 Michael Orthofer is a man on a mission. In a recent profile of him, New Yorker magazine wrote, quote, he has so far reviewed a staggering 3,760 books on that site. His goal is to read a book a day, but he averages about 260 a year. Of course these numbers are now badly out of date. Michael's specialty is fiction, in particular world literature and fiction and translation. So we're here today to talk about books and fiction with Michael Orthofer. Hello Michael, thank you for coming. Hi Thomas, thank you for having me. Let me start first with the question that's a little bit expansive. Now if we think about fiction, for all the wonderful novels we read, it actually turns out to be the case. The events in those novels didn't actually happen, right? Even especially vivid works like Lord of the Rings, right? Those are not real events. So if we're reading for some reason to learn things or be moved emotionally, why is it that things that didn't happen have so much power for you or other readers relative to things that did happen? Why is fiction so special? Well I think being not tied down to the actual events, allowing the imagination to roam really, writers are able to do amazing things and I think that's what we get out of it. That non-fiction, the description of what has actually happened, first of all it's also very difficult to capture just precisely what has happened. And often fiction allows you to go beyond that to imagine the reasons behind it which you might not be able to if you were doing just purely following the facts so to speak. But say we think of it in marginal terms, you know, I'm an economist. So if I say, well, reading Hamlet, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Jane Austen, of course that was essential for one's own education to speak to other people. The core, I don't know if you'd quite call them ideas, but inspirations in those works move people's lives. But at the margin, given how much you read, and you know, I read the fair man of fiction too, how much value is there really for that marginal work of fiction, given the regularity of patterns of stories that we see? What is it you get out of the marginal work of fiction? Well, it varies. I mean I have to admit that the great deal that I read I don't get that much out of. And you really, I think one of the reasons I do read as much as I do is because it really takes that whole mass to really find all the different things you're looking for in it. But I definitely think it really, it expands my horizons in a way that other things can't. Travel, talking to people, meeting people, reading the newspaper, following current events. Those things obviously also help you understand the world better. But I think fiction adds a totally different dimension to it. And truly great fiction really can take you much farther than other things can, I think. There's a book I read a review of. I'm sure you've heard of it, maybe you read it. Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings. Very positive reviews, right? It's 704 pages and they're fairly dense pages. I thought of reading the book and then I sat down and I said to myself, with the time it would take me to read this book I could fly to Jamaica and spend an additional three days. I've only been to Jamaica once. And therefore it didn't make sense for me to read the book. How do you feel about that reasoning? Well, I'm full of admiration if you think you could capture, you know, spending three days in Jamaica would be the equivalent. I don't think it's equivalent. I think it really is a separate experience. I think also many people don't have the possibility of just traveling and reading a book as much simpler. The axis is always there so you really can pick whatever strikes your mood, which if you commit to three days in Jamaica, you're stuck in Jamaica for three days and maybe it turns out that isn't really what you wanted. But I think the Marlon James adventure, his way of seeing it, one of the things we have to remember when someone's writing a book, a work of fiction, usually years of work in that. And I think that is reflected in the final product. The final product might seem like a compact 700-page book. That's already a very long one. But there is so much that is being worked through in that and in good fiction, great fiction, the work itself reflects that. So if we take American citizens who are not necessarily the people who read you, but at the margin we could give them more non-fiction, we could give them more travel, we could give them more fiction, or we could actually give them more of some really good TV. Which of those things are we rooting for them to do more of at the margin? At the margin I would think travel. I think really the experience of the foreign place would be the most benefit because I think most people really don't get that, don't have that opportunity. I don't think they need more TV. I think TV is pretty well covered in this country and everybody gets their fill or the proper, or probably more than the proper dose. But I think fiction is up there. I think fiction is an important part of it as well and it's such an easy part to get to as well. So I think people should take advantage of that. In that sense the marginal cost is relatively low since you can just go to your local library to the local bookstore and you have such a wide selection. It's actually inclined to give them the marginal dose of TV. Really? I think people absorb it and process it better. And the fact that they watch a lot of TV means they're good at it so you're very good at reading fiction. You absorb and process it very well. So TV shows really stick with people. If at the margin you're giving people quality TV, it might even be my choice over travel. A lot of people come