Cover Story (part two)

The sources of yesterday’s dream (see below) are not all that hard to identify. Different editions have been on my mind – and desk, of late. As this blog post reminds us, there can be a certain pleasure derived from juxtaposing the English and American editions of the same book (or, in some cases, editions from a dozen other countries). Though this is not something that I have ever been able to do with my own books (alas) there are a sprinkling of obscure European novels that have been published on both sides of the Atlantic.

For example, an old acquaintance of mine recently sent me the American edition of Edmund ‘Blumin’ Ek’s debut novel The Incredible Expletive Shock!! I suppose I ought to reproduce it here and allow you to compare it with the English edition (which appears somewhere on this page) but as my camera is, at present, undergoing treatment, I fear that you will have to wait on this one. What I can tell you is that the American edition is much more colourful, to the point of luminous. It may even glow in the dark.

Another book of which I’ve recently seen two versions is Pyetr Turgidovsky’s forthcoming Delicious Air of Life. The American edition is an uninspiring matt black, with pale pink writing. The English edition, meanwhile, contains a photograph which looks distinctly like  a view of Vladivostock, a city close to my heart (so close, sometimes, that it threatens to stop it). This tallies with early reviews of the book, which claim that Turgidovsky’s tale takes on the Eastern seaport’s dark history of chemical pollution, delighting no doubt in each and every miserable statistic. Something to look forward to there.

In other dream-related news, perhaps I ought to offer a riposte to my wife’s theory that last night’s fantasy had something to do with body-based paranoia: the unspoken fear, perhaps, that I might be turning into my unattrative ‘American edition’. To this I say ‘pish’ and/or ‘tosh’. I am not a handsome man, that much is obvious. But I am in the not least anxious over the size of my ears and shape of my nose.

Cover Story (part one)

Last night I dreamt that I met the President of the United States. He was sitting on a park bench in Berlin, dressed in red, reading a book. I sat down beside him and asked him what he was reading. It turned out to be my own study, Gogol to Galsworthy: A Rhapsody in G. This came as a surprise – not because I don’t think my book worthy of a President’s time, but because it looked to me like a different book entirely.

‘It’s the American edition,’ explained the President. This surprised me; as far as I am aware, there isn’t an American edition. Still, I didn’t like to doubt his word. It was barely possible to. Oh those honeyed tones of his! So what if the crimson jacket was a little on the overpowering side: the man oozed dignity. I asked him whether I could have a look. ‘Sure thing,’ he said, cracking a winning smile.

So I took the book. On the cover was a black vase, Greek in style, with an orange ‘G’ on it, sitting on blue-stained floorboards (the book, not the orange ‘G’). All very tasteful – a far cry from the English edition, which has always displeased me, however many times my wife has assured me that it ‘commands attention’. On the back cover of the President’s book, nonetheless, I was shocked to see a photograph of a most unattractive man, with fat cheeks dripping like Dali’s clocks, a nose sculpted by a clumsy toddler and ears stolen from a kangaroo. ‘The author’ read the caption.

‘This isn’t me,’ I said, handing back the book. ‘It’s the American edition’ repeated the President. I asked him to elaborate, but before he could a white horse appeared and he fell (or flew, depending on which way you look at it) through a hole in the ground. Sitting in his place was the man from the photograph: the American edition of me. I awoke with what some writers would call a scream, but which I prefer to term a throaty whimper.

More on this later.