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Episode 24: "The Tanners" by Robert Walser, translated by Susan Bernofsky, w/ special guest Spencer Ruchti
100 Plays7 months ago
Today Spencer Ruchti of Third Place Books joins to chat about The Tanners by Robert Walser, translated by Susan Bernofsky. We actually recorded this back in November and are glad to get it out into the world. Early on Spencer dips out momentarily due to an alarm in the store, but all ended up being right with the world. At least in that instant.
This is another wide-ranging chat as we dig into The Tanners and Walser’s writing. Some notable—perhaps random, perhaps not—topics that came up: hiking, firefighters, Full House, and lucid dreaming.
Lastly, Spencer is one of the founders of a newer literary prize, the Cercador Prize, which selected its first winner, Of Cattle and Men from Charco Press, back in the Fall. Do check them out and follow along as they get moving on the second year of the prize!
Titles/authors mentioned:
Of Cattle and Men by Ana Paula Maia, translated by Zoë Perry
Girlfriends, Ghosts, and Other Stories by Robert Walser, translated by Tom Whalen, with Nicole Köngeter and Annette Wiesner
Looking at Pictures by Robert Walser, translated by Susan Bernofsky, Lydia Davis, and Christopher Middleton
Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walker by Susan Bernofsky
Barry Lopez
Alexander von Humboldt
Heinrich von Kleist
Walks with Walser by Carl Seelig, translated by Anne Posten
Septology by Jon Fosse, translated by Damion Searls
Erik Satie
WG Sebald
The Village on Horseback by Jesse Ball
To hear more from Spencer follow him on Instagram: @spenruch and follow the Cercador Prize on Instagram, too: @cercadorprize
Click here to subscribe to our Substack and find us on the socials: @lostinredonda just about everywhere.
Music: “The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys” by Traffic
Logo design: Flynn Kidz Designs
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Introduction
00:00:01
Speaker
Hi, I'm Tom Flynn. And I'm Lori Feathers. And welcome to Lost in Redonda. Hey Lori, how are you doing today? Tom, I'm doing well. We've got a guest today.
Role at Third Place Books and Circador Prize
00:00:21
Speaker
We do. Joining us today in our line of guest hosts, we have Spencer Ruchty of Third Place Books hanging out with us. Hey, Spencer, how are you doing? I am doing so well. Hello, Tom. Hello, Laurie. Good to see you both. Welcome, Spencer. We're excited to talk to you today. Maybe it would be good if you would tell us a little bit about your bookstore. And then I also want to ask you,
00:00:48
Speaker
about a cool literary prize that you've just been, I think, responsible for getting off the ground.
00:00:56
Speaker
Oh my God, I would love to tell you both about my bookstore and about the literary prize that Laurie's referring to called the Circador Prize. I'll start with my bookstore. I've been working for Third Place Books here in Seattle, Washington since 2021. So I came in as the Events Manager for the store in the middle of the pandemic. We were only hosting virtual events, basically kind of rebuilt the program so we could start hosting authors in the store again.
00:01:24
Speaker
I've been a bookseller for seven years now. Let's see, am I doing that math correctly? Yeah, seven years, and have just never quite been able to get away from it. I've worked at several different stores, including Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge, as well as Broadway Books in Portland. Third Place Books is certainly the biggest store I've ever had the fortune of working for. We have three locations in Seattle.
00:01:47
Speaker
and I help schedule events for our three stores. It's a giant, you know, general interest store. Each neighborhood store is very distinct from one another and its audience and the customers it attracts. Like you'll see things on the best seller list at our Ravenna neighborhood store that, you know, maybe we've sold two copies of here at our flagship store in Lake Forest Park. So it's a really interesting dynamic between the three stores. Each, you know, I'm always kind of picking and choosing authors based on like which neighborhood audience I think will work best.
00:02:17
Speaker
I know one of your, we actually recently hosted one of your past guests, Robin McLean, our Ravenna store this, I think it was this last year. And she was wonderful. But again, it's like kind of the audience interested in like small press literature, you know, experimental literature, gnarly literature, like we have to kind of divvy those authors up in a special way.
Circador Prize and Its Impact
00:02:39
Speaker
As far as the circuit or prize goes yeah this year my dear friend and i justin walls started a prize for literature and translation called the circuit or prize it is a prize run entirely by booksellers the first of its kind we have ten finalists that we announced in september and then we announced
00:02:58
Speaker
the winner of those 10 finalists receives a $1,000 prize conferred entirely to the translator. It was a very fun project this first year. We're going into our second year and kind of developing ideas for what we want the theme to be, what new booksellers we want to bring into the committee.
00:03:15
Speaker
Our winner this year was of Cattle and Men by the Brazilian writer Ana Paula Maya, which was translated by Zoe Perry, just a wonderful, tight, haunting novel about labor and agricultural trade in Brazil. That's very similar to what we might see here in the United States. It's about a slaughterhouse worker named Edgar Wilson, and it's a wonderful short book.
Discussion on Robert Walser and 'The Tanners'
00:03:41
Speaker
I won't get too much into it because we have Swiss Germans to talk about today.
00:03:45
Speaker
Um, but yeah, do you want me to talk a little bit about Robert Fallser, my, and my relationship with him? Sure. But I just wanted to also say that a cattle men is a fantastic book. I really, I mean, it's a very strange book to describe as, um, wonderful or for me to say that I love. So.
00:04:02
Speaker
brutal. It's a really brutal book. Yeah, it's like, like, you feel like the hard glare of the sun throughout the entire book at no moment are you not in some way being interrogated by it. But it's really impressive. And I think, I think the fact that it is so short and is so tight really just emphasizes that and frankly, allows you to get through it. I don't know if I could have done 250 pages of of that particular, that particular novel.
00:04:31
Speaker
I will say one of the things, if I may, that I was surprised about during our finalist deliberation, each committee member, so there are five of us, is responsible for reading all 10 titles on the finalists list and coming up with kind of a unanimous winner of those 10 titles.
