Ron Charles of the Washington Post reviews José Saramago’s Death with Interruptions.

The story opens at the start of a new year in a small, unnamed modern country. As is typical of the allegorical universalism in much of Saramago’s work, we never get a precise location or time period. The frenetic, amiable narrator refers to characters only by each one’s generic function: e.g. prime minister, mother, editor. All of them are confronting the most unusual nonevent in human history: “No one died. . . . New year’s eve had failed to leave behind it the usual calamitous trail of fatalities, as if old atropos with her great bared teeth had decided to put aside her shears for a day.”

Recommended.

I can well believe Johnson might have wanted to show that Lulu never does truly go to Marrakesh — there’s a hint of irony in her title. The trouble is that the reader doesn’t get there either.

In the New York Times, Erica Wagner reviews Diane Johnson’s Lulu in Marrakech.

Google announces a settlement in its legal battle with representatives of the American publishing industry.

With this agreement, in-copyright, out-of-print books will now be available for readers in the U.S. to search, preview and buy online — something that was simply unavailable to date. Most of these books are difficult, if not impossible, to find. They are not sold through bookstores or held on most library shelves, yet they make up the vast majority of books in existence. Today, Google only shows snippets of text from the books where we don’t have copyright holder permission. This agreement enables people to preview up to 20% of the book.

What makes this settlement so powerful is that in addition to being able to find and preview books more easily, users will also be able to read them. And when people read them, authors and publishers of in-copyright works will be compensated. If a reader in the U.S. finds an in-copyright book through Google Book Search, he or she will be able to pay to see the entire book online. Also, academic, library, corporate and government organizations will be able to purchase institutional subscriptions to make these books available to their members. For out-of-print books that in most cases do not have a commercial market, this opens a new revenue opportunity that didn’t exist before.

A roundup at New York Magazine considers The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, To Siberia, Chicago, Sea of Poppies, and The Prospector.

John Laidler of the Boston Globe reports a surge in the use of local public libraries.

Back in 2002 I had a running debate with a friend of mine on the subject of “dignity.” She claimed that this was something I was excessively concerned about. She didn’t think it was possible for people like us to be really dignified in the old (and possibly imaginary) way of prior generations and characters in classic novels.

In writing about David Foster Wallace at n+1, Benjamin Kunkel writes about art and criticism in general.

At the Guardian Mark Brown notes the passing of Pat Kavanagh, wife of Julian Barnes and former agent of Martin Amis.

Not recommended.

Salon has James Hannaham’s review of Nancy Huston’s Fault Lines.

Sol, an arrogant boy from California, is convinced he is some sort of messiah. Huston draws him with biting specificity and detail, in the process nailing the dark side of American narcissism and child worship. She has a fast-paced style, as breathless as Philip Roth’s, deceptively light though deeply engaged in current events. Sol’s parents have childproofed the house by covering the electrical sockets and putting soft corners on all the furniture, but as soon as Sol is alone, he enthusiastically seeks out images of pornography and torture on the Internet. Huston spares us neither the outrageous vulgarity of the hypocritical environment in which Sol’s parents raise him nor its appalling effect on his personality.

In the Washington Post, Sir Ian Kershaw contrasts the writing of history with the writing of fiction.

One of the most frustrating feelings I experience when I sit in front of a computer screen before I start writing is knowing that I have to put words onto the empty space and that I am the only person who can do this.

At a meeting on Wednesday morning with the Flemish Literary Fund, Jill Schoolman, the publisher and editor in chief of Archipelago Books, a nonprofit Brooklyn publisher of works in translation, discussed her plans to bring out “Wonder,” a novel by Hugo Claus, a Belgian writer who was frequently discussed as a Nobel contender before he died by euthanasia earlier this year.

For the New York Times, Motoko Rich covers the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Recommended with reservations.

In the Village Voice, Jed Lipinski reviews Glen Pourciau’s Invite.

. . .both the form and content of Invite remain half-imprisoned by Carver’s influence. All the shopworn hallmarks are here: the drinking and cigarette smoking as a sign of inner turmoil; the clipped names (Don, Lou, Cam, Liv) meant to symbolize a working-class existence; the recidivist troublemakers who are, unironically, “at it again.” Pourciau seems tempted by irony and postmodern mischief, but in the end, he’s unwilling to let go of Carver’s staid earnestness.

