The literary World Cup: readers' best all-time teams

Albert Camus (at the front, wearing a flat cap), the best real-life literary goalie – here, with the University of Algiers football team. Photograph: Roger-Viollet/Rex Features

Back when the World Cup was in those exciting and unpredictable first rounds, we were playing away at Penguin's imaginary books World Cup, where an England with JK Rowling, George Orwell and Agatha Christie in attack and the likes of Shakespeare and Dickens in the midfield could possibly – possibly – have had a chance to win something.

The UK imprint imagined matches and footballing incidents on Twitter, and we joined in the fun, asking for your all-time favourite literary teams. Now that the actual competition is coming to an end, here are our top five writers' XIs.

TimFootman offered an all-nationalities, all-time XI with Albert Camus as goalkeeper (because – "duh" – the French author played as a goalie while studying at the University of Algeria). He chose a pretty hard-core defence (Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, Samuel Richardson and Vikram Seth) "because you need big guys at the back", went for a self-explanatory "middlebrowfield" with John Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett and Elizabeth Gaskell, and chose Bret Easton Ellis, Will Self and DBC Pierre in attack because, "as Mr Suárez proved, it's the scary, unpredictable, slightly bonkers ones who get results." No comment.

Photograph: Toby Moses

tagomagoman gave an extensive justification for this killer and eclectic XI, managed by "respected and innovative coach with a steely heart of darkness" Joseph Conrad. Some of our favourite picks:

James Joyce (centre-back): "The ultimate cultured centre-back famously left his native Ireland to learn his trade on the continent. It is a rare forward who can find a way past his impenetrable prose."

Cormac McCarthy (central midfield): "This tough tackling, no nonsense player patrols the border country between midfield and defence. If you thought the Comanche attack in Blood Meridian was brutal you should see what he does to a midfield runner who has the temerity to approach his territory."

F Scott Fitzgerald (central midfield): "Seen by some as a luxury player too keen to sit back and admire his own beautiful passes. Sometimes seems more concerned with his celebrity lifestyle with his glamorous wife than his career. But when he puts his mind to it, boy can he play. With the steely McCarthy beside him they form a formidable midfield."

William Burroughs (right midfield): "Old snake hips is one of the most feared wingers in the game. Has suffered with 'refuelling' issues in the past, but as long as he receives his 'vitamin supplement' before the game is a reliable asset. Famous for terrorising full-backs with his notorious cut-up technique that leaves them gasping for comprehension. Should score more goals, but suffers from a wayward shot."

Photograph: Toby Moses

neophil33 disagreed with Penguin's version of the French team and offered the following instead (with Anatole France, François Rabelais, Alphonse Daudet, Marguerite Duras, Louis Aragon, François Mauriac as subs), which sparked quite a debate. "That midfield could be a bit flaky", said shinerbock. "I'd have Proust among the subs – just in case you needed to bring someone on to run down the clock", offered AnotherBe. shinerbock jumped in again: "You can't have Rimbaud and Verlaine in the same team together. Even on opposite wings. There's no discipline there. Bring them on as 'impact subs', when Baudelaire's been sent off for showing off." Etcetera.

Photograph: Toby Moses

"At last, a competition Ireland will dominate", ventured theundertone. We had as many as four different Irish teams suggested – here's one by SanPaolo: from Patrick Kavanagh ("weird loner, ideal keeper") to Oscar Wilde ("big target man, ex-boxer, great turn – of phrase) and Samuel Beckett ("mercurial forward, famously not many kicks") on the attack and of course Joyce at the midfield ("creative, but tendency to overelaborate"). Although as Sunburst said, perhaps their star player would suffice: "between 11 best English novelists of the 20th century and one chapter of Ulysses, I'd confidently put my money on the latter."

Photograph: Toby Moses

And finally, how irresistible is this team from Ancient Rome suggested by Serdal:

Cicero (goalkeeper): "Reliable, can do everything, great reflexes, huge belief in his own abilities, can be a show-off, never to blame in his own mind."

