John Updike was 50 when he won the Pulitzer for Rabbit is Rich.

Maybe, that is, if you use major literary prizes as a sign of a “great book.” I went through the last twenty-five years of Man Booker and Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winners. The average winner was 50 years old when the prize was awarded. The vast majority (using the standard deviation, if you are a statistics freak) was between 40 and 60. The youngest was Ben Okri, who was a 32 year-old babe in the woods when The Famished Road won the Booker in 1991. The oldest was Cormac McCarthy, who was 74 in 2007 when he won the Pulitzer for The Road.

So we have established that most winners of major literary prizes are older. I can think of a couple possible explanations for this.

Although these prizes are supposed to be for a specific book (unlike the Nobel Prize for Literature), it is possible that the judges are influenced by the writer’s career and body of work. I call this the Led Zeppelin effect.

The Grammy Awards completely ignored Led Zeppelin during the band’s career. In 1969, the year Led Zeppelin I and II were released, the Grammy’s Album of the Year went to Glen Campbell. I kid you not.

In 1980, when Zeppelin broke up, the judges belatedly realised that they had ignored some of the greatest musicians in a generation and looked like incompetent idiots. They finally made up for it in 1999, by giving former Zeppelin bandmates Jimmy Page and Robert Plant an award for a rather forgettable song. It was an open secret why Page and Plant won. Perhaps some of these literary prizes are given, maybe even unconsciously, the same way.

It is also conceivable that writing, unlike some other artistic forms, improves with time. A writer needs decades of experience, both as a human being and as a writer, before she can publish something great. If you have read any of Kurt Vonnegut’s very early stuff that has been popping up after he died, you know what I mean. There was a reason why this wasn’t published in his lifetime, literary executors.

There could be another reason why writers improve with age. This comes from recently departed genius Carlos Fuentes:

When your life is half over, I think you have to see the face of death in order to start writing seriously. There are people who see the end quickly, like Rimbaud. When you start seeing it, you feel you have to rescue these things. Death is the great Maecenas, Death is the great angel of writing. You must write because you are not going to live any more.

You know, he might have something there.

But I saw good reviews for his 11.22.63, a time-travel novel about someone trying to stop President Kennedy’s assassination. When I started reading, King seemed much better than I remembered, and I was surprised. It felt like meeting an old girlfriend you had dumped because your relationship wasn’t going anywhere, only to discover she was doing much, much better without you.

Unfortunately, by the middle of the book I was bogged down. The plot had stopped developing and apparently the middle third of the book is devoted to rather weak characterisation. As I struggled, an important day came closer and closer. It was a day I had long been waiting for: the release of Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies, the sequel to Wolf Hall, which deservedly won the Man Booker.

Finally, I abandoned King with a twinge of guilt. It was like I had walked out in the middle of an awkward date because I saw a supermodel at the next table eating alone.

But, damn, it is hard to regret forsaking King, because Mantel is an amazing supermodel. She’s intelligent, funny, and so beautiful as to make the heart ache. There are many, many good writers out there, but there are very few that send me into paroxysm of joy just to read their prose. Mantel is one.

At home in his city house at Austin Friars, his portrait broods on the wall; he is wrapped in wool and fur, his hand clenched around a document as if he were throttling it. Hans had pushed a table back to trap him and said, Thomas, you mustn’t laugh; and they had proceeded on that basis, Hans humming as he worked and he staring ferociously into the middle distance. When he saw the portrait finished he had said, ‘Christ, I look like a murderer’; and his son Gregory said, didn’t you know?

Thomas Cromwell. Portrait by Hans Holbein.

In my youth I would never have dreamt of abandoning a book. I stuck it through to the end, no matter how terrible the date. I don’t do that anymore. There are so many good potential partners out there it seems silly to see a bad one through to the end.

So I’m sorry for walking out in the middle of the main course, Stephen, but hopefully you understand. I love remembering our good times, like The Stand and Pet Semetary. Who knows? Maybe I’ll ask you out again someday. But right now I need to be with Hilary.

The soon-to-be-changed sentence in Swedish.

Mohamed 2.0 is being translated into Finnish and Swedish, with an expected publication date of September. Swedish is particularly important: not only is Schildts & Söderströms primarily a Swedish publisher, but the Swedish language plays a vital role in the story of the book. Swedish is almost like one of those Greek gods in the Illiad, intricately influencing events from a distance or, sometimes, in person.

When Stephan Backholm was in the process of translating, we often talked about various aspects of transforming the book into Swedish. Sometimes it was difficult to find the right word to use. For instance, the verb “to disrupt,” along with its various permutations as a noun or adjective, has a variety of meanings in the English language. The Oxford English Dictionary has seven possible definitions, and the situation is similar for Swedish, so we had to carefully determine what I meant in English, and what word to use to express that concept in Swedish.

This process was continued recently when my literary director Tapani Ritamäki and I had a long drive together. We used that time to talk about the translation. He had printed out the first draft and I flipped through it as he drove, finding each of his notes. He had about twenty or thirty questions about particular words or phrases in English, so he quizzed me on what, exactly, I had meant and which, exactly, Swedish words to use.

But we also used the opportunity to make a few changes. As everyone knows, translations are never perfect. Sometimes the precise meaning of a word in one language has no direct twin in another. “Lost in translation” has become a cliché. Yet what is not so well known is that sometimes a translation differs from the original on purpose.