00:04:48
Speaker
And one of the things that I was surprised by that maybe I shouldn't have been is that as booksellers, many of the booksellers on the committee were discussing the finalists in terms of how we would talk to customers about these books in the store, how we would like communicate the importance or kind of like the bizarreness of these strangeness of some of these titles to a reader who might not be familiar with translated literature, which is, in my mind, kind of the goal of the prize altogether is to make
00:05:15
Speaker
you know, increase the audience for translated literature, you know, make sure readers are aware that, you know, of the international scene for literature, also raise awareness for the work of translators. Bruno at the National Book Awards, who translated Daniel Gardel's The Words That Remain, she, in her speech, when that book won,
00:05:37
Speaker
said something along the lines of like, you know, translators are not fairies working in the dark, which is absolutely true. And it's so that's why we decided from Justin and I decide from the get go that we wanted to make sure this prize was acknowledging the works of translator, the work of translators, whose work are often obscured and in the dark, often like booksellers as well. And that we wanted this money to go to the translator as opposed to the publisher to the author, because we felt like just that gesture was was important to us.
00:06:07
Speaker
That's fantastic. I'm so happy that this prize is here. And just so we can hit something near and dear to my heart, why don't you mention the publisher of that title? A pretty damn good little publisher there that's doing such great work right now.
00:06:30
Speaker
Yeah, and that publisher is Charco Press. They're based out of the UK in Scotland. They are, my God, I think, I mean, they really, they really hit the spot for me, I think nine times out of 10. You know, when I'm able to read their books, their books look beautiful. They have thematic cover design so you can recognize a Charco Press book on the shelf immediately.
00:06:50
Speaker
They have great distribution as well in the U.S., so it's easy to obtain those titles. They've had great success with novels by Ariana Horowitz, who wrote Feebleminded. Oh, and I should mention that Charcoal Press exclusively publishes Latin American literature, I believe.
00:07:09
Speaker
And so there's also kind of a theme there as well. And it narrows the field, but also allows them to specialize. And so you have a lot of interested booksellers. If your main interest in translated literature is Latin American literature, you can go to Charco Press and you know that anything that you pick off their title is going to be your speed.
00:07:28
Speaker
Yeah, they're really doing good work for a little literary prize that I started here in the US and Canada. Their submission this year for 2023 is Two Sherpas. So I don't know if you guys are familiar with that title. That's a really good, I really like that a lot. Yeah. So they are doing great
Community Engagement and Event Management
00:07:51
Speaker
work. We had Claudio Pinheiro zoom in for a book club meeting at the store.
00:07:57
Speaker
Oh, that's so cool. Yeah, with Carolina Orloff, the woman that runs and is the brains behind the whole press. And she was doing the translation for us as we were having the book club discussion. So that was really cool. So well, congratulations on the prize, Spencer. I'm so glad that that's here and good luck. And I just hope it keeps going for the next hundred years.
00:08:23
Speaker
Yeah. For many more years to come until one of us dies. And even then we'll find an inheritor. It'll be great. Make sure, make sure you have your seconds lined up. No matter what, come hell or high water. And then, then you just casually disappear and leave them to take over running it.
00:08:40
Speaker
That's right. That's what a lot of CEOs seem to do anyway. So I just have to adopt the CEO mindset. That part of the mindset, not the grind set, not that approach. No, the make sure there's someone there to take on all the work. Actually, that's a really nice way to segue into the tanners and characters who
00:09:04
Speaker
some of whom have absolutely no inclination to do anything for more than a few weeks at a time.
Robert Walser's Influence and Style
00:09:12
Speaker
But yeah, so you had us read Robert Walzer's The Tanners from New Directions, translated by Susan Bernofsky. I hadn't read any Walzer before this. I'm not sure, Lori, if you have or not. Yes, I'd read The Tanners once before, maybe nine, 10 years ago.
00:09:32
Speaker
Okay. But, uh, yeah, why don't you say a little bit about it and maybe also, you know, get into a bit why I guess, uh, also in keeping with, uh, the approach of the committee for the circuit door, maybe give us the, uh, the bookseller pitch, uh, around this one, uh, too.
00:09:49
Speaker
Oh, absolutely. So Robert Volzer's The Tanner's, a very important novel to me. And first of all, I want to say, you know, I want to thank the two of you for giving me the opportunity to file through old books on my shelf. And I don't often have the opportunity to reread books that I love. So this was a really fantastic exercise.
00:10:08
Speaker
I'm a huge Robert Valser fan. The Tanners was the first book I read of his. I have two small shelves dedicated to his work alone, so I'm a bit of a completist. The Tanners is about, I would say, to give the basic pitch. It's about a 20-something
00:10:25
Speaker
narrator trying to find his way in the world and a lot of that kind of extends through labor and jobs like jobs he picks up as well as his kind of distaste for that work or his love of that work and when i when i found or first discovered robert fallser i didn't know anything about him but i was
00:10:45
Speaker
Um, it was about probably five years ago, 2018. Um, I was on my first trip to New York ever. So I was, you know, kind of, I was being bombed, but I was, I'm, I'm from Southeast Idaho. So, you know, at the time big cities still kind of like frightened me. I just moved to Boston and I was doing a bookstore tour and I went to green light bookstore and picked up the tanners off the shelf, uh, based
00:11:09
Speaker
basically on the colophon alone. It was published by New Directions, and I knew I loved those books. And also, I had never heard of this book. It's often difficult as a bookseller to find books that you're unfamiliar with. So that was instantly kind of attractive to me. And then, of course, there's an introduction by W.G. Zaybald in this edition, and that was also immediately attractive to me. And I thought, well, if Zaybald likes it, then I'm sure I'll love it too.
00:11:37
Speaker
So I picked it up in the store and I read the opening passage of the book, Proper, which starts with Simon Tanner, the narrator, trying to get a job at a bookstore, which was applicable to me, of course, as someone who worked at a bookstore. And he starts off this long speech by saying he goes on many, you know, many monologues throughout the novel. But this one is one of my favorites.
00:11:59
Speaker
He says, I want to become a bookseller, said the youthful novice. I yearn to become one, and I don't know what might prevent me from carrying out my intentions. I've always imagined the trade in books must be an enchanting activity, and I cannot understand why I should still be forced to pine away outside of this fine, lovely occupation. And he goes on talking to the proprietor of this bookstore for another page until he convinces the bookseller to give him a job.