away from travel, alienated. They don't always enjoy travel. They vaguely feel it was good for them. And they argue with each other. I can see that. So the general mix like what people do versus what they really enjoy, I find interesting. Now you have a blog which has two parts. One is called Literary Saloon and the other is Complete Review but I think of them as one integrated entity. You review books on a very regular basis and most of all you review books which are being translated from other languages into English. Is that a fair way to put it? Yes, foreign fiction dominates. And why the appeal of foreign language fiction to you? What catches you there? Well in part it also came about the site, I started the site in 1999. It's been around a long time and one of the reasons I started it was because I saw how many people were posting book reviews online and suddenly you had the possibility of getting book reviews not just from your local paper or from the national magazines but from anywhere in the world. And one of the things that struck me and this is also partly has to do with the timing in American publishing and in American book reviewing is that there was very little coverage of especially translated fiction which would be much more popular say in the 1970s. And suddenly we had reached a real low point and so I made a conscious effort also to move in that direction. But aside from that I also I find foreign fiction more interesting in a way. It's not that I find foreign fiction more interesting than American or British fiction but just I think it's better to read from everywhere from all over the place rather than one specific locale. What's your theory of America? Where have we gone wrong? So you say correctly there was more interest in foreign fiction in the 1970s, right? We've moved away from that. Why has that happened? What's the institutional failure behind that? You could say lack of someone like you may be part of it but you're here now. It's still the case. A novel comes out in American English and they try to hide the fact that it was translated quite often. I'm sure you've seen this or maybe not seen it. Well I think actually things have improved a lot in the time I've been running the site. I think a major reason was that there was a generational shift from the especially the publishing world the publishers who had come across from Europe around World War II and who obviously had brought a lot of international fiction who were aware of what was being written elsewhere in the world mainly in Europe unfortunately so relatively localized as well but still. But you also had it with the interest in Japanese fiction for example there was that generation which is also very much due to the sudden interest in Japan from World War II the people who learned Japanese and then began translating the work and I think there was a generational shift which played itself out most fully in the 1990s but I'm not sure why exactly it went as far down as it did. The wonderful thing is that translation has really been revived in the past couple of years I think there really has been a greater interest especially with smaller publishers who are really interested in publishing translations. But it is a kind of paradox of globalization right so after the 70s in particular immigration to the United States goes up quite rapidly there's a lot more trade especially with Asia many more Americans get past ports they travel abroad and at the same time we're less interested in some aspects of foreign literature and maybe there's something more general to this so if you think of America as in some ways an open country actually we're much less willing to watch foreign films than our people from most other countries and then you go to Canada for all of its talk of cultural protectionism they do a small amount of it or Paris arguably they're in many ways more open to foreign cultures than America so what's the general paradoxical lesson about globalization we can pull out of all of this? It might be a cultural thing that America is in many ways always being sort of integrating it is integrated the immigrants that come in and it is value that they become American that they adopt American values and part of that has been leaving behind to a certain extent the culture a great amount of literature of sort of the first, second, third generation Americans and how that lives but it's almost all in English and there's very little of returning to the languages that these immigrants brought with them on the other hand it's fascinating how many foreign authors live especially in university settings in the United States but they live in these sort of isolated pockets and that part of the broader American literary culture which I find the bizarre paradox I don't quite understand why that happened Let me tell you an argument about New York City which I occasionally hear and I know it's not true about you but whether you think it's true at all and it gets at these paradoxes of globalization that in some ways New York City or maybe just Manhattan is fairly provincial because people think and they're led to believe that the whole world comes here in some ways that's true tourism and migration but you don't actually get the whole world here at all you get a highly processed filtered version of a bit of it from each particular region and then people here in the way become more inward looking they don't go as many other places they feel everything's right here they get into their routines and is it possible that parts of Manhattan are evolving into this highly provincial place because of these cultural paradoxes? I think so although New York still remains such a dynamic place because you also have great shifts in what populations come here and