Recent Antkind News

Holly Williams from The Observer:

Antkind is 706 pages long. It offers a maximalist satire of a contemporary America defined by fake news, corporate bullshit, vacuous pop culture and performative wokeness, but one so excessive, surreal and repetitive that it is itself tiresomely bloated and absolutely exhausting. If anything can happen without consequence, stakes are lowered. It’s absurdism ad infinitum.

Where Kaufman’s films are playfully mind-bending, they usually have real heart. But although Antkind is skippingly clever – saturated with comic allusions, puns, linguistic inventiveness and wildly unfettered imagination – it is sorely lacking characters you actually care about or any emotional narrative to cling to. (Source)

BOOOOO.

Ah well. The initial universal acclaim was bound to give way to a few negative reviews, eh. Charlie is never for everyone.

Another review! This time it's Peter Bradshaw from the Guardian:

This debut novel from the award-winning screenwriter of movie masterpieces such as Being John Malkovich and Synecdoche, New York, is funny, exhausting and very, very long. Reading it is like watching (or being) someone trying to sprint to the top of an Escher staircase.

[...] Finally Antkind comes to its crazy, hellzapocalypticpoppin ending, and this twilight of the puppet-gods dwindles into darkness, leaving me with the punchdrunk feeling I have after all Kaufman’s movies. He may be someone for whom anxiety and sadness are a personal ordeal, but he transforms them into bleak, stark, unearthly monuments to comic despair. (Source)

indieWIRE's David Ehrlich chimes in with a film reviewer's review of Antkind. It's mega-heavy on the spoilers, though, so be warned. (His verdict, if you don't want to read: he really liked it, with a handful of qualifiers.)

Kaufman’s 720-page Globster of a novel initially feels like it’s trying to split the difference between Haruki Murakami and Hollywood Elsewhere (and later flirts with the likes of Pynchon and Borges on its way toward settling down as an adventure that can only be described as Kaufmanesque). (Source)

Antkind proved too much Kaufman for Miller:

I’ve long had a weakness for obsessive, neurotic, paranoid, and comically vain narrators, but Charlie Kaufman’s overstuffed, formless first novel, Antkind, may have finally cured me of it.

[...] Yet Antkind also has flashes of wit and even beauty, often just at the point when the reader has started to wonder if Kaufman wants her to suffer as much as the benighted B.

[...] Why, then, is Antkind so often tedious when Kaufman’s films are, for the most part, entertaining and delightful? Could it be something so simple as the constraints of cinematic form, the fact that you can’t make a three-month-long film because every minute of a movie costs a lot of money, typically other people’s money? That the limitations collaborators impose on a genius can end up rescuing him from his own hopelessly dithering solipsism? It could. Other people may be hell, according to Sartre, but sometimes they can save your ass—or at least stop you from crawling up it. (Source)

Here's what I think is so far the best Antkind video interview with CK. Pulitzer-winning author Andrew Sean Greer read Antkind twice, so maybe that accounts for it. It's a fun watch with some interesting tidbits, questions we haven't heard before.

He'd probably hate hearing that his By the Book is as Kaufmanesque as you can get, but oh my god it's true. If you do not like Charlie, you will not like this. If you do like Charlie, you might like this.

What books are on your nightstand?

Not to split hairs, but I don’t have a nightstand. I’m living in a temporary place for reasons too tedious and painful to get into here. There’s not much furniture. In the bedroom, such as it is, I have only a sleeping bag and a floor lamp. There are a few books next to me (I’m currently in the sleeping bag), books I ordered for research purposes. I’m reading Toynbee’s “A Study of History” and Tsiolkovsky’s “The Will of the Universe,” although the truth is, I am having trouble focusing lately. I spend long hours staring at the old, stained mattresses in the dump outside my window, as I shelter in place in this unfamiliar apartment. There is so much unexplained in my new, small world. The strange noises emanating from my neighbors’ apartments; the constant dropping of large items on the floor above me, the clinking of hundreds of wine bottles, as the neighbors across the hall carry them daily to the trash room. The screams. (Source)

I love how the next line is the question "What’s the last great book you read?" YEAH, LET'S JUST IGNORE THE THING ABOUT THE SCREAMS.

Anyway. It all gets weirder from there, but it's a good way of giving you a little taste of the oddball humour that lies within Antkind.

Here's a quickie nutshell interview with NPR's Scott Simon. Antkind spoilerish, no huge scoops, but worth the listen--especially if you've been skipping the video interviews for lack of time.

Charlie's Chicago Humanities interview is now publicly available, yay! This is the one I wrote about the other day.