Caesar (left-back): "Lean, efficient, fast, unfussy, able to influence referees with his propagandistic style."

Ovid (left midfield): "Great work-rate, though defensively suspect, the side's greatest technique and pacey as hell, should complement Caesar's qualities."

Virgil (central midfield): "Used to be a slim, tricky player, in his later days a player of gravity but lots of emotions, able to mix the rough and the magical."

Photograph: Toby Moses

There were so many other brilliant line-ups that we had to leave out – do take a look at the delightful thread, which included discussion of referees and even a wink to our own sports writers. And, as always, add your own or tell us what we’ve missed in the comments below. But let's close with a team from Magnusson which he promises will be "precise, efficient and beautiful in its simplicity":

Photograph: Toby Moses

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Author Karen Russell on vampires, addiction and literary tattoos

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Karen Russell's new short story collection is titled 'Vampires in the Lemon Grove.'

Karen Russell's fiendishly titled new short-story collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, follows her Pulitzer Prize-nominated debut novel, Swamplandia!, and her first collection, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, published when she was 25. Hailed as a "Young Lion" by the New York Public Library and named to The New Yorker's "20 Under 40" list of authors, Russell confessed to Bookish that her real ambition is to make the "85 Writers Who Are Still Lucid at 85" list.

The stories in Vampires are full of war, recovery from addiction, women who've turned into silkworms and, yes, bloodsuckers (but they've gone clean). Here, Russell reveals how "mucking around in the swampy mangrove forest" near her childhood home in Miami and reading everything from Jack London to The Grapes of Wrath shaped her as a writer of "magical thinking" fiction. By the way, she's over swamps: She tells us her next novel will be set in a dustbowl "wasteland."

Bookish: Which author or book most profoundly shaped you as a writer? Is there one writer you're guided by as a pole star?

Karen Russell: I always get tongue-tied when I have to choose a single book or author. As a younger reader, I loved Jack London, Ray Bradbury, Tolkien, the Narnia books, A Wrinkle in Time. I remember reading books like The Grapes of Wrath and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter on long car trips, probably understanding only every third word--exactly what I gleaned from those classics is hard for me to pinpoint now in retrospect, but I do remember feeling that my "real" life was my reading life--a secret life, an interior world made in collaboration with these authors, impenetrable to any outside observer. Traveling to Ray Bradbury's Martian cities felt much more memorable than my trips to buy Keds at the Dadeland Mall in Miami.

And, Flannery O'Connor's wickedly wise sensibility is a terrific pole star.

Bookish: In the title story of your new collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, Clyde and Magreb are two vampires who have sworn off the red stuff and who soothe their "throbbing fangs" with the juice of lemons. Are we all just vampires in the lemon grove, suppressing our desires?

KR: Ha! Well, I do think there's something to that "noble truth" business…. I think part of the power of the figure of the monster (and of the vampire in particular) is that we can all recognize and relate to the horror of compulsion, of enslavement to craving--the living death of addiction, loneliness and thirst. Even if you don't think of yourself as a vampire in recovery, I'd guess that you have some experience with an ungovernable desire. And I think those lemons were my silly way of representing the bitter relief of a temporary fix for an endless longing.

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Bookish: Your story, "Reeling for Empire," is about a group of women in turn-of-the-century Japan who are imprisoned in a silk factory and literally turned into silkworms. How did you come up with the idea of women being forced to grow silk in their bellies?

KR: It's hard for me to reconstruct exactly where that nightmare picture came from. I had been reading David Graeber's Debt, one section of which discusses female debt slavery; and John Tresch's The Romantic Machine, which got me thinking about man-machine hybrids. Then, I became fascinated with Meiji-era Japan, a period when the entire country was undergoing a violent metamorphosis from isolated feudalism to its modern form. Model mills imported Western-style technologies, and female workers left their home villages and towns to work as silk and cotton reelers.