how that affects the city I think and so there is that dynamism the changing neighborhoods so I still think in that sense it is a very vibrant city and it's fairly unprovincial for a metropolitan city compared to even some European from Austrian Vienna is it's a cosmopolitan city but in the end it is it is, yeah now my friend Ben Kazanoka he's always talking to me about this idea of life hacks like advice where you can live your life or learn things more efficiently and let's say I was approaching foreign language literature in translation as an economist and the following life hack occurred to me I'm gonna lay it out and you tell me why it's wrong there's always more to read always more wonderful things to read in all of the major languages but if you can read a language fluently usually you'll enjoy the fiction or poetry in that language much more so you're not gonna run out of things to read in the languages you can read in so therefore in translated literature you should read like the very most famous works so if you don't read Russian yes read Brothers Karamazov and War and Peace and a few things and then stop and if you read say English, Spanish and French then just read in those languages and translated literature at the margin put it aside never look at it again now that's not what you do but what's wrong with that argument well I think you're really missing so much because the problem is finding what's what is a value what is important and I mean we have these established books like War and Peace or Crime and Punishment but Russian literature goes so much deeper for example to take just an example of a big language and it also changes with time so rapidly I think that in every ten year period you could select a new set of a dozen recent relatively recent of the past quarter century from that culture works which would give you a completely different view and yeah provide you a completely different experience and the bigger problem I see of course is that you're missing out on so much literature from elsewhere that there really is for a lot of cultures and languages there isn't that stand out that you know oh Russia Tolstoy got it but if you want to read something from the Philippines you're unlikely to be able to find that one author or any other languages and cultures and there's so much being written now which it really is worthwhile keeping up with would you agree then that it's a good life hack say for poetry so if I try to read poetry originally written in Russian I don't speak Russian I understand some of it I know enough to get that I'm not getting it when I read it in English it just doesn't come through no matter how great the poet and I don't enjoy it that much so in this case I followed the life hack I don't read poetry in Russian and I feel that's efficient do you agree with that when it comes to poetry but I do read poetry in the languages I read well poetry is a bit more difficult because first of all there seems a lot more with fewer less poetry that stands out it's very difficult often to recognize the great poetry of the day in the time being especially with modern poetry I find it very difficult to get a sense of what I really should be focusing on so I mean I guess it is a useful life hack because really there is only so much we can read and I might very well act similarly with poetry because I don't spend that much time reading poetry but with fiction I wouldn't accept it here's another life hack which I totally reject but it may just be because I'm an addict of sorts but you tell me why for you it's wrong a lot of people say to me well I love fiction but I'm never going to read new works because I can't tell what's really good I'll just wait 20 years and then look back on what was truly excellent from 20 years ago I wouldn't read that 20 years later but in the meantime now I'll just read classics or things in other areas which are verified as being truly excellent does that make sense well I worry very much about people who rely on what gets that stamp of approval just because it's been has a cover review in the New York Times book review does not mean that that book really is if we look at it from 5 or 10 years down the road that that book will still be a significant work and I find so much which is highly praised at any one point a long term won't be and again however well much that we look back on is we've lost in the margins as well because it's really hard to keep track of all the great books and we saw at Strand earlier today, Stone or John Williams this is a book that disappeared from view for a long time it was always recognized sort of I mean people would say this is a great book but it had really fallen out of view Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai was just republished I just ordered it on Amazon I'm excited to get my copy I didn't know about it right and this was sort of that legendary books but it had gotten a great deal of potential when it first came out and then through odd series of coincidences it just sort of fell from view and there are many many many more books which are in this grey zone where if you really dig if you really look you could still pluck them out but because there's so much new work being published it's very difficult for it to rise out of that noise I'm an American but I'm someone who doesn't have as much time to read as you do or I do and I'm only going to take away one book tip from this podcast or video I'm going to walk into a Barnes & Noble or go to Amazon and I want to buy a new book and at the margin what's the piece of information I should have that will help me make a better decision other than just saying well go to literary saloon and see what I tell you to do but more generally I forgot my iPad I'm in Strand or