Stuart Kelly from The Scotsman? Not a fan.

it is without a shred of humanity. There are novels that feature truly dislikeable characters: Ignatius Reilly in John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy Of Dunces, Antony Lamont in Gilbert Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew, Francis Xavier Enderby in Anthony Burgess’s quartet of novels.They are all bombastic, delusional, self-pitying and egotistical. But there is pathos in these characters, whereas it would take preternatural powers to be sympathetic to B. B. is the wokest woke person that ever awoke[...]

It’s as if, without the restrictions imposed by cinema, Kaufman thinks it is his right to just chuck in any passing fancy. [...] Antkind may well be called postmodern, probably by people who use the word postmodern to make themselves seem intellectually superior at cocktail parties. (Source)

That's okay. Not everybody likes the things we like.

Good interview in the Guardian, with a couple of new nuggets.

The way Kaufman describes the process, the novel sort of grew and mutated as it went. The germ of it, he says, was that “I wanted to deal with time travel in many different forms – all of them mutually exclusive.”

[...] “I’m sort of stuck in a sublet apartment in New York. I don’t know where I’m going to end up, but it’s not my place, not my things. Not my books, you know, not my bed. I spend almost all my time in this place because, you know, there’s nowhere to go and I’m very anxious about getting ill.” And he’s writing – what else? – a script about a virus. (Source)

(Emphasis added by me.) Don't ask me what it is, I have no idea. Could be related to the project for Ryan Gosling's production company?

Another thumbs-up review, this one from the Washington Post. It's spoiler-heavy, so beware before you click through.

Kaufman, of course, is the clever one here, and he has a blast tweaking toxic masculinity, celebrity worship, political correctness, filmmaking, therapy, high art, low art and much more. Themes that have long preoccupied the writer, particularly in the films “Adaptation” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” reappear in “Antkind.” Humanity’s ever competing perceptions of reality, the unreliability of memory, the question of God’s existence and the malleable nature of storytelling are measured again and again in this novel that is long but never dull.

[...] But for all the absurd digressions and circuitous detours, “Antkind” remains propelled by Kaufman’s deep imagination, considerable writing ability and bull’s-eye wit. (Source)

Meanwhile NPR gives the book a more even-handed (and spoilerish) review:

Antkind is strange, disjointed, and obsessive. [...] You could call it a brilliant piece of metafiction or a marvel of postmodern storytelling and you'd be right — but you could also call it bloated or a flashy, eloquent mess and you'd also be right. Ah, subjectivity.

[...] The one thing that can be said about this book with certainty is that Kaufman is a master of language. He shows this time and again throughout the 750-page reading experience that is Antkind. His sense of humor injects many passages with a unique electricity that makes them memorable and the characters, cultural products, and events he's created speak volumes about his seemingly endless imagination.

[...] Antkind is a bit overstuffed, but we all overstuff ourselves at a buffet once in a while. What matters is this is that this is an entertaining, unapologetic book that never steers clear of — well, anything. And watching Kaufman recklessly throw himself at everything with a backpack full of words is a sight to behold. (Source)

Matthew Specktor really likes it:

It must be said that, by any standard — and even for someone who remembers the shock of Kaufman’s work when it was passed around Hollywood as unproduced samizdat in the 1990s — “Antkind” is an exceptionally strange book. It is also an exceptionally good one, and though one is tempted to reach for the roster of comparably gnostic novels by contemporary (-ish) writers — not just Wallace, but Pynchon, obviously; John Barth; Joshua Cohen, perhaps — such comparisons inevitably collapse. (Source)

Greta Johnsen (Nerdette Podcast) interviewed Charlie for the Chicago Humanities Festival, and your resident BCK guy was lucky enough to catch it. (Thanks to Stephanie and Chicago Humanities Fest.!)

Charlie seemed relaxed and happy during the fairly informal chat, so that was good to see. The focus was on Antkind, of course, but a bunch of areas were covered. Some highlights and stuff worth noting:

Future Projects:

- Charlie is currently reading Yoko Ogawa's 1994 novel The Memory Police, because he's been offered the job of adapting it. (This does not mean he'll take the job, and it doesn't mean it'll definitely hit cinemas, but still.)

- He has "a few jobs that I'm working on right now."

- He's already considering writing a second novel; has some stuff percolating, and was going to spend the evening post-interview mulling it over. There are "a couple of areas that I want to explore."

- Charlie has an interest in doing "not a podcast, but something like a radio serial" and he's an admirer of Joe Frank's work, calling it "evocative."

Antkind:

- Kaufman was given essentially carte blanche to write whatever he wanted. "They basically said 'Do what you want' and I gave them some vague ideas, some of the ones I just told you, and a couple more, and then they said 'That's fine.'"

