A Wordsmith and a Worldsmith: Traymore Rooms reviewed by Akashic

Our friends at Akashic Books in Brooklyn, just posted a wonderful, appreciative review of Norm Sibum's sprawling 700-pager The Traymore Rooms on their weekly "In Good Company" online review. Intern Alex Whelan's astute take and fine stylings —"At times, Traymore smacks of an exceptionally erudite episode of Cheers where everybody knows both everybody’s name and the full text of Virgil’s Eclogues." C'mon!— show that he's got quite a future ahead of him. He sees in Sibum's "screwball genre-hopping and erratic plotting" echoes of "Restoration sex comedy" and "the paranoid conspiratorial satire of Thomas Pynchon," not to mention a "Hemingway-like elegy for younger and better days." But ultimately, Whelan sees at the core of this ambitious novel a heartfelt peon to friendship: 

"None of Traymore’s zeal would land, however, if not for the truth at the center of the novel: Calhoun’s—and Sibum’s—genuine, unashamed love for his friends. In the great tradition of Nick Carraways marveling quietly upon their Gatsbys, Calhoun seems well aware that he’s no match for the company that he keeps...For Traymore’s protagonist, there is no prospect more horrifying than not occupying himself with fellow Traymoreans from sun-up to sundown."

Thanks Akashic and Alex! 

"Sibum in Nighttime": Traymore in the Brooklyn Rail, Largehearted Boy

Excuse me while I clear my throat.

1. "At once hugely ambitious and never above an off-colour crack."
2. "'Melvillian.'"
3. "The decline and fall of the American Empire, by means of highbrow bedroom farce."
4. "Harkens back to big-novel romps of the author’s youth, in particular John Barth’s Sot-Weed Factor (1960), which put Colonial America through dizzying bounces."
5. "The narrative reach alone is honourable."
6. "Much of it comes across with smarts and verve ... it’s no surprise to learn that our narrator’s a poet."

And that's just the first two paragraphs. Thoughtful thoughtful thoughtful smart stuff today for our friend The Traymore Rooms, including not just this review but a feature on Largehearted Boy's Book Notes page. What a Fiction Friday! And since I can't resist an ending as good as John Domini's, my plan is to close the week with that, and then tell (beg? plead? implore?) you to go check out the whole darn October issue of the Brooklyn Rail. Here's to setting the bar high, folks. See you on Monday.

Sibum effectively eschews the “cheap genre” approach to worldwide collapse, “some tale of the inner sanctum,” all about the powerful and their trophies. “Pay me millions to fake it,” claims Calhoun, “and I could not do it,” and so he confines his drama to the no-accounts. As for the sheer weight of it all, isn’t that part of the Homeric task? Right down to the reiterations (Moonface is “long-bellied,” Montreal a “faded Jezebel”)? Or think of the title, its French-English doubling, trés-more. Exactly.

—John Domini, The Brooklyn Rail 

 

 

"Normative Statements" (Courtesy of Véhicule)

Best question I've seen crowdsourced all week, up today on the Véhicule Press Blog.

Why, in a few months, it'll be up in lights on Broadway: Traymore, the Eighth Wonder of the World.

—Say, what is it, anyhow?
—I hear it's a kind of a gorilla.
—Gee - ain't we got enough of them in New York?

                           King Kong, 1933

Ladies and Gentlemen, no chains will ever hold it. It's here.

Hoo hoo! (Or, The National Post reviews Traymore)

A phrase to join the ranks of "the rain in Spain" and
"Montcalm threw the battle."

Afternoon, folks, and happy Friday. This just in courtesy of Michael Hingston and The National Post:

One of the great joys of fiction is watching a novel set up a problem that only it has the tools to solve. With long novels, that problem also tends to involve a balancing act of the reader’s time invested vs. the stimulation received. But a novel as long and cyclical as Norm Sibum’s The Traymore Rooms wears its problem on its sleeve even more pointedly: It asks, “How little territory can I possibly cover over 600 pages?” And that comes with a built-in dare to the reader: “How long can I trick you into sticking with me?”
Fortunately, Sibum, a seasoned poet, has enough control of his craft to make even asking those questions part of the fun.