Barnes & Noble well I think depending on the bookstore but it works probably even for many of the Barnes & Noble ones I really think you should have some faith in the staff that they will be able to best guide you I'm certain at Strand for example which booksellers there are book lovers and if you give them a bit of information about what would be suitable for you that they will be able to guide you I like to think that the complete review is meant to guide their books so I think on the more localized level in the bookstore you hopefully get that as well I think I've bought more than 100 books because of you so I thank you for that let's say now I'm someone who more or less reads for a living maybe I write books or I'm a book reviewer I'm a certain kind of journalist or I work in publishing and you can give me advice at the margin how to make a better book choice something to buy and read for that kind of person harder to give advice right but what would your advice be I don't know that I would I don't really have a system for picking books myself but that can't be true you may not have articulated your system and you have rules and principles you turn the corner at a certain time you know what sections to go to right and it's a very personal selection process I think and I mean it's I think it's whatever information works for you one source of information for example is seeing what imprint is published at certain publishers so if new directions or New York review books have brought out a volume you know what kind of book this might be and so that helps narrow it down and in a book store you have to be familiar with the older imprints for example which just takes a lot of practice I guess but that for example is one of the sources of information it's very difficult I think to narrow it down and that's one of the wonderful things of going in a bookstore and being willing to take a chance and pick up something that hasn't been shoved down your throat hasn't been recommended in 15 different publications because the offerings out there are so rich that you can really find many things just at the extremes I once did an experiment I went into a bookstore and I said I'm just going to pick out the book and put aside whatever other impressions I might have of that book and really see this through just to see how good of a predictor that would be and I ended up liking the cover of a Kate Christensen novel and I then liked the novel and I've liked some of her subsequent writing so when it comes to covers covers are there in a way to trick us but there's also a kind of matching going on it signals maybe how intellectual the book is or what kind of person should buy or read that book so you see a cover that shows the information there if you like the cover does it sway you it can sway me but it rarely does I'm not a big cover person I'm really a text person not an image person and so I try to see beyond the cover but it does the aesthetics obviously do play somewhat of a role but it's a very I think a cover can attract my attention but won't be decisive anything about a cover could convince me that this is a book I must have I think I will leave beyond that but it can get me to pick up the book say a parent comes to you the parent says I have a 12 year old smart child shows some interest in now wanting to read what advice do you give that parent for hooking the child on reading since you yourself your whole life you've had extreme intense love of reading maybe you were born with it but how do people get hooked on reading I think you want to let them loose in a book environment so in the library in the bookstore and you want to give them the freedom to explore for themselves to make because I think reading is very much a personal thing especially in childhood and especially where parents are often tempted to well is this a book that's good for the kid and I think you want to avoid that because the child has a completely different perspective and really has to want to read the book and I think by letting them make their own choices their own selections finding their own way and not really pressuring them I don't think you want to say you know reading is good for you you have to read whatever this but just making it easy for them to read whatever they want to read you know what I did a few times with Yana I put a book on the table I point at it and say you're not ready for this yet and then I just walk away and that was fairly effective are there books which are better translated into languages other than the languages they were written in novels? I think there are probably many which are let's say B novels so pub novels for example can often be especially stylistically improved translation and you often have so-called literary authors translating crime authors and they do a wonderful job of it there are also cases where I don't think it's better but some of the most interesting translations that appeal most to me are those of experimental works which basically are not you can't translate them literally so the word for word you don't care so the translator basically becomes a recreator of the text and takes a new approach and some of those are wonderful as well what's the best book that you never finished? that I never finished I don't know because I really I finish almost almost everything it takes a lot for me to give up on a book see I don't finish most of my books maybe I finish 10% I'm not sure but a fair minority why finish books that are not as good as the next book you could be reading in expected value terms? yeah but I can't think of any I don't think there are probably some long books which I haven't made my way entirely through but which I return like let's say Richardson's Clarissa which is a huge book which