The English version of Mohamed 2.0 was released in a rush, because Muxlim.com had been taken offline and the world wanted to know what in the world was going on. Stories were popping up in newspapers, online forums were musing, and the small Finnish start-up community was rife with rumours. There was a compelling commercial need to get the book out as fast as possible. (I actually received an email from Tapani, saying “Have it done by next Monday.” I was hyperventilating, as you can imagine, when the next email came: “Scratch that. Make it this Friday.”

Anyway, there was one thing that made it into print that might not have gotten in as is, if we had a bit more time to consider it. It was a single sentence, referring to the troubles between Mohamed El-Fatatry and his Muxlim co-founder Pietari Päivänen. In the English version, the line reads like this:

He [Mohamed] was alone and vulnerable, and felt betrayed by the person with whom he was closest, Pietari.

Tapani didn’t like this. As we were riding in the car, he challenged me about this sentence.

“What about Mohamed’s wife?” he asked. “This sentence is too absolute: Pietari was the closest person to him.”

“I know exactly what you are talking about. I thought about the same thing,” I answered. “But this is almost a direct quotation from Mohamed. It is possible that he meant ‘everyone except my wife and family,’ but it is also possible that he really did mean Pietari was the most important person in his life at that moment. We know that his devotion to Muxlim negatively impacted his personal relationships. Since this is exactly what Mohamed said, I think we should leave it exactly as it is: ambiguous. Let the reader decide.”

“No, this is a bad ambiguity,” Tapani argued. “If we leave it like this, it makes you look bad for writing it and makes me look bad for leaving it. You’re the writer, so you have to make the call. Did Mohamed really mean his business partner was the most important person in his life, or did he mean he was the most important person in his business?”

I sat and thought about it as we slowly drove north into the Finnish interior, with naked birch trees sliding by the window. I had talked to Mohamed’s father and mother, as well as his former partner Pietari. I had spent untold hours talking to him about them. If I had to make a decision, it was an easy one. No one can be 100 per cent sure what goes on inside someone else’s head, but I could make a decision with confidence. I know how important Muxlim is to Mohamed, but I also know how important his family is to him.

“Mohamed meant that Pietari was closest to him only in the business,” I answered. “He didn’t mean that Pietari was the closest person to him in his life.”

“Okay, then,” said the relieved Tapani. “Then we’ll add a phrase to reflect that in the Swedish translation.”

After we decided what phrase to use, I was left to think about it. Now someone who only reads the Swedish version will not get that taste of uncertainty present in the English. But this isn’t a bad thing. Tapani was right, of course: that uncertainty could perplex and annoy the reader, so it was better to be clear.

“Suomenruotsalainen kustantamo on julkaissut, englanniksi, upean kirjan kenen tahansa startup- yrittäjän tai bisnesenkelin oppimateriaaliksi.

Meille muille Mohamed 2.0 toimii laatuviihteenä, jonka draamaa ei Hollywoodissakaan olisi osattu keksiä. Muxlimin tarina saattoi olla loistelias epäonnistuminen, mutta David J. Cordin kirja on ihannoivuudessaankin pelkästään loistelias.”
Kauppalehti, 23 Huhtikuu 2012

A rough translation into English:
“The Finnish-Swedish publishing house has published, in English, a great book for any start-up entrepreneur or business angel as an educational resource.

For the rest of us Mohamed 2.0 works as quality entertainment, drama that even Hollywood would never have come up with. Muxlim’s story might have been a glorious failure, but David J. Cord’s book is, even in its idealising, simply brilliant.”
Kauppalehti, 23 April 2012

Från Muxlim till drömfabriken
Hufvudstadbladet

The tale of Mohamed
Helsinki Times

Writing a path to Mohamed
Six Degrees

“Charting the rise and fall of online Muslim social network Muxlim, here we have the story of Mohamed El-Fatatry’s dream to connect Muslims around the world. Extremely readable, author David J. Cord’s prose is punctuated by vivid imagrey as he draws on many of the major plaers involved to hear their perspectives.”
James O’Sullivan, Six Degrees

If you see any others, please let me know!

A simply stunning piece of work, one of the most intimate books I have ever read. Translated from Norwegian.

Diego Marani’s New Finnish Grammar

I’ve just received it, but the story is compelling: a mysterious man with amnesia shows up in Italy during WWII with a Finnish name on his clothes. Translated from Italian.

D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover

A good book, but I feel that its status as a “classic” is due more to its 1960 obscenity trial than the writing.

Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!

This was one of the titles on the short list for the aborted Pultizer Prize in Fiction this year.

Mohmaed 2.0: störningsmanifest

Yes, this is the Swedish version of the book. It hasn’t been released yet. The link is to the English version.

Nokia’s Quarterly Report

Poor, poor Nokia. Reading their quarterly reports is like hearing what a doctor has to say about a cancer patient’s periodic chemo sessions.

Interview with David J. Cord – “Mohamed 2.0: Disruption Manifesto”

Verovaroilla tuettu muslimisivusto teki miljoonatappiot ja lopetti toimintansa

Mohamed El-Fatatry has issued a response on his blog:

Setting the Record Straight

Antti Vilpponen at Arctic Startup has commented upon the controversy:

Muxlim Debate A Great Reminder – Startups Far From Mainstream

And I gave a brief response regarding taxpayer money going to start-up companies in my weekly Helsinki Times column (note that a subscription is required):

Your taxes and Muxlim

David J Cord

Mohamed 2.0 Disruption Manifesto (Söderströms) Mohamed Al-Fatatry, egyptier uppvuxen i Arabemiraten, kom till Finland för att studera teknologi. Som 22-åring skapade han Muxlim, “the largest Muslim lifestyle network in the wordl”. Boken utges på engelska.

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