I read this fine book on books. If you are curious about the interplay between authors and their (or other's) physical works this is a great read. Gekoski knew them all, from Tolkein to Graham Green to Rushdie and relates great quirky stories. . .
The Toronto Star
December 19, 2004 Sunday
HEADLINE: True tales between the lines
Author Rick Gekoski might cringe to
hear it but his wildly readable Nabokov's Butterfly is like the E! True
Hollywood Story of celebrated 20th century literature. It's a behind-the-scenes
tell-all with all the hallmarks: huge successes, bitter rejections, elicit
affairs (straight and gay), bad planning, worse executions and piles of money
made and lost.
Call it word porn for book nerds. Nabokov's
Butterfly is a page-turner. Bet you never thought you could say that and James
Joyce in the same breath. As we're told in the introduction, Gekoski, an
expatriate American in England, early on traded a career in teaching for a tour
of duty as a "full-time rare book dealer specializing in 20th century first
editions and manuscripts.
"Admittedly," he writes, "it was a risky
thing to do but it worked. I was happier being my own boss, swanning about
buying and selling the odd book. In the first year I made twice my previous
university salary, and had three hundred times more fun."
BBC Radio
soon realized anyone diving headlong into - not to mention wagering thousands of
dollars on - coveted copies of Salinger, Golding, Kerouac, Tolkien, Rushdie, et
al., would have some neat tales to tell. Nabokov's Butterfly picks up where
Gekoski's Rare Books, Rare People radio series left off.
The
criteria for inclusion are simple yet arbitrary. Books must have what Gekoski
describes as "complex biographies. They must be valued in the rare book market.
In many cases I have good stories to tell about them, from a dealer's point of
view."
Truth in advertising there. Gekoski dishes riveting back
stories about such hallowed titles as Lord Of The Flies, The Catcher In The Rye,
Brideshead Revisited, Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone, Animal Farm,
Ulysses, Lolita and The Satanic Verses, to name eight of the 20
explored.
Gekoski hammers some titles mercilessly, though he's very
funny. Take this passage about Salman Rushdie:
"Like many readers,
I never finished The Satanic Verses. On every page I found something to admire
... It had genius, but there was something unrelentingly same-y about the prose,
and the succession of scenes, that made me feel that, after a few hundred pages,
I'd had enough. I wasn't disappointed exactly, just prematurely
satisfied."
Or this, detailing Gekoski's litigious brush with
reclusive author J.D. Salinger: "No sooner had the material arrived, than I
received a phone call from the offices of Salinger's literary agents ... I was
informed by a woman with a voice racked by indignation and cigarettes, which
could have frozen the blood of an Orc, that I was in serious
trouble."
Naturally, nothing compares to the stories, some
well-worn, some apparently fresh, about the books themselves. How Harry Potter
author J.K. Rowling was initially rejected by everyone from Penguin to
HarperCollins. How Kerouac's buddy Ginsberg carved On The Road as "crazy in a
bad way." How D.H. Lawrence was unable to craft Sons And Lovers until his
mother, who Gekoski reckons had "appropriated" her son's life, died in
1911.
Supporting such drama are juicy bits detailing how Gekoski
came to buy and sell copies of the books in question, including the prices he
paid and the sums he earned through shrewd maneuvering. We meet everyone from
Graham Greene to "Mr." Tolkien, Frodo's creator.
Nabokov's
Butterfly is irresistible for anyone who digs real-life yarns stuffed with
triumph, tragedy and a litany of mishaps by publisher.
Kim Hughes
is a lead reviewer for amazon.ca.
Nabokov's
Butterfly:
And Other Stories Of Great Authors And Rare Books