National Public Radio’s Day to Day laments America’s literary insularity.

Haruki Murakami appeared at Berkeley. Ben Dooley has the details at The Millions.

On Murakami’s next novel: He finished it last week.

Debut novelist Aravind Adiga wins this year’s Booker prize for The White Tiger.

Recommended with reservations.

More aspects of Rimbaud are known than can be assimilated: his vastly various, influential and innovative poetry itself; his expressive letters; his scornful and unhesitating permanent abandonment of poetry at the age of 20; the anecdotes of his contemporaries showing him as a drunken, filthy, amoral homosexualteenager who becomes a reserved, hard-working, responsible and respectable (if misanthropic and disgust-ridden) adult merchant and explorer.

The New York Times has Richard Hell’s review of Edmund White’s Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel.

Ron Charles of the Washington Post reviews Ron Rash’s Serena.

A Google-news sweep reveals that first reaction in America is that the Nobel committee, in line with their prize-awarding colleagues in other fields, now see it as their God-given mission to cut the world’s only remaining superpower down to size. To prevent in literature what has happened in film (a cultural field in which Sweden and France were once world players - but no more). Or even in science.

At the Guardian, John Sutherland examines the reaction to Le Clézio’s Nobel win.

Recommended with reservations.

For National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, poet Andrei Codrescu speaks of Wall Street’s sweet deal.

Ah, where were we? The economy, yes: $700 billion is more than enough money to buy every able-bodied American a chain saw, a solar-powered generator and a stake in a communal well and windmill. Also, red dirt and plum trees.

The Swedish Academy has awarded Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio the Nobel prize in literature for 2008.

. . .now that the situation is reversed, and it is Europe that looks culturally, economically, and politically dependent on the United States, European pride can be assuaged only by pretending that American literature doesn’t exist.

Writing for Slate, Adam Kirsch probes the Nobel chasm.

The Financial Times has Naomi Alderman’s review of Howard Jacobson’s The Act of Love.

This is a subtle novel that repays careful reading. Felix wages his slow campaign to persuade Marius and Marisa into one another’s arms in the belief – so he says – that Marisa understands what he’s doing. But for much of The Act of Love it’s not clear that she does understand – or, even if she does, it’s not clear that she’s actually complying. When Felix insists that the matter was raised in “every conversation we almost had or refused to have”, when he tells us that he read her letters and understood that Marisa “would have wanted me to find no proof that she was having an affair as proof incontestable that she must have been”, the reader begins to doubt Felix’s sanity.

Recommended.

In the New York Times, Joshua Hammer reviews Ian Buruma’s The China Lover.

Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post reviews John le Carré’s A Most Wanted Man.

The anti-American note struck there is not new to le Carré — it has coursed through his work much as it did in the fiction of Graham Greene — but it is expressed in A Most Wanted Man with special virulence. No doubt this reflects the author’s opposition to innumerable aspects of recent American foreign policy, but he seems neither to know nor to care that many Americans share that opposition.

Recommended with reservations.

Horace Engdahl is permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, the body which chooses the Nobel Prize for literature. In an interview with an American journalist this week, he dismissed the writing of the US – the land of Melville, Hemingway and Fitzgerald – as “too isolated, too insular”. “They don’t translate [foreign books] enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature,” he said. “That ignorance is restraining.”

American writers were “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture,” he told the Associated Press. “Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the centre of the literary world.”

In the Independent, John Lichfield reports on the fallout.

At the Guardian, Giles Foden offers a one-word response to Mr. Engdahl.

Terry Gross of Fresh Air interviews Robert Baer, ex-CIA operative and author of The Devil We Know.

Not recommended.

Writing for Salon, Edward McClelland covers David Foster Wallace’s McCain’s Promise, Cliff Schecter’s The Real McCain, Paul Begala’s Third Term, and Matt Welch’s The Myth of a Maverick.

When scholars of the Obama presidency try to answer the question “Who Was John McCain?” — or, more pointedly, “Who Were the Two John McCains?” — they should start by reading what journalists had to say about him. Four new books about McCain, by four liberal authors, show how difficult it’s been for a politician with middle-of-the-road instincts to operate in a polarized era. Writers loved McCain during his first run for the presidency, in 2000. But eight years later, they think he’s a flip-flopping hack.