00:12:26
Speaker
Well, mere pages later, a week later in the time span of the novel, he marches back into the store and he basically demands his wages and says, I'm going to quit. He says, during the past week, I've come to realize that the entire book trade is nothing less than ghastly if it must entail standing at one's desk
00:12:47
Speaker
from early morning to late at night while out of doors the gentlest winter sun is gleaming and then he complains about the work of being a bookseller for two more pages and this really sets the tone for the rest of the novel where you have Simon Tanner kind of floating in and out of work which is also kind of reminiscent of the author's biography as well you know took on many positions you know during the course of his life and many different trades in addition to being a writer
00:13:16
Speaker
Spencer, have you used either of these speeches by Simon Tanner in procuring bookselling jobs or leaving bookselling jobs? You know, I've thought about it, actually. I once thought about copying and when I was, when there was a period, like especially during the pandemic where I was out of work and I was living in Portland and I was applying for jobs at
00:13:42
Speaker
at pals and Broadway books to basically no success. I was just trying to get part-time work. And I actually typed out some of the lines from these first pages about the wonder of books. And I was going to adapt it and see if I could do something with it. I didn't have the guts to actually send it because it seemed way too false. And Susan Bernofsky does a wonderful job translating this. I mean, this novel is from,
00:14:10
Speaker
Let me double check. I almost said 1901, but I don't think that's correct. 1907, it's also one of Robert Valser's first novels, probably his, I think his second publication, aside from a collection of like vignettes and essays that he published. But Susan Wernofsky does a really wonderful job of like modernizing that language just a little bit, like enough that it feels, you know, still feels like a novel published in 1907. But there's like,
00:14:37
Speaker
If I copy and pasted that paragraph into a cover letter applying for a bookstore position, someone might just think I was an eccentric. Or someone might recognize it and be like, this guy's brilliant. Oh, that guy knows literature. Yeah, because Tanner's is one of my favorite books, too. Or they might read it and know what comes next from... Exactly. And be really concerned about... What a week later.
00:15:02
Speaker
I mean, it'd be a great way to get an interview, maybe not the best way to secure the job. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. And I do have to confess, you know, this is, it's been five years, you know, since I read this book, and it is not the book.
00:15:18
Speaker
that I remember it being. And so I think that, you know, I figured that's also part of like the healthy discussion of reading and rereading books you love. But I remember being so enamored by this book and looking at Simon Tanner as, you know, definitely not a template to follow. But at least it was kind of like to me when I was younger, a thinking person's exercise in like finding your way and how to be a person in the world in kind of like a more eccentric
00:15:47
Speaker
wavered sense you know in high school I was reading you know lots of beat poetry and and you know what you know wanted to be Kerouac like a lot of young white men in southeast Idaho but this was kind of like like it entered into a oh fights just turned off one second oh
00:16:09
Speaker
the whole power to the bookstore's power just shut off and now there are lights flashing. It might be a fire alarm. Do you need to get up and go? I don't think so. I can keep going. Can you actually see me? Oh, you probably can't even see me because it's so dark in here.
00:16:27
Speaker
We can, we can hear you, but we can not see, we can occasionally see the flickering of the light. That's so weird. Oh my God. Here. Maybe if I turn this around, can you hear the siren going off? Yes. That's why I'm thinking it's a fire alarm. I'll be back. All right. Thanks. Okay. So Spencer, tell us.
00:16:45
Speaker
Okay. We'll leave some of that excitement in there. You know what's funny is we actually had someone pulled the fire alarm two Fridays ago. We were hosting Ali Hazelwood at the store. So we had a huge sold out event. Someone pulled a fire alarm in the middle of the event. We weren't about to evacuate like 300 people. So we just told everyone stay seated. We finally got the alarm to turn off.
00:17:10
Speaker
Firefighters showed up, you know, it was like a whole thing as like this panel of romance authors was trying to talk and do their thing and I got up on stage and and told everyone, you know, everything is fine. Like the fire department assures that someone just, you know, some kid pulled the fire alarm on a Friday night. It's just, you know, bound to happen eventually. And then I said, but if any of you want to meet a firefighter tonight,
00:17:32
Speaker
And they cracked up. Oh, it's so great. And that's how you host romance events, bring a bunch of firefighters in. That might be the title of this episode, how to host a romance. Or do you want to meet a fireman? Or do you want to be a fireman? Yeah. OK, so where do we need to pick up again here?
00:17:53
Speaker
So you were talking about rereading it after five years and how things change. And I think what's funny is that because this was the first novel by Robert Valser, I'd read, I realized that everything I read after and just for
00:18:09
Speaker
context for those who aren't familiar with his work translated into English. A lot of it is translated by either Tom Whelan or Susan Bernofsky across many different books and collections, but Robert Falser is actually not most famous for his novels. He's most famous for these very short prose pieces, some might call them vignettes, that are mostly collected in these New York Review of Book editions.
00:18:34
Speaker
If someone out there is looking to start with one, I would say the most famous collection, the collection that contains some of his more famous, like, well-known pieces, is called Girlfriends, Ghosts, and Other Stories, which is kind of a ridiculous title, but, you know, some of his more quotable pieces are, like, A Little Ramble, and Remember This, and one that actually Zaybald talks about in his introduction to the Tanners is called Ash, Needle, Pencil, and Match.
00:19:04
Speaker
And in these vignettes he's often talking about, he does, it's kind of like the best work that you find in the tanners at a sentence level and at an observation level. You have Robert Fallser like observing people in the city, talking about the natural world, talking about joys and delights for the most part. Like he can be a very grumpy and cantankerous writer, but overall like he really delights in the world and being alive and loves that. And this kind of like
00:19:31
Speaker
I see him as like kind of on the opposite side of this German spectrum to like Thomas Bernhard who's very scathing and dark and you know always pointing a finger at someone whereas like Robert Valser can take you know something like pencil scraping or ash and he gives it life and he gives it personality and he's able to you know find find everything everything and you know in a very small piece of minutia. There's this line in
00:19:59
Speaker
a little ramble that's just about it's a very short you know one page piece just about Robert Fallser like walking through the mountains enjoying the countryside just talking about the little things he comes upon and the last few lines are I encountered a few carts otherwise nothing and I had seen some children on the country lane we don't need to see anything out of the ordinary we already see so much
00:20:24
Speaker
And I remember, you know, when I was a young bookseller in Boston reading that line on the subway platform and it's like missing home, you know, missing the mountains, missing kind of the, the Northwest countryside and just like, it just hit me like a, like a brick wall that those, those few lines.
Character Development and Authorial Intent
00:20:43
Speaker
So I think the Tanner's it's it's not a good introduction to Robert Valser certainly but it is a really interesting character study. You have you know Simon Tanner and his many siblings are you know kind of our disparate parts of the disparate parts of the world disparate.
00:21:00
Speaker
places in their lives and various places of financial and career security, I guess you can say. And then you have Simon Tanner kind of floating in between all these siblings. He doesn't have a defined career. He doesn't really have a defined lifestyle. He writes, but he's mostly just floating and observing, floating and observing. And some of the strongest pieces of the book are like these profound observations he has about human life.