I've never sat down to read from beginning to end so perhaps something like that but nothing really strikes me is because a good book I want to finish that book I really so it would have been a not very memorable book in any case of the so called great books what's the one that disappointed you most? of the so called great ones I don't well it's difficult knowing what that canon is like Harold Bloom's list in the back of his book something like that I have difficulty with some of the especially the verse epics so I've never finished the NEID for example or something like that and I've difficulty getting into some of those I think of the great authors the one I have most difficulty with is probably Dostoevsky so I've read most of those I think the prince is probably my favorite or the idiot is sometimes translated but I'm not a big fan of Dostoevsky so Tom G wrote this question into me Marginal Revolution quote which are the first three books that come to mind and answer to the question what books made him feel really good after finishing them or desired again this is the kind of question I have great difficulty with because I don't know what made me feel happiest right I don't know that the immediate satisfaction I couldn't even think of one off the top of my head now my theory of you as a reviewer and reader is that you love highly complex books that are long and very puzzling to work out what's going on I do enjoy those very much yes so I mean it's bring up two or three of those and you can tell us what's in them for you or why we should care so here's volume one of a Chinese book used to be known as dream of the red chamber now it's more often called story of the stone penguin translation you're an advocate of this book very long this is only one volume what's in here it's basically it's a family saga and basically a love story of the main character and the two women girls when it starts out when he's young boy and it's basically a novel which has everything it's sort of a comprehensive it's such a sweeping it's really one that you can get lost in over a long period of time it's a book that is very easy to return to because there's so much in it even though on the Wikipedia page 40 main characters are listed plus minor characters so that's going to be tough going right even with a good translation well it depends well I think conveniently it probably has the list of characters but even with the cheat sheet 40's are but they're the main characters again it's as a book to return there really are the central characters and the more incidental characters and the story focuses on groups of characters at a time they're not 40 people on stage all the time so that makes it somewhat simpler it is initially perhaps if you haven't read much Chinese fiction the Chinese names alone can be confusing but I don't think that's the least of the hurdles to the book I think but it's also very accessible it's just a compelling story it really describes these characters and their feelings very well and a wonderful picture also of the China of the Times which is a totally different world an author you're a big advocate of Arno Schmidt you've written a book on him it's the book here and his masterwork is coming out in English actually translated for the first time this September is that correct? and the German title is Settles Traum what's the English title? Bottom's Dream and most people have never heard of Arno Schmidt regrettably but we have a chance now to read his masterwork some of his others are in English already tell us why we should care well the bottom's dream I don't know how many people will actually read that that is a very complicated piece of work Arno Schmidt is a fast reader and you love it right? you've written a book on Schmidt but again it's on Schmidt as a whole and Schmidt has written in several different categories so he's also written short novels and stories which are much more accessible but you giggled when you read Bottom's Dream right? you giggled a lot well this is the English edition I think is just under 1500 pages it's going to be about this big and it's written in three columns per page so this is the main story and then you have the commentary and not quite the footnotes but sort of the elaborations on the side talk us into the work now well it's it's a work it covers a seven day span and basically it's a story of translation it's basically some translators come to an expert on Poe and ask his advice about translating Poe as the title Bottom's Dream also suggests there's a Shakespearean aspect to it as well and I don't even know if Schmidt's greatest work in some ways because it is such a you know beyond almost anyone else has ever tried to write it is an immense accomplishment it's probably it's not the first Schmidt work you want to and what's the first Schmidt work you want to read? well if you eventually want to read Bottom's Dream then The School for Atheists is the one to read and that's in English now that's being in English now interestingly the person who translated all these books is John E. Woods who is famous for his translations of Thomas Mann he did the definitive Magic Mountain and Bullenbox and but he's always been translating Arno Schmidt for decades now and he likes the translations yes and Schmidt again is one of these writers who you really it's difficult to translate him just literally in the case of Bottom's Dream and The School for Atheists which are these he called them as typo script books because they were written on larger than normal pieces of paper and allowed not just writing line by line as we're used to but the playing with the text and so for example one of his favorite things to do was with words where you can change the beginning of the word so you have both