I’m sick as a dog, with an ear infection that took advantage of a 5-day stretch of REALLY pushing myself (magazine, book publicity work, and a friend’s bachelor party in NYC Saturday night; the latter was the final straw). On the plus side, the Bergen Record’s short piece on Voyant is out. I’ll cheer, but not too loudly, because the fever and delirium might trick me into thinking that someone else is wandering around my house:
8/10/03
“Voyant,” a word coined by poet Arthur Rimbaud, is derived from “voyeur,” one who sees, and “savant,” one who knows. But it’s hard for publisher Gil Roth, founder of Ringwood’s Voyant Publishing, to do either when it comes to predicting the public response to the company’s upcoming book: The Immensity of the Here and Now, by novelist Paul West.“I’m hoping it will get talked about, certainly,” Roth says.
That, at least, seems likely. For one thing, West is a major novelist (The Dry Danube, Rat Man of Paris). For another, his book is about a still-hot topic: 9/11.
Most important, though, is some of the content. “It’s not very politically correct,” Roth says. “It’s full of rage about 9/11.”
It was this sulfurous element that had West bypass his usual publisher and offer a major opportunity for Roth’s one-man operation, which has published four paperback books since it launched in 1998. This is Voyant’s first hardcover book.
The book’s main character loses his memory after the 9/11 attacks; in his sessions with a therapist, he reveals a bile toward radical Islamists that may or may not reach delusional proportions (there are suggestions that the story may be happening in the future, and other world landmarks also have been destroyed). This is the classic “unreliable narrator” that everyone learns about in English Lit 101, but he’s still bound to make some readers uncomfortable.
“This is certainly not a right-wing gun-nut sort of book,” Roth says. “But this character has a lot of rage.”
Roth, also a writer, made at least one seminal contribution to West’s book: urging that West discard his original title, The Topless Towers of Illium (from Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus“).
“I told him I thought it sounded like a Trojan strip club,” Roth says.
The Immensity of the Here and Now ($23) will be in bookstores in early September.
E-mail: beckerman@northjersey.com