I do remember looking at pictures of silkworms and thinking how frightening it would be to have one's selfhood erased by white fur, to become converted from an individual--a human woman with a unique history--into part of the factory machinery.

In this story, Kitsune's silk thread is a greeny-black manifestation of her grief, her regret. I often feel that certain emotions have an almost physical weight, like a rock in the gut. So, it wasn't such a stretch to imagine a memory or an emotion silking through these women's bodies and stiffening into the thread.

Bookish: Many have called your writing "magical realism," but that term can seem lighthearted--there is a death in nearly every story in "Vampires." How do you describe your work?

KR: I think that I am actually getting worse at describing my work. Less and less do I feel like I have the right distance from these recent stories to know exactly how to categorize them. I do agree that "magical realism" might not be quite the right term, since it suggests to me a hard and fast distinction between the "real" world and "magical" zones, a line that is continually effaced in the fiction I best love (Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo, Calvino, Borges, Kafka, Kelly Link, Kevin Brockmeier, etc). In my experience, there is no single, fixed reality--the present moment is always slippery, always filtered through one's own dreams and terrors. Which can imbue even the most "mundane" Tuesday train ride with a supernatural tinge.

Maybe what I'm writing is "magical-thinking" fiction--so many of my characters are lost in some kind of profound blind spot. They struggle to decipher their role in the disasters that befall them, or the mysteries unfolding in their own backyards. In Swamplandia!, for example, Ava desperately needs the Bird Man to be a Charon-figure, an adult guide to the underworld. Beverly in The New Veterans badly wants to be a healer, to feel that she is doing something selfless and noble--to be a powerful agent in Sergeant Zeiger's recovery. And that desire colors her perception of every interaction that she has with him, down to the feeling of the soldier's skin under her hands.

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Bookish: Like Ava in your first novel, Swamplandia!, many of your characters are kids struggling with growing up. How was your development as a writer affected by your own childhood?

KR: I think that a South Florida childhood is great training for a fiction writer. In some ways, you could say that Florida is a magical-realist state--impossible, bizarre things happen everyday. The Miami Seaquarium, with its killer whales and circus dolphins, is a block away from the canned pineapples on special at the Publix grocery store.

And, childhood continues to fascinate me--the passage from childhood to adulthood is such a private, intensely felt, halting and painful and exciting journey. (Even though, like the distinction between fantasy/reality, I think the childhood/adulthood binary is pretty bogus--what adult do you know who does not still have all of her ages rattling inside of her at once, Russian-nested-doll style?). I'm not sure if I can give you an honest and succinct reason here for why I keep returning to that threshold in fiction. I do think that a Miami childhood is one-of-a-kind: So many of my friends and neighbors were first- or second-generation immigrants, and I often felt that we were all navigating a new world together. I was also an anxious kid, a loner, and I spent hours mucking around in the swampy mangrove forest near our house, or riding my bike through the Everglades Lite that is Matheson Hammock, a man-made lagoon near Biscayne Bay in urban Miami.

Miami's weird and watery settings are all well-suited to stories about adolescence, I think. You really couldn't ask for a better landscape to stage a coming-of-age story. I think the central drama of a lot of my fiction revolves around "seeing"--a character, often a child, trying to reconcile contradictions between what they are being told and what they are learning to be true-trying to get their bearings in some swampy subjective territory.

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Bookish: You were named to the National Book Foundation's "5 Under 35" and the New Yorker's "20 Under 40" lists. Is the book world obsessed with youth, like other spheres? What other category of writer would you like to be included in?

KR: You know, those lists really put one in mind of one's own mortality. I'm hoping to make the "85 Writers Who Are Still Lucid at 85" list. I think it's excellent that the National Book Foundation and the New Yorker want to support younger writers--that support came at a crucial time for me, when I was in my mid-20s and wrestling with Swamplandia! One of the things I love about the book world, especially as I gallop into my 30s, is that an author's age matters so much less than it does in other industries. We've got at least that leg up on catwalk models and pro athletes.