"This is Sibum’s debut novel," Hingston observes, "and it isn’t so much a dip of his toe into the world of fiction as a cannonball off a third-storey hotel balcony. You’ve got to admire his chutzpah."

Well we sure did. For the rest of the review, and to see why Hingston's convinced this may be the most beguiling book of  2013, click here.

A Really Really Great Second Half

The Millions' Most Anticipated Great Second Half of 2013 book preview went up this morning. On it? Yep, that's right. "Poet Norm Sibum’s 700-pager should be on the radar of all the maximalism-starved readers who landed A Naked Singularity on our Top 10 list in 2012," writes Garth Hallberg, "though the book might more rightly be likened to something by William Gass or Alexander Theroux. Plot isn’t Sibum’s thing, exactly, but his erudition (considerable), sense of character (eccentric), and mood (quietly splenetic) more than compensate. The novel concerns a group of aging friends who share haunts in downtown Montreal. They talk, fight, love, and try to make sense of a historical moment that has disappointed their youthful hopes ... the prose is a consistent pleasure."

Is it a novel or a kettle bell?

Presenting a novel that could be used to do shoulder presses: The Traymore Rooms by Norm Sibum, coming this July from Biblioasis.

We're binding galleys today and my paper cut count is up to five.

At least I'm getting in a bit of an arm workout in the process.

Who needs weights when you've got a book this massive?

Left, 6 galleys of David Mason's The Pope's Bookbinder (a pretty lengthy book on its own). Right, one gigantic copy of Norm Sibum's The Traymore Rooms. The result? A paper cut ratio fast approaching 1:1.

Encore Lit Interviews Norm Sibum

I pointed out a few weeks ago that Norm Sibum has been keeping a blog for some time, and that Thirsty readers might want to check it out on occasion. CNQ contributing editor Michael Carbert interviews Norm today over on his online magazine Encore Lit about the blog and just about everything else it touches on:

More than one literary commentator [Ed. note: Messrs. Wells and Starnino] has expressed surprise that Norm Sibum now has a blog. Author websites are common, but blogs where the posts are both daily and lengthy, not to mention written in a truly idiosyncratic style, are not typical. One sees from the posts themselves that you’re surprised to find yourself pursuing this project. Why a blog?

Yes, I am somewhat surprised to find myself ‘pursuing this project’. I knew at the outset I was taking leave of my senses and felt quite ridiculous for the first month or so writing up my ‘posts’. But it passed. The fact that it passed perhaps ought to trouble me. So why a blog? I don’t know, to be honest. Any number of reasons recommend themselves. To keep my hand in somehow, poems coming more slow; to hear the sound of my voice rattling on — dreadful thought, that one; to organize my thinking, if at the expense of the long-suffering reader. The thing is, a number of people tell me they follow the posts on a semi-regular basis, so I have some excuse to continue. I give it a year, at the end of which I will assess whether or not the posting has been a good or truly rotten idea.

Your posts ground themselves quite deliberately in a specific locale, with detailed references to the restaurants and terraces you frequent and the people you encounter, while simultaneously discussing geo-politics and events happening around the globe. Is this juxtaposition primarily an aesthetic one, or do you sense that developments in Washington or the Middle East do resonate in your corner of things here on Sherbrooke Street West?

Resonate is a word that renders me exceedingly nervous. One hears it used so often that one wonders, what with just about everything resonating, if we can expect rolling blackouts sometime soon. I am doing in the blogs what I have always done in the poems, just that I am permitting myself to be awfully chatty and, well, prosy. The blogs may lead in the end to better poems; then again, look out, wretched bit of verse at 3 o’clock—To further treat with your question, one’s street corner is always ‘the world’ to some extent or another, and time is fluid. The poet Hesiod wrote his verse a long, long time ago and yet, I know at least one Hesiod out in the Townships who is just as cranky and as red-necked as the poet was. This man, as he listens to his Mahler and Beethoven, vents continuous, unrelenting streams of bile. In that sense, these juxtapositions you speak of in my writing do not reflect an aesthetic position on my part; it just seems a quite normal state of affairs.

For the rest of the interview please go here.