By all accounts, Maurice Schérer led an oppressively virtuous life. He never cheated on his wife. He was sober, refusing both drugs and alcohol, and he attended Mass each Sunday. Though he could have afforded a car, he never bought one, and he considered even occasional taxi trips an undue extravagance. In his old age, when he was suffering from painful scoliosis, he continued taking two buses to work in the Montparnasse neighborhood of Paris each morning, then the same two buses back home each night. He cherished quiet enjoyments: classical music, visits to museums, nights at home with his family. He was born in 1920 and died in 2010, but he never owned a telephone.
What does this self-effacing ascetic have to do with Éric Rohmer, the elusive yet glamorous filmmaker who has been called “the father of French New Wave”? Perhaps it is only incidental that they were, in fact, the same person, for the two of them led remarkably discrete lives. Schérer was a teacher of high school Greek and Latin when he started publishing film criticism, first in magazines run by others, then in a short-lived journal he founded himself, and finally as the editor of the legendary Cahiers du Cinéma. Soon after he began writing, he adopted the pseudonym “Éric Rohmer,” a nod to mystery writer Sax Rohmer and director Erich von Stroheim, to prevent his touchy mother from discovering his true vocation. Yet even when the old woman died, oblivious, in 1970, he remained fanatical about keeping his private life sealed apart from his art. His wife and two sons sometimes accompanied him on filming trips, but they were never permitted on set; they did not meet his colleagues until he was lying on his deathbed. Read more here.

THE CLOSEST THING I HAVE TO AN INVIOLABLE PRINCIPLE is that it is a sacrilege to read a good book on a screen. Setting aside paper’s many sentimental attractions (gluey smell, physical heft, ample space for scribbling), to which I will admit I am susceptible, to read on what is so hideously called an “e-reader” is to concede that literature is continuous with the internet, that non-place where people go to look up one word, only to resurface lifetimes later, dazed and dead-eyed, twenty minutes into a video of someone popping pimples with a special implement. The internet scoops out the mind and mashes it into wet pulp, which is to say that it is the opposite of a novel, at least when the novel is working.
But the task of literature is to reflect (if never just replicate) even unliterary or anti-literary realities, on pain of irrelevance. Contemporary fiction full of telegrams and analog phones would smack of contrivance and cutesy nostalgia, like TV shows in which the characters show up at each other’s houses to stage confrontations in person, instead of just texting angry emojis as actual people increasingly do. The internet is real life now. The question is not whether to fictionalize it but how to incorporate its distractions and derangements into a novel that is not hellish to read. Read more here.

“The moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman”, wrote Oscar Wilde in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” (1891). In No-Signal Area, a newly translated novel of 2014 by the Croatian author Robert Perišić, there are many dull craftsmen – and a number of unlikely artists.
Perišić’s mordant romp takes place in the town of N, a forlorn outpost on the margins of an unnamed nation in what was once Yugoslavia. It is no accident that the author declines to specify the town’s exact location. Forgotten by policymakers and overlooked by tourists, N might stand for “nowhere”. Its inhabitants are traumatized by memories of the recent ethno-nationalist conflict, and most of them have been out of work since the local turbine factory shut down. Sobotka, once the factory’s engineer, has been estranged from his wife and daughters since they fled to escape the war. Even mobile phone coverage in N is unreliable. Forsaken by the forces of neoliberalism and forgotten by the more fortunate denizens of the new world order, it has become a dreaded no-signal area. Read more here.

The novels of the English experimentalist Ann Quin are not like most: although she was loosely affiliated with a movement of pioneering British writers in the 1960s, among them B.S. Johnson and J.G. Ballard, she remains singular in her aversion to the usual strictures of structure. Her books careen wildly among verb tenses and perspectives. They lack the customary form—the start, the climax, and the denouement—that holds most stories together.
Yet even when Quin is shredding the conventions of traditional narrative, she fills her work with trios. Instead of plot arcs, there are love triangles. In Berg (1964), Quin’s outlandish retelling of Hamlet and her first published book, a man sets out to seduce his father’s girlfriend (and afterward to kill his father, though he does not succeed). In Passages (1969), Quin’s third novel, a man on a tortuous trip with a woman fantasizes obsessively about sadomasochistic threesomes. And in Tripticks (1972), the last novel Quin completed before committing suicide in 1973, a man is chased across America by his ex-wife and her new beau. The book contains illustrations by Carol Annand, and many of its poppy cartoon panels are triptychs. Read more here.