00:21:30
Speaker
This is something that came up in the first season of our podcast, specifically the Maria's title of Man of Feeling. Laurie hadn't read before, but my memory of it was how much I adored it. And then on the reread,
00:21:45
Speaker
Maybe I'm in a different place in my life. Maybe I just read it differently, but it did not hit me in anywhere near the same way. But similarly, I think that your first introduction to an author, no matter where you land on a subsequent reread, often turns into the gateway. I mean, it's the lens through which you see all their subsequent work, and it's the way that you can kind of argue for
00:22:06
Speaker
how to approach an author's work. For like Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood was the first one I read. And so I always felt that Norwegian Wood, I got into arguments actually with another bookseller. He felt that Harboiled Wonderland and The End of the World was the perfect way to get into Murakami. I felt as Norwegian Wood, the answer is they both are.
00:22:24
Speaker
Well, right. It happens all the time. You think, you know, someone asks you, well, what's the best way to get into, you know, such and such author? And you're like, well, it's this novel, because that's the one I read. And I can't imagine any other experience that, you know, it's hard to imagine another experience or portal through to an author. And I completely agree with that.
00:22:44
Speaker
But yeah, because I read, you know, The Tanners is probably not my favorite. It might not even be my favorite Robert Valser novel, but it is the first one that I read and the one that like craft opened the world for me. Yeah, it kind of has that like er text feel to it, right?
00:23:00
Speaker
So Spencer, you said that this is a book about character and character development. Talk to us a little bit about what you think Walzer is doing here. It's certainly a coming of age novel, but it's not particularly plot heavy. No. So how would you explain this novel to someone?
00:23:23
Speaker
Yeah, I think foremost, I think it's easy probably to conflate Robert Valser, the author, with Simon Tanner, the character, because this is an early novel, even in 1907, the temptation, I think, to write of oneself was there. And I think it's easy to kind of assume that Robert Valser was like Simon Tanner, was kind of this like,
00:23:51
Speaker
waifish, eccentric, idling, um, flanour, uh, who didn't really, you know, didn't, didn't care about, was always looking for work, but refused to hold a job for longer than, you know, a week or two if it displeased him. Um, but in truth, you know, Robert Valser was extraordinarily disciplined as a writer. Um, you know, he was one of eight
00:24:11
Speaker
eight children. He came from a middle-class family. His brother, much like Klaus in the novel, his brother Karl Valser was an artist, and you can actually see some of his work in one of my favorite books of Robert Valser ephemera, I'll call it, called Looking at Pictures. It's this little
00:24:34
Speaker
It's a little book that New Directions published, a little hardcover that collects a lot of Robert Valser's writing on artwork, and then it'll actually display the art on a facing page. It's hard to describe because I don't know much about book design, but it's very unique. It's probably one of the most beautiful books that I own, and you see some of Carl Valser's artwork in there. But anyway, so there are a lot of autobiographical elements to this book, but it's also
00:24:59
Speaker
you know there's admittedly Simon Tanner doesn't necessarily change that much by the end there's not a lot of traditional character development in the way that we think of it or that you know one might read about in an MFA course but you are you are kind of getting I think throughout like
00:25:16
Speaker
more and more an enhanced like Simon Tanner becomes grounded more and more he has these interactions with his siblings that you know don't always go so well he you know comes across uh you know uh like for example a dead body in the wood woods and it deeply affects him you know he's experiencing kind of these bizarre
00:25:39
Speaker
almost outlandish portions of life that don't necessarily make sense from a normal novel standpoint. But I think Simon becomes more grounded by the end of the novel, and that's kind of where the development comes from.
00:25:55
Speaker
Let's talk a little bit about Simon's intentions or his agency because he has a very roundabout way of, I think, getting what he wants. Whether it's a job, as we discussed with the book selling, he's a little bit self-denigrating. I don't know why you would hire me except that I know that this is
00:26:17
Speaker
always what I wanted to do and I will be like the best employee ever, but I really don't have any qualifications. Oh, and you say, ask, do I have any recommendations? Well, no, and I'm rather kind of offended that you would even ask for a recommendation from someone who knows me. And then when he goes to obtain his first
00:26:40
Speaker
or his apartment in the boarding house with Fra Clara. He kind of the same way, oh, this is wonderful. And I could never dream of living somewhere this beautiful. I have no money. So of course, I can just feel sorry for myself that I'll never be able to live here. And then she's like,
00:27:05
Speaker
Oh, I don't really care about the money, please move in. So he seems to like, ingratiate himself with people and get what he wants, but in this very roundabout, indirect way. Yeah, and he's very, like, he's very hot headed in a way. Roberts, Robert Valser's characters are very often, including in one of his more famous novels, like Jacob von Guten, they're, they're often clerks and servants. And that's kind of a theme you find in a lot of
00:27:33
Speaker
a lot of the author's work is you have these characters who are like eager not just eager but like their life's mission their their life's passion is to serve other people to provide good service and it's interesting to see that on i guess it kind of ends up informing like simon tanner's like he wants to please people he wants to to kind of enter into the like course of a career as quickly and as
00:28:00
Speaker
as kind of aggressively as possible but it will also if it doesn't you know if he finds that the the work is invaluable like he'll he'll turn his back and leave but his definition of what that work is and what is invaluable is kind of is unique like little it just contributes to his hotheadedness.
00:28:19
Speaker
But you wouldn't necessarily say that he's just like falling into these things, right? No, he seems to seek them out. Yeah, he recognizes that one needs to work in order to get money. There's, I think, a point in the novel when Simon Tanner talks about how he's been searching for work on and off and he's had kind of the freedom to pick and choose what he wants to do in terms of labor.
00:28:45
Speaker
And he mentions in kind of a side note that he's been living off like an inheritance given to him by his parents. And now he no longer has that. So now he has to buckle down and really find long-term work or kind of be able to find people who are kind and generous enough to give him a home, give him a food and a roof over his head. That said, I do feel like there are
00:29:10
Speaker
aspects to his character that very much feel like he's just in the wind and that his arguments can shift from one interaction to the next and a lot of the work that he engages in and a lot of the
00:29:24
Speaker
I mean, he moves around a lot, so from town to town, city to city, forest to forest. There is almost a examination of the society of the time taking place there too, because he's engaging with all levels of that society from folks who are day laborers to, I mean, he works as basically the man servant for a wealthy woman and her invalid child. And in that situation, he doesn't quit.
