Authors: B. J. Novak
One More Thing (31 page)
What other languages did he know? What other interests did he have? What other great books were most worthy, or most ready, or most easily mistaken as such?
The speculation over the next book J. C. Audetat would introduce to his age itself became a guessing game with obsessive echoes in the literary world and beyond. Book clubs turned into betting pools. Graphic designers drew up new covers for old classics, just as daydreams. Professors and high-profile fans around the world campaigned exuberantly for their favorite works. A rumored Audetat translation of
The Metamorphoses
briefly crashed servers at the University of California at Berkeley before it was debunked as a hoax. Philip Roth composed an open letter to the
New York Times
, humbly requesting that Audetat consider translating Milan Kundera; Michel Houellebecq, apparently knowing no other tone, published a blistering and inexplicably misogynistic open letter to
Le Monde
, rudely daring Audetat to translate one of his own books, a gambit for attention that went widely ignored. A consortium of undergraduates and professors at Yale University started an online petition for “J. C. Audetat to Translate an Emerging Voice of Color and/or Gender” that received more than 140,000 distinct units of social media approval online.
The most attention and interest came from a full-page advertisement that ran across many publications and was signed by a notably wide-ranging group that included Bill Clinton, the Aga Khan, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Noam Chomsky, Salman Rushdie, Mos Def, Richard Dawkins, former pope Joseph Ratzinger, and over three hundred prominent others who might at first glance seem to have contradictory or at least divergent agendas. “Dear J. C. Audetat,” it began—as though there could be a pretext of anything either traditional or intimate about this group sending this message in this way—and then proceeded to lay out the case for Audetat that “a true translation of the
Koran
for the present day could carry a power even beyond the grandness and beauty of the text itself; it might
inspire all sides of a fractured world to understand itself better. Consider using the light of your brilliance to brighten the pages of the book that is more discussed while being less understood than any other. We do not intend to place any pressure on the delicate and mysterious force of your talent, but merely to inform you of a way by which the fate of the world may well be moved by the hand that holds your pen.”
J. C. Audetat was a different person now. His light had been replaced by a glow. He was forty-four years old and lived far from the center of this activity, in a house near a lake with the loveliest person he had met on his adventures and their two-year-old son. He had chosen both Tennessee and Aurelia in large part for the sounds of their names, and his lifelong trust in the poetic had not led him astray; his life was soaked in brunette tones and accidental music, and he was, for the most part, a happy person.
He took walks most mornings and most evenings on a ragged path that led from his house to the lake and around it and back, letting his mind drift in similarly ragged circles. He walked the path alone, except for a few welcome occasions when he was joined by the one neighbor he knew, a kind and curious man obsessed with the prospect of moon travel whom Audetat came to like and one afternoon helped to compose an unsolicited editorial on the subject for a local newspaper.
Once in a while, Audetat came across something that made him want to write—a flash of ambition, or a filament of beauty that momentarily longed for replication. If he still felt that way when he returned to the house, he would write a note to himself describing in the sparest of terms what the thought had been.
But, luckily or not, the need to write always went away before he felt the need to really do anything about it.
One day, it didn’t.
One day, on a walk around the lake like every other, Audetat kicked a rock along the path and then, for no reason he could pinpoint other than that this idea had been stalking him patiently for a long time and waiting for precisely the right moment to ambush him, Audetat was jumped by an excitement-coated despair that shouted at him that this daily life—all he could ever have hoped for, as a different, calmer, narrower voice in his head enumerated reasons for every morning—was not a reward but a procrastination; the loveliest and lightest procrastination that anyone could ever have invented for him, but a procrastination nonetheless.
He rushed back inside and set out to find something that would quiet the voice that had just grabbed him and shaken him, almost literally.
He knew he wasn’t a poet anymore. Still, while he didn’t know exactly what he wanted to say, he knew exactly how it should sound. He knew the acoustics of his age, he knew the precise echo that greatness made within it, and now, as much as he loved—finally—everything in his life, all he wanted was to hear that sound. He needed that sound to pull him out of where he was now, not because he didn’t love where he was now, but because he did, so much, that he needed to find out if he could make a sound that could compete with it.
“He must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and
how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about … like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.”
—
THE GREAT GATSBY
, F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
He must have felt that he had lost the world he’d known, that he had finally defaulted on the impossible price of living so long with one dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is, and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world: material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted about, neither by chance nor design … like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding towards him through the once-familiar trees.