I do wish that these lists and awards would drop the age cut-offs, which can feel pretty arbitrary. Authors begin their careers at every age. Ben Fountain was a debut author in his late 40s, and a debut novelist at 50. Robin Black published her phenomenal debut story collection, If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, in her late 40s, after raising three kids.

Bookish: In your story "The New Veterans," a masseuse working with traumatized soldiers accesses a soldier's pain through the vibrant tattoo on his back. If you got a literary tattoo, what would it be?

KR: My best friends and I just barely avoided getting matching e.e. cummings tattoos in high school. Speaking of age, I think I may have aged out of the possibility of getting a fabulous literary tattoo. Although, I love stories about tattoos--"The Illustrated Man" and "Parker's Back." If Odilon Redon, channeling Poe, had some mobile time-traveling tattoo shop and you could get one of his landscapes on your back, I would go there.

Bookish: Are you working on another novel? Can you give us any hints about what we have to look forward to in your next book?

KR: In my honeymoon phase of writing this new book, I was blabbing about it to strangers on the Megabus, but now I've grown slit-eyed and wary--wary of the jinx. So, it's probably safest not to say too much. It's set during the Dust Bowl drought. I'm trying for a wasteland with some colorful personalities.

--

This article originally appeared on Bookish.com.

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AS IF: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality

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Washington Post book reviewers

Feb 15, 2012 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Michael Saler
Oxford Univ
ISBN 978-0195343168
283 pages
$27.95

Reviewed by Michael Dirda, who reviews each Thursday in The Washington Post Style section and conducts a book discussion for the Post at wapo.st/reading-room. His latest book, "On Conan Doyle," was recently published.

At least since the 18th century, there have been periodic complaints that the world has been drained of enchantment. Once, every meadow, grove and stream seemed appareled in a celestial light. People believed in some sort of natural supernaturalism surrounding them, or felt other worlds enriching our own, whether they were the realms of Faery or the Christian heaven.

Then came the fall. Rationalism, new technology, the disappearance of traditional religious beliefs, the population shift from the country to the city, the rise of democratic governments - all leached the marvelous from existence, leaving humanity roiled in the gloomy condition we call modernity.

Is there no way to re-enchant our mundane, dreary lives while preserving the myriad benefits of the machine age?

According to cultural historian Michael Saler, during the late 19th century - the fin de siecle - people attempted to do just this through an increasing immersion in the fantastic. Spiritualism, the occult, Eastern beliefs and extreme aestheticism offered various paths back to Eden. But all too often these creeds - like some of their modern successors - required one to surrender reason and independent thought as a prerequisite to entering the lost garden.

As an alternative, argues this brilliant if sometimes densely written book, one might instead turn to an early form of virtual reality. Through certain literary texts, people found that they could immerse themselves in various imaginary or secondary worlds. Moreover, by maintaining a sense of irony, they could experience enriching delight without surrendering to delusion.

In effect, "As If" explores the rewards of participatory fandom, concentrating on three groups: the devotees of Sherlock Holmes, especially the famous literary and dining club called the Baker Street Irregulars; the connoisseurs of H.P. Lovecraft and his Cthulhu Mythos; and the scholarly enthusiasts of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth.

To some onlookers, people who pretend that Sherlock Holmes existed, who don't laugh at Lovecraft's tentacled or piscine horrors, or who take the trouble to learn Elvish should all go out and get a life. One might reasonably answer: That's just what they've done. By periodically inhabiting vicarious realms, they have created a second life, discovered a way to gladden their souls, gained fresh perspectives on the real world and enjoyed a genuine human connectedness with their fellow enthusiasts.

People accomplish this, Saler repeatedly stresses, through the maintenance of "the double consciousness" of the ironic imagination - a willingness to play a game wholeheartedly while understanding that it is only a game. This is, in essence, the same attitude we bring to enjoying a conjurer's performance: We revel in the tricks and illusions without believing that they are achieved through actual magic.

