Catcher in the Rye when it came out. Then, many years later, I had to teach it and discovered that all the magic had evaporated.

“Céline’s Voyage to the End of the Night and Death on the Installment Plan made a terrific impact on me. I still recall the dazzling revelation of Borges when I read his five-page story, Funes the Memorious.

“Finally, as proof that I do occasionally read things other than Le Monde newspaper, I recently discovered the contemporary Italian author Mario Rigoni Stern. Hard to believe, but I wept reading his story How Thin You Are, Brother.”

Part Two wil be posted Tuesday 8th April

Good Americans Go To Paris When They Die by Howard Waldman. Out Now!

The Kingdom of Heaven has been downsized to a single city. And to save overcrowding, God has a new chosen race and set of entry qualifications.

In the modern hereafter only good Americans go to Paris when they die!

But not even a divinely ordered bureaucracy is infallible and five not-so-good Americans find themselves posthumously thrown together and trapped in a surreal limbo:

Randy 1900s marine Louis Forster;

Maggie Thompson, an over-sexed 1930s fan dancer;

neurotic 1940s New York intellectual Seymour Stein;

Helen Ricchi, the mysterious and bookish wallflower suspected of foul play after her husband's disappearance in the 1950s;

modern-day Las Vegas boor, truck driver Max Pilsudski.

And the ill-assorted desperate departed will stop at nothing in a seemingly impossible quest to return to the land of the living and repair flawed lives and fractured loves.

Heaven and an Orwellian Hell share a fragile frontier in Howard Waldman's masterfully woven novel of profound humanity and lethally-honed humor.

What the critics are saying about Howard Waldman …

The acerbic wit and sustained irony of a Woody Allen or a Kurt Vonnegut. David Gardiner. Gold Dust Magazine.

This is a man in superb control of his material, a man who knows his characters inside out and who can bring them across to us with a sense of reality that is quite beautiful. He has a wicked turn of phrase that can bring the reader from a smile to a laugh. Chris Williams. Tregolwyn Book Reviews

This book is destined for greatness and I would not be at all surprised to see the name Howard Waldman on the bestseller list. Alastair Rosie.

Read an excerpt from Good Americans Go To Paris When They Die

Click here for Howard Waldman's biography

Good Americans Go To Paris When They Die on BeWrite Books: paperback, eBook

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ISBN: 978-1-904492-98-6
Pages: 364
Price: £9.50

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If good Americans go to Paris where do bad Americans go when they die?

The Kingdom of Heaven has been downsized to a single city. And to save overcrowding and overwork, a semi-retired God has a new chosen race and tight set of entry qualifications.

In the modern hereafter only good Americans go to Paris when they die!

But not even a divinely ordered bureaucracy is infallible and five not-so-good Americans find themselves posthumously thrown together and trapped in a surreal limbo:

Randy 1900s marine Louis Forster;

Maggie Thompson, an over-sexed 1930s fan dancer;

neurotic 1940s New York intellectual Seymour Stein;

Helen Ricchi, the mysterious and bookish wallflower suspected of foul play after her husband’s disappearance in the 1950s;

and modern-day Las Vegas boor, truck driver Max Pilsudski.

And the ill-assorted desperate departed will stop at nothing in a seemingly impossible quest to return to the land of the living and repair flawed lives and fractured loves.

Heaven and Hell share a fragile frontier in Howard Waldman’s masterfully woven novel of profound humanity and lethally-honed humor.

Following on the heels of his genre-defying Back There, Time Travail and The Seventh Candidate, Waldman produces an odyssey that combines horror with romance, science fiction with theology, sex with politics, dark humour with slapstick … it is all of these, yet none of these.

Good Americans Go To Paris When They Die is something unique in fiction, mixing George Orwell with Douglas Adams (a dash of Dante and Dali for seasoning) and producing a thundering new author voice that is so much greater than the sum of its parts.

Howard Waldman’s track record for independence in the increasingly genre-driven world of popular authorship excels even itself in a brave new novel born of stretching the imagination to breaking point – and then, somehow, stretching it still further by adding to the impossible the magic ingredient of the probable.

Waldman – an American academic living reclusively in a remote part of France – vows that Good Americans Go To Paris When They Die will be his final novel. He wants to grow roses now.

Should this be his last book, we should make the very most of the four outstanding novels created by this maestro of literary fiction and scent the flowers.

Good Americans To Paris When They Die

ISBN: 978-1-904492-98-3

Price: £9.50

Pages: 364

Release Date: 26th March 2008

Excerpt

Author bio

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