00:29:54
Speaker
he just makes himself such a nuisance that eventually she shows him the door. And that's clearly his goal. But prior to that, he spent a lot of time thinking about how much he enjoyed being castigated for doing something wrong or like or what it means when the master punishes the servant and there is a lot of
00:30:16
Speaker
digging in a way that I think Simon might be doing, but I think that's also against the backdrop of very much desiring love and care. The novel kind of ends with someone basically just accepting him, taking him in. And this is a novel in which I would guess a third of it is spoken by Simon and these very long, often diatribes to be, I guess, generous. Yeah.
00:30:44
Speaker
But it does not end. He does not get the final word of the novel. And in an earlier point, Clara, who you mentioned, falls in love with, is it Casper? That's the painter?
00:30:56
Speaker
Yes, with his brother Casper, the painter, which is fine. And he has a long conversation about love and loving with Clara. But then when he sees his friend Rosa, she asks after Casper. And that I think the chapter I break at that point is Simon realizing, Oh, she's in love with him too. And then the chapter ends. There are a lot of those
00:31:19
Speaker
I mean, on the craft level, Walzer does a very good job of having these, you know, lush descriptions of countryside and these long declarations of thought and meditation on labor or love or what have you. And then there will just be a very short paragraph of an intrusion of reality into whatever it is that Simon
00:31:40
Speaker
I'm also thinking about when he's living with his sister Hedwig and they have this very long conversation thinking about very high minded things and then that portion ends when the wife of the school teacher from the town over knocks at the door because her husband just beat the hell out of her and they take care of her and then
00:31:58
Speaker
then there's the shift. So like, reality punches its way into Simon's life in ways that he probably isn't accounting for and is, in some ways, I think maybe working against. Yeah. And it's very sober, like that scene you just mentioned about, you know, Simon and Hedwig having this conversation.
00:32:19
Speaker
And then suddenly there's a knock on the door and that in that portion of the chapter, you know, last maybe two or three sentences after, you know, this, you know, many, many pages of conversation.
00:32:30
Speaker
Yeah, it's very chilling the way he does this, I think. And how he's, you know, it shows, I think, authorial intent, the author's ability to, like, the author knows that what we are getting of Simon Tanner are more or less ramblings, some of which are, you know, with their small nuggets kind of buried into these ramblings, but also the author is aware that life is not just a thinking person's game. There's also these,
00:33:00
Speaker
you know, alarming, alarming violence that occurs, there's reality intrudes, there are there's money at stake, there's, you know, one's career in life at stake in many of these situations that Simon Tanner just kind of like, you know, it's attempting to like blow through life. But I think it's, it's a it's one of the elements of this novel that I that I really enjoy. Reading this, I
00:33:24
Speaker
couldn't help making comparisons to one of my very favorite novels of all time, Thomas Mann's Boondin Brooks. And that book is titled Decline of a Family. It's the subtitle of it basically. And it's about the Boondin Brook
00:33:42
Speaker
clan, you know, siblings, parents, grandparents, and this is going to be very, very generalized, uh, morsel to take away from that great novel. But I get the feeling that Thomas Mann is, is articulating a German idea through that novel that if everyone in the Bundbroek's
00:34:09
Speaker
clan had just kind of maintained some type of professional occupation, much like the older brother Klaus in The Tanners, then the family wouldn't be going to hell like it is. And it just like starts sliding in Bund and Brooks until like it's
00:34:29
Speaker
a dissipated kind of state. So here we've got Klaus, who's a career man. I forget, is he in government service? He's got a very good position, I know. He's an academic, I think. Okay. But he's a serious guy and he's got a career. And then he's got Simon, who's
00:34:51
Speaker
flitting to and fro, and Casper, who's trying to be a landscape artist, painter. And when Klaus is given the opportunity to talk when Simon shuts up long enough, you know, you hear things about like, I just want you guys to get real job, settle down, get your act together, the kind of things I think that you would find older brothers saying, you know, even today,
00:35:19
Speaker
I don't know, Spencer, and it's probably an unfair question whether Thomas Mann and Robert Valser might have been in dialogue in some either actual way through these books or just some way through myself as a reader of their books. But what do you think is going on here with like Germany at the time that this novel is taking place and talking about career aspirations and ambition and
00:35:49
Speaker
versus kind of a more decadent, I don't know, breezing your way through life and not having a clear path or clear goals or direction.
00:36:00
Speaker
Yeah, I sincerely wish I knew more about what was happening in Germany, you know, during this period. I know that, you know, Bunn Brooks was published, you know, probably at the, maybe a few years before the Tanners. I think that's right. It was certainly in the, probably dialogue with, you know, that Robert Valser's work as he started publishing, you know, that would have been, you know, would have been published and out in the world.
Walser's Biography and Literary Contributions
00:36:25
Speaker
I know that Kafka very much looked up to Robert Valser as kind of an influence on his early work, especially as a miniaturist. And I would probably, yeah, I'd have to read Susan Bernofsky's biography of Robert Valser again to tell you more about that. But that's another book I'll shout out is that just recently,
00:36:50
Speaker
The translator of this book, Susan Bernofsky, wrote a biography of Robert Falzer for Yale University Press. That was just, you know, stunning. And it was one of the first kind of like, and it's one of the first, I think, English language biographies of Robert Falzer and certainly the only one that's in print. So if you're interested in this, you know, I'd also highly recommend Susan's work on the topic too.
00:37:15
Speaker
I do think we could also pull in though, though I'm not sure you've read it, Spencer, Imperium by Christian Crockt, which is contemporary, but is set in a similar timeframe and a similar
00:37:31
Speaker
milieu of Germany at the turn of the 20th century and the pressures within the society at the time, the state exerting greater control, but new ideas and new ideas of how to be a person and rejection of what
00:37:50
Speaker
what is supposed to be a lifestyle, your life as you move along. I mean, I think that is certainly in the air. It's interesting. Like the more I think about and the more we talk about it, the more I get a feeling that, and we should read a little bit, like at least one of his landscape descriptions. He's a gorgeous prose writer when he won't, like he just, it makes you feel like the forests in Switzerland and Germany are the most beautiful, like idyllic spaces on the planet.
00:38:19
Speaker
But I think he's also really digging into the society of his time, that there is this tension between a, there's a certain dreamlike quality to how Simon moves around and how he talks and the people he speaks with. And I don't mean that in a surreal sense, it just sort of has that sort of
00:38:40
Speaker
that gauzy veiled feeling to it where the light's just a little different. But, but when he wants to shift gears and really kind of dig into social interactions, he can do that too. And so I think that is part of what he's accomplishing with Simon moving from point to point as it gives him the, it gives him a vehicle to do all that, to really kind of talk about and dig into all of that.