Such "as if" play, one might argue, is a source of inner enrichment and essential to our full humanity. Virtual communities and environments teach us, in the words of critic Marie-Laure Ryan, "to live, work, and play with the fluid, the open, the potential."

As Saler points out, "as if" activity requires not so much "the willing suspension of disbelief" as "the willing activation of pretense." Historically speaking, certain rich, multi-layered works have encouraged such "activation of pretense" through the use of scholarly and scientific paratexts - that is, maps, documents, footnotes, charts, glossaries, historical timelines, photographs, illustrations and allusions to events outside the story proper. This material plethora displayed a playful seriousness and encouraged a serious playfulness from readers.

Saler mentions, for instance, the 19th-century Hetzel editions of Jules Verne. These elaborate, oversize volumes, bound in gorgeously decorated covers (featuring a Vernean collage of elephants, submarines and balloons) and packed with detailed yet evocative steel engravings, are book-worlds that one can live in. As a child, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre adored the Hetzel editions, remembering them as "magic boxes" and little theaters. Such works were spectacular, in both senses of the word.

Books alone, however, aren't enough to foster an ongoing virtual reality. One also requires "public spheres of the imagination," places where fans can gather, argue and deepen their understanding of the sacred texts. Often the first such sphere is simply the letters page in a magazine, but before long there are "societies, fanzines, and conventions."

In the chapter "Clap If You Believe in Sherlock Holmes," Saler emphasizes that the great detective isn't just logical, he is also distinctly imaginative. Holmes the aesthete perceives the world as an Arabian Nights realm of mystery, full of a "hidden import" of which he alone is aware. Using the same combination of deduction and imagination characteristic of their hero, members of the Baker Street Irregulars "play the game," as they call it: When they rigorously deduce fanciful meanings in Holmes's adventures, they employ the rational techniques of modernity to further a sense of enchantment.

In his Lovecraft chapter, Saler describes the scientific aura surrounding the Cthulhu Mythos, and how later weird-tale writers and readers have added to these stories of Yog-Sothoth and the Old Ones. But he looks particularly at the correspondence, conversations and other exchanges between the author and his admirers - that is, at "the public sphere" of the Cthulhu Mythos - and speculates that the resulting discussions and debates helped Lovecraft mature as a man as well as a writer. Hence, the artistic richness of his later work, his eventual repudiation of his racist views of non-Anglo-Saxons and his newfound sympathy with Norman Thomas's style of socialism.

For Tolkien, Saler says, "re-enchantment through fantastic Secondary Worlds was not a rejection of modernity, but rather a corrective to its one-sided emphases." By "cross-dwelling in another world" - Middle Earth - "a visitor could benefit from the perspectives and practices that she might not find in the context of her own world."

To Saler, Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" is centered on the idea of home, the enchanted realm to which, like the hobbit Sam, we long to return or, perhaps, that we hope to restore. To investigate this theme, Saler surveys Tolkien's life in terms of his "nationalist, aestheticist, and religious views." Despite the novelist's expressed horror at allegorization, Saler views Tolkien's masterpiece as a paean to a certain kind of English homeyness and decency, threatened by our "robot age" and the economic sway and cultural vulgarity of the United States. However, Tolkien strongly believed that stories, especially "sub-creations" that shape an imaginatively inhabitable secondary world, possess the power to "console, redeem, and inspire."

Living in the realm of "as if" thus keeps us truly open and affirming as human beings. We learn "to entertain provisional identities, provisional narratives, and provisional worlds." As a result, we gain an understanding of "contingency and difference" and a wariness of all inflexible, essentialist doctrines.

"As If" doesn't address the current forms of virtual reality, i.e., computer games and simulated worlds. Perhaps that will be Saler's next book. In the meantime, "As If" reminds us that, through real play in imaginary gardens, we can enhance the lives we lead in this alienated modern world.

Copyright 2012 Washington Post Writers Group
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