school bus and school child and so you would have school and one were in the bus and child on top of each other so you could have both meanings of the word and but he would take this to the nth degree and so Bottom's Dream and also The School for Atheists allow for incredible literary play and Schmidt is also I mean I read a fair amount I read probably more than most people probably Anno Schmidt is an order or two above me as a reader really that is he wrote a lot but basically he's one of the great readers of all times and one of the reasons I also appreciate him so much is because he's directed me to so much more reading and there are a couple of he's like you right well on some level yes here's your book out not too long ago The Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction another author you promote in this book and elsewhere Luis Guaitisolo one one Guaitisolo Luis is the brother but both of them you like right well unfortunately Luis nothing of his has been translated yet although his major work the title of which escapes me is Antagonia is coming out from Daltke Archive as well the same same publishers who are publishing Bottom's Dream okay it strikes me as a book you would love it does it does and but unfortunately I have not read that yet but brother Juan why is he special because he also his he writes in so many different registers he's not satisfied with simple even when he's successful with one way of storytelling he tries out different things new things he tells stories in new ways and also he's been a wonderful chronicler of Spain and especially the Spanish conflict with the Islamic world which goes back to when part of Spain was Islamic and so that's been a tension that has been in the culture for well over a thousand years and he he's writing he's written several works which I find really superior and he's one of those authors where you won't get the same book you got last time you'll get something completely different when you pick up the next one and he's one of those authors who also manages to do he's not going to fail at these attempts they are going to be if they are failures they're interesting failures and so that that appeals to me greatly so he's one of those authors where if something new of his is coming out I'm going to make a beeline for it now there's a segment of these chats you may have heard of it it's called overrated or underrated so I'm going to call out a few names books whatever you're free to decline if you don't want to offend anyone or other reasons that will try just a few and you tell us overrated or underrated J.K. Rowling as a writer I feel perhaps overrated but as a cultural phenomenon I think perfectly fine I mean it's hard to say underrated because she is for the Naples Ultra of children's writing Gerta overrated or underrated especially in English absolutely underrated Gerta is a far more significant author than anybody here seems to realize and the TLS just has a review of a New Princeton anthology of the essential Gerta at a thousand pages and you can't stuff him into a thousand pages because there is so much there and so much variety too which is also one of the astonishing things he's the greatest poet of the times the greatest dramatist of his times and he was an astounding novelist as well and a scientist, a good scientist Yes, yes and the conversations with Eckermann and so on you know you have all these different things which are just superior literature so in English he's vastly underrated in Germany I think they get it Angela Merkel underrated or overrated I actually have not ever read anything by Angela Merkel No, not as a writer as a political leader Again it probably depends I admire her I think among the political leaders currently operating in Europe and especially since we're speaking shortly after the whole Brexit vote and the turn over that happened in England there I think she's probably underrated Herman Melville Probably also underrated I We're agreeing on Albie so far if you're curious Yeah, I think people don't also range far enough with Melville I always when the argument of the great American novel comes up I always make a plug for the Confidence Man which I think is sort of representative it says so much about America that I think that would be my choice for the American novel and especially from Melville but yeah, I think he's also underrated Thomas Bernhardt Well, he's very fashionable but also I don't think he can be underrated I'm also completely behind him I think he was a remarkable author I've always enjoyed even though there's a droning similarity to much of his bitter ranting it completely wins me over and I don't think I've been disappointed by any Bernhardt Wittgenstein's nephew is my favorite and then the loser Der Untergeier but all of them I think are fantastic for me very underrated another Austrian Friedrich A. Hayek The Economist Again, you're free to pass Well he's I don't like what he his arguments are always employed for I mean currently he's obviously a very popular economist to rely on and I think it gets dangerous with you know the interpretation of the philosophies so I'm a bit more livery of too much enthusiasm for him but again obviously such a significant figure that's very difficult to underrate him I think fiction what would be the country or region now what's the country what's the region it's even up for grabs but that is really underappreciated relative to what it has done so if you say oh classic Russian fiction even if people haven't read it people know there's a lot there right probably wouldn't pick that so what's the counterintuitive pick for a most underrated region or country for a wonderful fiction under I would absolutely think the regional language literature of India I think