00:39:05
Speaker
Yeah, I always joke that Robert Valser is like a true Pacific Northwest rider because he loves hiking and is enamored by biology and landscape. You know, there's like something of like Barry Lopez and his appreciations for nature. That's probably unfair. But there is. But yeah, you read him and you you can.
00:39:27
Speaker
You also feel like you are reading, you know, a little bit of like Alexander von Humboldt or Heinrich von Kleist as well to two bonds in there, but like, you know, Robert Valser was a was an amateur naturalist as well, as well as a writer, and often you kind of
00:39:43
Speaker
you know you don't realize this but when he's you know he taught in the tanners he writes about um you know hiking through mountains like just to get to the next city um like he was he was hiking hiking there's another wonderful book called Walks with Valzer by Carl Selig that New Directions also published and it's the memoirs of Carl Selig talking about his relationship with with Valzer and Carl Selig is kind of like the max broad let's see how do I phrase this
00:40:11
Speaker
Max brought his to Kafka as Carl Selig is to Robert Valser. So Carl Selig was responsible for a lot of Valser's posthumous work being published for kind of keeping him in the literary domain as time went on. And Carl Selig writes about how he would go on these walks with his friend Robert Valser and they were very lengthy walks and they weren't just like going on an open country road. They would
00:40:37
Speaker
They were really hiking. And so it comes from that, I think a lot of that appreciation of nature just comes from a desire at the time to supplant oneself, to use walking as like a thinking mechanism, which is something
00:40:54
Speaker
You know, we still see a little bit of today. You know, you have, you know, five or six books any given year on the market about like the pleasures of being a fl manure. You know, it's still something we talk about a lot today. But, you know, it's also one of my favorite things about Robert Valser's talk is when he just talks about walking and what he sees on those walks.
00:41:16
Speaker
Should we read a passage to one of you guys have something set aside that we could share with the listeners that kind of demonstrates the beauty of this?
00:41:29
Speaker
Yeah, I've got, I mean, it's Mr. VO1 too, but I've got one right here. It's early in the novel, page 67. And this is Simon walking with Casper. They're walking back to Kara's house in the woods. The setting sun blazes in their windows, turning them into rydian eyes, gazing fixedly, beautifully into the distance. Down below lay the city, spread out broad and luxuriant upon the plain like a glittering, twinkling carpet.
00:41:55
Speaker
The evening bells, which are always different from morning bells, were ringing far below. The lake lay, its outlines indistinct in its delicate and ethical form at the foot of the city, the mountain, and all the gardens. Not many lights were sparkling yet, but those whose glow could be seen were burning with a splendid, unfamiliar keenness. People were now walking and hastening down below in all the crooked, hidden streets. You couldn't see them, but you knew they were there. Yeah, that's lovely. But you knew they were there?
00:42:23
Speaker
just lands the plane so perfectly. Like it's just such a, such a great, yeah, so evocative and just such a great way to like really connect you with something that an experienced almost everyone's had. You always know there are people moving around somewhere in some distance that you're looking at. You might not be able to see them, but there's a comfort or a sureness in the world and knowing that other people are moving around.
00:42:47
Speaker
Should we talk a little bit about sense of humor? I think there's a real sense of humor in this book. Oh, he's hilarious. Yeah, he's very funny.
00:42:56
Speaker
But it's not something that knocks you over the head. It's something about how ardent Simon is, overly so, like a youthful person often is. The whole relationship with Clara and her husband is really ridiculous in a lot of ways. I don't know. Tell us about it, Spencer, from your perspective.
00:43:25
Speaker
Yeah, it's, it's, Simon Tanner, I think is such an interesting character, because I think nowadays, if a character like Sam Simon was, was written, it would be written in kind of a, you know, every everything is, is a little bit satirical, like we're making fun of Simon, because he is because he is such a strong personality, and he is often wrong, and he is often making these like grand statements and making these grand gestures that
00:43:50
Speaker
are, you know, quite frankly very obnoxious. And so he would be played for laughs in that way, in a way that Robert Valser, you know, it was probably not common to this time anyways, but Robert Valser does not do that. You know, he is, there are these grand gestures that are obviously ridiculous and these grand statements he makes that are, you know, I think to the reader very obviously incorrect, but
00:44:14
Speaker
He's also much more complex than that, you know, he's, it's not always satirical. Sometimes these, you know, you have, you have humor buried in here and yeah it's not like hit over the head, hit you over the head kind of slapstick humor, but you know just to go back to the, to what I think is you know one of the funniest passages in the book which is, you know, those, those opening pages when
00:44:37
Speaker
when Simon Tanner professes how much he wants to work in a bookstore and pages later comes back and says, basically just turns everything he said in the previous pages on its head and says, no, actually, I've discovered that my experience as a bookseller is the exact opposite of what I wanted. You are mistaken if you believe that a young man's back exists in order to be hunched is one of my favorite lines there.
00:45:04
Speaker
I'm talking about you know the work of standing at the desk that's way too tiny for your body and so i think it's just the. The neurotic kind of juxtaposition that you know simon tanner embodies all thoughts he doesn't have you know he doesn't really stand on stable. Ground you know ethically or otherwise.
00:45:23
Speaker
But there's something about him too. And this is kind of funny in that he, he quits these jobs with these grand pronouncements, basically denigrating the professions from which he's all together. Yes.
00:45:40
Speaker
But then the bosses that he's addressing are like, this is extraordinary that you're talking to me like this, but I'm interested. So please just tell me more. That's some of the funniest segments, I think, too, when these people are just having this young kid tear into them about
00:46:08
Speaker
how despicable their job was and didn't live up to any of his expectations and it's the professions that these people have dedicated their lives to and they just are like oh okay you know almost like incredulous they can't believe someone
00:46:24
Speaker
that this and especially someone this young is like talking to them about it and they're just are kind of recoiling because it's insulting but at the same time they're kind of mesmerized because it's really you know just astounding that he's talking to them like that.
00:46:42
Speaker
There are also moments in some of the longer speeches, and not just by Simon, this happens to both Klaus and Hedwig at least a couple times, maybe even Kara, where they're making these grand pronouncements and they're winding themselves up more and more and getting more and more excited and moving further and further away from their starting point.
