Kudos Read Online Free PDF Page B

and at greater or lesser length; or to put it another way, you knew where you were only once you had arrived. I didn’t doubt that it was for such metaphors that the architect had won his numerous prizes, but it rested on the assumption that people lacked problems of their own, or at the very least had nothing better to do with their time. My publisher widened his eyes.
    â€˜For that matter,’ he said, ‘you could say the same thing about novels.’
    He was a delicate-looking man, dapperly dressed in a blazer and striped shirt, with neatly slicked-back flaxen hair and angular silver-framed glasses and a smell of ironing and cologne. His slightness made him seem even younger than he was. He was very fair-skinned – the flesh at the cuffs and collar of his shirt was so white and unmarked it almost looked like plastic – and his pale-pink mouth was as small and soft as a child’s mouth. He had been occupying his senior position in the firm for eighteen months, he said now: before that, he had worked on the marketing side of things. Certain people had expressed surprise that one of the country’s oldest and most distinguished literary houses should be put in the handsof a thirty-five-year-old salesman, but since he had taken it in that short time from the brink of insolvency to what looked set to be the most profitable year in the company’s long history, the critics had one by one fallen silent.
    He wore a faint smile while he spoke, and his light-blue eyes behind their glasses glittered with the diffidence of light glittering on water.
    â€˜For example,’ he said, ‘only a year ago I would not have been able to sanction our investment in a work such as this one.’ He held up the book with my photograph on it, in what was either accusation or triumph. ‘The sad fact,’ he said, ‘is that in that period even some of our most illustrious writers found themselves for the first time in decades having their manuscripts rejected. There was a great groaning,’ he said, smiling, ‘as of afflicted beasts bellowing from the tar pit. Certain people could not accept that what they regarded as their entitlement to have whatever they chose to write – whether or not others wished to read it – put into print year after year had been questioned. Unfortunately,’ he said, lightly touching the thin steel frame of his glasses, ‘there was in some cases a loss of courtesy and control.’
    I asked him what, besides the jettisoning of unprofitable literary novels, explained the company’s return to solvency, and his smile widened.
    â€˜Our biggest success has been with Sudoku,’ he said. ‘In fact I have become quite addicted to it myself. Obviously there was an outcry that we should be sullying our hands in that way. But I found that it died down quite quickly, once those less popular authors realised it meant their work could be published again.’
    What all publishers were looking for, he went on – the holy grail, as it were, of the modern literary scene – were those writers who performed well in the market while maintaining a connection to the values of literature; in other words, who wrote books that people could actually enjoy without feeling in the least demeaned by being seen reading them. He had managed to secure quite a collection of those writers, and apart from the Sudoku and the popular thrillers, they were chiefly responsible for the upswing in the company’s fortunes.
    I said I was struck by his observation that the preservation of literary values – in however nominal a form – was a factor in the achievement of popular success. In England, I said, people liked to live in old houses that had been thoroughly refurbished with modern conveniences, and I wondered whether the same principle might be applied to novels; and if so, whether the blunting or loss of our own instinct for beauty was responsible for it.