—
THE GREAT GATSBY, F
. SCOTT FITZGERALD, TRANS. J. C. AUDETAT
The world took a moment to figure out what it was reading. Then another moment.
“At first glance, an English-to-English translation of
The Great Gatsby
would seem to be the very last thing we need. But
The Great Gatsby
has already been translated many times since its publication: into film by Baz Luhrmann, into life by Jay Z. In this context, Audetat’s translation is not only the most contemporary, but the most faithful.”
18
“As the definitive fable of American success—the real, the imagined, and the imagined-as-real—
Gatsby
is still inexorably tied to its emblematic author, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, and to its time, the 1920s. This translation of
Gatsby
is the same book, but with its colors refreshed, its lines reinforced, its themes reshaded. But most important, the novel’s tumultuous and defining romance with the nature of success is now filtered to us not through the experiences of the great literary star of another era, but through the great literary star of ours.”
19
“The
Gatsby
for our time.”
20
“The timelessness of
The Great Gatsby
is not evidence that we don’t need this translation—it is proof that we do. We deserve to read this book as effortlessly as the original readers did, without needing to time-travel back to a place of distancingly different idioms and issues. If you want to read the
Great Gatsby
in 2013, the way that Fitzgerald intended
The Great Gatsby
be read in 1925—read Audetat’s translation.”
21
“I loved it!”
22
“A landmark insult—not only to Fitzgerald and to
Gatsby
, but to literature itself.”
23
“A joke. And not a funny one. F.”
24
“The Emperor himself has come before the masses and declared himself naked—and
still
, people praise his robe?”
25
“Has the world lost its goddamn mind?!”
26
It was the last thing J. C. Audetat wrote, and the last thing he needed to write. He had now said all he had felt the need to say in his particular life. It was nothing that hadn’t been said before, but he had said it all better than it had ever been said in the language of his own time and place.
Which was, in fact, the only language he knew.
Audetat stayed at his home, safely surrounded with the rewards that the original mischief of the compromises of his artistic journey had brought him, as the buzzing of the many minds he had touched vibrated incessantly and harmlessly about him, around him, and through him, like radio waves, for the rest of his life.
It felt like poetry.
1
. Nick Hornby,
The Believer
.
2
. Janet Maslin,
New York Times
.
3
. Harold Bloom,
Yale Book Review
.
4
. Brian Lewis,
Men’s Health
.
5
. Keith Gessen,
N+1
.
6
. Junot Díaz,
New York Times Book Review
.
7
. Frank Rich,
New York
.
8
. Camille Paglia,
Salon
.
9
. Dan Chiasson,
Harper’s Magazine
.
10
. Alan Green,
New York Review of Books
.
11
. Natasha Vargas-Cooper,
The Awl
.
12
. Chuck Klosterman,
New York Times Book Review
.
13
. Lauren Leto,
Glamour
.
14
. Ed Skoff,
The Atlantic
.
15
. Lev Grossman,
Time
.
16
. (reviewer anonymous),
Gawker
.
17
. Andrew Sullivan,
Times Literary Supplement
.
18
. Nathan Rabin,
The A.V. Club
.
19
. Alan Cheuse,
NPR
.
20
. Tina Brown,
The Daily Beast
.
21
. Marjorie Garber,
Harvard Book Review
.
22
. Larry King, larryking.com.
23
. Hector Tobar,
Los Angeles Times
.
24
. Jeff Giles,
Entertainment Weekly
.
25
. Andrew Sullivan, Andrewsullivan.com.
26
. Stephen King, private correspondence with Amy Tan.
Discussion Questions• Did you think the book was funny? Why or why not?
• Did you flip through the book and read the shortest stories first? The author does that, too.
• What is quantum nonlocality? Be concise.
• Do you think discussion questions can be unfairly leading sometimes? Why?
• Who are we supposed to be discussing these questions with?
• Do you normally have discussions in response to a question that was posed by a person not participating in the discussion? Why or why not?
• Do you think “why not?” is ultimately a better question than “why?”
• Why or why not?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTSThis book developed alongside a series of public readings in front of live audiences. First and above all I want to thank every person who attended one of these readings. You were the most inspiring of motivators and most honest of editors. I loved you and feared you.
Thanks as well to the staffs of the venues that coordinated these readings: most notably the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in Los Angeles, as well as its counterpart in New York City; and additionally the Last Bookstore in Los Angeles, Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena, as well as Shakespeare and Company in Paris.