00:47:04
Speaker
You'll see a break where they go, wait, don't make that face. That's not what I meant at all. And they realize that they've just contradicted themselves or the person they're speaking to suddenly exists again. They've noticed that they're actually talking to someone, not just pronouncing to the universe their grand idea. And so this sudden shift that he does where they're very startled that all of a sudden this other person has a thought process and it jolts them out of it.
00:47:30
Speaker
It's, it's, it's fun. And having been that person on more than a few occasions, I enjoyed, I enjoyed that those interactions. He also just does have a very, very good eye for how people
00:47:46
Speaker
can engage with each other and how they can cut each other really deeply without intention. And it seems often without intention. And also how they can express concern as Klaus does, but in a way that completely undercuts everything he's attempting to achieve with his siblings. So we meet all of the Tanner siblings, except for one.
00:48:12
Speaker
And the one we only hear about, we hear about both randomly in a bar and then at the end of the novel, towards the end of the novel, when Simon meets this final person who gets the last word, he actually gives a pretty, I mean, it's long, but it's a fairly succinct description of
00:48:32
Speaker
all of his siblings of a lot of what has taken place in the novel. It does have, it isn't an epilogue that almost serves that function of summing it all up. There are lots of ways in which this novel feels like a serial, just the episodic nature of it. But even within that episodic nature,
00:48:51
Speaker
Sometimes it does feel like Simon's a totally different person at the start in a new location than he was in the previous one. So there's Simon, Hedwig, the only sister, Casper, the artist, Klaus, the academic, and then Emile. Klaus is the oldest, so it's suggested, I believe, that Emile is the second one.
00:49:11
Speaker
And when we hear this story about a young man who is very good at life, but then starts to take up with some of the worst people in society and over time, like his charm starts to fade and through deprivation and experience, he ends up going mad.
00:49:30
Speaker
And when this person wraps up their story that Simon's been listening to, he declares, that was actually my brother Emil. And his father was a flower merchant, right? And starts listing off all these facts to confirm this. And then Emil is mentioned again, and that he's now in a madhouse. But initially, as a reader, I feel like you
00:49:51
Speaker
It sounds like someone's describing Simon. It sounds like someone's describing an aspect of Simon's life we haven't heard yet with the constant movement, the changeable beliefs, the changing of jobs every two to three weeks, but instead it's his older brother whom
00:50:08
Speaker
He defends as not being a ne'er-do-well, but having helped instill a love of nature and a love of the world and a sense of perspective in all of his siblings. I don't know. I'm still thinking about why that character exists within this novel.
00:50:28
Speaker
It puts a spin, it puts a spin on things, right? It doesn't change the trajectory of anything, but it does alter how, how you're perceiving a lot of what's come before and what comes after. Yeah. And it's interesting that you say that because I almost forgot about this, but I remember having the same thought when I was reading those, you know, kind of final passages as I thought, Oh, this person doesn't, you know, was talking about Simon Tanner, but doesn't know he's talking to Simon Tanner.
00:50:52
Speaker
it turns out there's this other sibling in the mix. And it's an interesting effect because you have this doppelganger introduced in a way. And it gives Simon a chance to defend his own actions, defend his own course in life, but also realize that there's this kind of
00:51:12
Speaker
alternate path towards madness in this case that he himself could have taken. Jan Vassa in fact in Septology does something kind of similar where he has a doppelganger or his narrator has a doppelganger who is consumed by alcoholism and that's kind of like the diverging point with these two characters and it gives
00:51:36
Speaker
you know, the narrator of Septology, kind of the ability to look at his own life from an alternate path in a surreal way. In this case, you know, it's very real. There is a literal brother, you know, who he's speaking about and speaking to, but you're right, you know, the two are eerily similar and I think that, you know, of course that's very intentional.
00:51:56
Speaker
And I think too, and maybe I'm going a bit too far in making this inference, but could it be with this novel being published in the first decade of the new century that the brother is, the brother Emil is perhaps someone who couldn't, couldn't handle the changing times. It's someone that Simon
00:52:24
Speaker
It could have been Simon, you know? Because Simon says, this unfortunate brother was surely, and I may say so without hesitation, the ideal of a young beautiful man. And he had talents that would have been better suited to the gallant, charming 18th century than our times, whose demands are so much harder and drier.
00:52:45
Speaker
So it's almost, I think, perhaps a commentary that the world is becoming a place where it's hard, it's hard to live and you can't, and you can't perhaps be as
00:52:59
Speaker
as sensitive as you once were, you have to kind of paddle or sink kind
Exploration of Themes in 'The Tanners'
00:53:07
Speaker
of thing. Yeah, I think that in a way, you know, Simon has all these siblings and kind of I mentioned earlier, you know, I think The Tanners is about, you know, a 20 something, you know, man trying to find his way in the world and is exercising all of these different possibilities, you know, and you see it in
00:53:26
Speaker
not only in the jobs that he takes on and the you know the attempts at you know short-lived careers he takes on but also in the way he drops in on all of his you know the lives of his siblings at different parts of the novel is it's it's yet another way to kind of um you know
00:53:44
Speaker
you know, exercise or experiment with different ways of living, different styles of living, trying to find what he wants the stuff of his life to consist of. I think that makes a lot of sense and very much tracks with
00:54:01
Speaker
And the example of a meal kind of puts that into starker relief, right? And to your point, Laurie, I think, yeah, you could perhaps read it as almost a bearing of the romantic, right? Of that era of both literature and just sort of like, it's not like it only existed in literature. It wasn't a way of being in the world. And that's a way that's
00:54:25
Speaker
that's going away. I mean, it's really interesting and kind of fun that this novel, which is in so many ways, so very light moves very well, almost despite how, how much talking like there is the kind of talking that could bog down, but it just sort of trucks along and does very well. But there's this real, there's this undercurrent to it that you start, you know, lifting up, lift up the hood a little bit. And there's, there's some,
00:54:53
Speaker
There's some warnings maybe existing under that surface. Let me let me see how many other metaphors I can. And for a very random just thought process and something that occurred to me about halfway through the book, is there a chance that the creators of the show Full House, at least one of one of whom was a fan of Robert Valser and named the family after Simon and
00:55:22
Speaker
and Hedwig and all of them. I mean, they are the tanners in Full House, so I don't know. That just occurred to me. That's funny. That had not occurred to me. Is the spelling the same?