surprisingly even though India is perhaps the main literary English is the main literary language of India and a great deal is locally translated even there much of the vernacular literature still isn't available in English and what one can see of it and also in part hear about it we're missing an awful lot I mean there really there is a literary culture there especially for example in Bengali but we've had that since Tagore and one of the remarkable things is even Tagore won his Nobel Prize over a hundred years ago and there's still novels by him which haven't been translated into English and he's really a very good novelist and it's I guess truly worthwhile and this goes for many regions of the southern region of Kerala where they write in Malayalam Malayalam it's there's a remarkable literary production there and we just see so little of it and so and it's also what is available because a fair amount is it tends to be underappreciated especially in American so it hasn't really reached these shores and would you pick any part of the world as overrated for literature in a way I know you think it's all underrated but in relative terms I think the American dominance is still too overbearing worldwide. So we agree on this too I'm happy to hear you say that but go on yeah no I think it just it's American literature is too often given a free pass especially abroad because you know we're so used to it being so dominant and so I really think if any it's overrated it is American fiction most of it bores me and like one of my pieces of advice for people going to a bookstore I would just say don't buy an American novel all other things equal because they're fairly likely to do so they're more likely to have heard of it without any kind of bias necessarily operating just refuse to buy American novels for a year I think it's a good piece of advice that is probably yes it probably is yeah if you think of all of your beliefs about literature books fiction or you can go more broadly if you'd like but what's the belief you hold that other smart people you respect would find the most absurd so if someone said oh I think Robert Heinlein is the greatest author ever to have walked on earth that would be considered absurd not my belief probably not yours but what's your like craziest view relative to the other people you think are smart in respect in a literary sense or you can go broader if you want start with literary I don't know I don't think see I'm so my opinions are so firmly held I believe them to be so obvious and you may still think you're right other people don't agree but well I don't get those disagreements they don't dare disagree to my face apparently I really don't know nothing comes obviously to mind and more generally also not I mean just more more general I guess the standout beliefs is I don't see myself having the concern for mortality which most other people seem to have that seems to be a very popular thing reading as well that there's this obsession with mortality which I find a bit odd so you think we fear death too much yes I think it's it's and many people seem to really obsess about it in a certain sense and so that's something I mean I don't think necessarily my opinion is strange it's something so foreign to me and the other thing is also I have great difficulty with religion the god concept is just I can't I really don't know what to how to regard that it is when I can't fit into my world view when any of my actions and so even though I read a great deal which also again is based on this of course that part of it always remains foreign to me but when it comes to death would you say death is underrated or life is overrated well you can't overate life I mean it's all we got again because I don't believe in the religion aspect of it too I don't believe in the afterlife so I definitely think life is underrated but death is it's an inevitability so you take it as it comes because there's no other way to take it now let me tell you about one of the things I find most charming about your site and your reviews there's this unusual mix between extreme passion for the subject and curiosity and drive to get the books and track what's coming out and reading them and then a lot about how other people are reviewing the books so if one reads your site they don't just get you you get a whole broad panoply of other reviews it's one of the most valuable things but then on the other hand you're very hard to impress as a reader so just to you give these short capsules of your reviews here are three of your more recent ones and I quote passable ultra light fare here's another one typical Carlotto tale of justice in a flawed world so there's something reductionist or here's one you are very enthusiastic quote nicely done now I know those are shorter capsules for broader more detailed reviews but this mix between like the the blasé and the enthusiasm and how willing you are to just retreat into like and then that's what I find so intriguing about literary saloon is there anything you would say to that well I hope people use the site in that way in a way my reviews presuppose familiarity with the site I assume that people you know they look up a couple of reviews and they get an idea of what this person is doing and the capsule reviews I think are a sort of counterbalance also to the longer reviews in which often I will be more enthusiastic or I mean this ultra light novel I gave it a B because it's it's perfectly competently done but it's just a vacuous problematic you know there's so little to it but it's still it's perfectly readable and I hope I explain that fully in the review itself. No you did. But one of the things which I also I mean the original idea behind the site was to be able to link to other reviews and also