00:55:34
Speaker
Yeah, it's the same spelling of Tanner. I think that Emile would probably be Uncle Jesse, the John Stamos and all of that. And God, I could do a, it could do a whole, that's my head cannon now, is that the creator of Full House was a big Robert Walser, Robert Walser head. Like that would be phenomenal. Yeah. I'm sure the creator listens to this podcast. So maybe you'll get a response to that. So I'm not thinking of it in more ways because we lost that whole country after that episode with Chad.
00:56:04
Speaker
One of our running jokes now is the episode of the chat post on it, where we're talking about Jan Sharsted's book, The Conqueror. We ran a few risks of what we said about Norway. So we'll see what that means. I haven't double checked the downloads for Northern Europe in a little bit.
00:56:23
Speaker
Spencer, one of the things that we have fun doing is trying to come up with comps to titles. If you love the tanners, you'll love. Anything come to your mind?
00:56:38
Speaker
You know, one thing I was actually recently reading, Dustin Illingworth, the book critic wrote, he has this kind of like infrequent sub-stack where he'll just write an essay about something that interests him, post it online. It's nice because it's like, you know, it's not tied to anything around, you know, publication date or media. It's just like something he's interested in.
00:57:02
Speaker
and he wrote recently a sub-sac post about the life of Robert Valser whose work I know he loves but it was mostly sent around Susan Bernofsky's biography and in it he he compared Robert Valser not only to you know he was talking about like
00:57:18
Speaker
in, you know, Walzer's influence on Kafka and some of these other like German, you know, absurd, you know, surrealist, absurdist writers. But he also compared some of Walzer's like miniature work to the music of Satie, which I thought was really interesting. So there's a there's a music cop there.
00:57:38
Speaker
But, you know, of course I would say if you like, you know, Zebald is a really good comp. Yeah, I'd have to think of, you know, what's funny is that I think a lot of the, I won't say vignette, but
00:57:53
Speaker
in today's reading culture, we'd call it work with a lot of white space attached to it, which is very popular these days. And a lot of Robert Valser's vignette work falls into that category, but surprisingly hasn't picked up mass TikTok appeal. So maybe soon we'll have legions of young literary students flocking to Robert Valser's miniature work again.
00:58:23
Speaker
I was kind of thinking Traveler of the Century a little bit on this woman. It's not a clean comp, but it's kind of occupying a similar...
00:58:34
Speaker
It occupies a similar space in my head in terms of the landscape, the setting, the time period that it creates. Newman can 100% crush a landscape description if he wants to. The social interactions are in some ways somewhat similar. But yeah, that was the one. I came ready this time, Laurie. That was the one that occurred to me.
00:58:59
Speaker
the most when I was reading it. And Andres Newman's got a new book coming out next year with open letter and I'm so excited.
00:59:07
Speaker
That's very exciting. We should do a Newman for the podcast at some point. Traveler of the Century is probably my favorite of his. I like Fracture too. Have you read that one? The one that takes place in Japan? No. That's nice too. I was actually just thinking that a contemporary writer that seems, I don't know if I really want to make the claim, that could maybe do something similar to Walser, David Peace.
00:59:31
Speaker
Uh, now he writes a ton, but his, and he doesn't really write in the similar mode, but I don't know, there's something about his book patient X, which is all about, um, a coup de gala. Um, it's basically a, a, a historical biography. I mean,
00:59:50
Speaker
you know, a literary biography of a Kitagawa is, um, there are things that he does in there that, I don't know, somehow, some are doing, are hitting a similar frequency for me, um, as some of what Valzer's like digging into exploring, um, in this one.
01:00:06
Speaker
What about you, Laurie? Does anything specific come to mind? I already gave mine. Boudenbrokes. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I think that's, and, and when I'm thinking about the other works of Thomas Mann, I don't really think it's so much rings true, but, but yeah, Boudenbrokes definitely just in terms of, you know, the, the, the family element, Germany around the same period of time or not quite the same, but, you know, maybe a couple of decades earlier, but.
01:00:34
Speaker
Yeah, I venture to also add Jesse Ball a little bit into the mix. Oh, that's like the curfew, I think. Yeah, I think it's certainly not as long-winded or as dense, like his work is not often as dense as the Tanner's, but I think
01:00:53
Speaker
I can I can absolutely see the like the potential influence on like the miniaturism and the like these kind of like surreal family dynamics in a little way. Yeah, and the sense of movement. I mean, balls characters are always
01:01:09
Speaker
moving and usually on foot from one place to the next. And a lot of what happens in the novels happen while people are walking and thinking and exploring all that. Actually, on the miniatures point, I forget which press it is. I'll put it in the show notes if I can remember and figure it out. I don't think it's green in or I think it's something really small.
01:01:31
Speaker
But Jesse Ball does Lucid Dreaming. Oh, yes. It's something which is all of his writing students. But when he has this collection of very short pieces that I believe, if I'm remembering this correctly, they're basically his journal entries from his dreams. And so he's a great death's brother or.
01:01:54
Speaker
I don't think so. Um, the village on horseback, actually, I was thinking, yeah, village and horse frozen verse. It's, I could absolutely see that also as being having some connective tissue. Yeah, you know, yeah, that early collection of Jesse ball work is my favorite. It's my favorite, like compendium of his like more so than his novels. Like I used to go and you know, I used to read that like,
01:02:19
Speaker
kind of once a summer where I just like kind of revisit and drop in and out of it because it's just a collection of pieces from a certain era of his writing that was then reprinted by milkweed. But yeah, it's phenomenal. And that's absolutely you know, where you see kind of I think the strongest influence of Robert Fallser and Jesse Falls work is a lot of those early experimental pieces. Yeah, that's a man. I haven't thought about that book in a while. That is a that that book is really a trip. Yeah, it's fun. He's good.
01:02:48
Speaker
This has been really fun Spencer, this has been really great.
Closing Remarks and Literary Exploration
01:02:51
Speaker
Yeah, thank you both again for having me on and for indulging in.
01:02:56
Speaker
in my wanting to reread the Tanners after so many years. This is really wonderful. It's been really so interesting. And for me, and I'm thinking you feel the same way, Tom, just really satisfying to talk to people that have their lives in books, surrounded by books, just talking about an older book that doesn't really get
01:03:23
Speaker
much airplay anymore. The conversations have been great. They've been really fantastic. And I mean, that's I mean, it's one of the points that this for this podcast is why why we started doing it to talk about talk about backlist, talk about things that we love. And it's really fantastic to bring in other folks who love books and love specific books just as much as as we do. And that's been it's been really great. So thank you so much, Spencer. This is really fun. Yeah, thank you so much, Tom and Laurie. Thank you.
01:03:57
Speaker
you