I have the review quotes from the major review publications where there are review quotes available which I actually did sort of as a counter measure to because I was so irritated by the blurbs you find on the back of like the paperback edition which are not at all representative of the reviews of the book so I wanted to give an honest I wanted to give the honest blurbs of the reviews but it's always been important to me that you know my opinion is my opinion and you really should seek out as many as different ones as possible and to be able to give access to all these different reviews to point readers to because readers some readers rely on a certain reviewer and so if I can give them the link to that for this book so that they will get an opinion which perhaps is more informative to them than mine can be because they don't see eye to eye with me I think that's a very important thing and having as many different opinions as possible to me that always seems beneficial I realize now we have this issue of whether the wisdom of crowds really is wisdom and whether it doesn't just over complicate matters as well but it's always been important to me that I have very strongly held opinions but please also consider the other opinions because Other reviews and here I mean media not say bloggers but how corrupt are they? Corrupt in what sense? That there's something in the process which is favoritism and maybe there's an incentive for excess enthusiasm because if your book review section reviews 13 books and says they're all mediocre well people won't buy the books but more importantly they'll stop buying your book review section right? Yes. So do you think there's for instance an incentive to be too positive or some other skew? I think I don't know that it's as blatant as that I definitely think it is editors certainly prefer positive reviews and there's some newspapers which basically won't print negative reviews I think that's always an issue and I mean they can say that well we you know we pre-select so that's are the way we do it but that's I mean one of the things I love about how I'm able to review books is that I just you know I'll review almost anything and I will actually review it even if I do not enjoy the book even if I have immense problems with the book because I think that's just... You don't put them down like I do it. Take New York Times or Amazon I know there's both but if you had to choose which do you trust more? I I don't know if I can I like Amazon because I can get a lot of information about out of Amazon they're really the way the information is presented and in part with the reviews depending on how widely it's been reviewed part of the problem with the New York Times of course is that they can only review so few books and so you have really so little information or information about so few titles whereas Amazon you have at least some information about practically everything in that sense good reads is perhaps you know even more useful because usually with the foreign language books they'll usually at least be people who have already reviewed the foreign language edition and that's helpful one of the things I find remarkable about my site is I try to link to big media reviews and an extraordinary number of the books which I cover basically go unreviewed in the major media often even publishes weekly and which I find kind of shocking because I mean I do review obscure books but it's not that obscure the I'm fascinated the literary hub is a very good website now which collects a lot of literary information and they've also now started a review aggregating part of the site called bookmarks and basically what they do is when they find reviews in three of the publications they monitor which are basically all American major publications and a few internet sites if they have three reviews for a book then they'll put that on bookmarks with the summaries and links to the reviews so sort of what I do and I find maybe one out of ten of the books I cover qualify and I find that shocking that's so we know you can read in a lot of different languages we know you read a lot of books close what are three other things about yourself you might want to tell us not to do with books I don't know that anyone would find anything interesting about me I don't I don't know what I sculpture perhaps there I mention it you're a big fan of doing ice sculpture I am I find the I just build a snowman but I will try to sculpt as much as I can out of the snow and I enjoy doing that because the snow is always different the conditions are always different what you can make out of it is different and it's also completely transitory it's gone usually in a short time sometimes a few weeks or month and it's sort of the ending goal where these sculptures in nature take into the more extreme because the snow is obviously really very short lasting and it also shape shifts as it collapses as it falls apart and you were born in Graz Austria right? I was yes you have a background in law is that correct? I do I have a degree in law I'm a New York State lawyer and you were put off by the academic nature of formal literary study because it involved so little reading of books and too much theory very much so yes I was disappointed that at university basically you could study literature without reading basically without reading fiction especially and more importantly without really engaging in fiction I think literature can lend itself to theory you can build theory around it but I don't find that a useful way of dealing with literature thank you very much Michael again this is Michael's book University Press The Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction Michael Orthofer in my opinion still vastly underrated thank you so much