- It took around 5 and a half years to write, while he was working on other things simultaneously. He tried writing it in the 3rd person, and the 2nd, before settling on first person because he liked writing in Rosenberg's voice. When he started out, Charlie intended to write a serious novel, eventually turning instead to a comedic one. He has no real writing routine--no daily goal, no set "writing time"--but in the last days and months of writing Antkind, he'd go to a coffee shop when it opened at 6:30 and write for 3-4 hours, getting a lot done.

- There are no real deleted scenes lying in a drawer. Everything he came up with ended up in the novel, in one form or another.

- There was a lot of research involved in writing the book, given the number of cultural and historical references that appear in Antkind. Sometimes Kaufman would serendipitously encounter things--like the Kentucky Meat Showers, which played directly to a recurring motif in the book--and in they'd go.

- When Charlie started the novel, he says he was "kind of interested in talking back to film critics," citing the odd one-way relationship that usually exists between artists and their critics--critics can talk about you, but you generally don't get to talk about them. Charlie cites artist/critic Robert Henri as saying that critics "should never write about anything that they don't love." Says CK: "…and I can't figure out the hole in that stement.[…] It seems to me that what criticism, for me, when it's helpful, is that when I read it it opens me up to something that this person understands in a way that I don't yet. There's no point in telling me 'This is awful, you'll hate it.' Unless I'm trying to figure out what movie to go to on Friday night, I don't need that." He prefers criticism as more of an art form and a means of imparting why you enjoy something. He spoke of Mark Rothko's art; Kaufman says he isn't normally a fan of expressionist art, but Rothko's leaves him feeling "really affected, really moved." Kaufman's father--an artist himself--never liked Rothko's work, and Kaufman wishes he'd had the vocabulary to explain to his dad why he likes Rothko.

- On that note, Charlie is no fan of ranking things. He finds it a "Bizarre, aggressive and wrongheaded way to look at a piece of work. It moves you, it doesn't move you, why do you need to compare it to some other piece of work?" Rosenberg, the lead character in Antkind, is a big fan of ranking things.

- Kaufman: "I disagree with most of what he [Rosenberg] says. He's not based on me, he's based on people that I've known," and he remarks that the book isn't used just as an exploration of critics but of a general type of person he has known.

- Though he set out to write an unfilmable book about an impossible movie, now Charlie is thinking Antkind could probably be turned into a limited series on TV. Having said that, he's not sure how he'd do it, because there are many ambiguous things in the novel which you'd have to make concrete on the screen. Which is why he'll only do it if he can direct it, assuming that he comes up with a way it can be done.

Other stuff:

- Charlie thinks his best solution for writers' block is just to let things percolate. If you do get blocked "I feel like one has to accept that that's part of one's process." He feels bad for wasting lots of time, but adds that there's value to it--or tells himself there's value to it--because it leads sometimes to solutions. Even if it feels like you're not working, your subconscious is often doing stuff behind the scenes. Charlie has attended artist retreats a couple times, which he finds very helpful for focusing on the work.

- He doesn't listen to music when he writes.

- He sometimes writes by hand before transcribing his work to computer; the process of transcribing it leads to him writing essentially a second draft, because he makes changes as he transcribes.

- Charlie has become a vegetarian, thanks largely to living with his daughter for a bit in New York. When cooking, they would sometimes dance in front of the kitchen windows.

- Though it might appear Charlie is interested in puppets (Being John Malkovich, Anomalisa, the puppets in Antkind) he is not in fact unusually interested in puppets. Anomalisa just happened to involve animated dolls because the owner of an animation studio wanted to make the film, and Antkind involves stop-motion animation only because Charlie needed a way for the character of Ingo to make a movie entirely alone, without anybody else seeing it.

- Charlie is fine(ish) with the notion of sticking to fairly similar themes and ideas from film to film. (i.e. Kaufman is cool with being Kaufmanesque.) He's not interested in writing things just to prove to people that he can write them. That approach is too "outwardly directed" for him.

I THINK THAT'S EVERYTHING. If the video is published publicly at all, I'll be sure to stick it on the site.

Thanks again to Stephanie and CHF.

Here's another online event: Charlie in conversation with Entertainment Weekly's David Canfield.

Join Oscar-winning screenwriter Charlie Kaufman—writer of Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind—for a conversation about his iconoclastic career in film and his acclaimed debut novel, Antkind.

Earning comparisons to the likes of Thomas Pynchon, Antkind is both brilliant satire and a mind-expanding reflection on art—Kaufman proves himself to be an audaciously inventive, deeply entertaining novelist. Watch him talk to Entertainment Weekly’s David Canfield about why he chose to put the story in a book, what screenwriting has taught him about writing fiction, the latest scoop on his upcoming film projects, and much more.

$10 a ticket! That's pretty great.

Here's a bit of a downer profile about Charlie for ya.

“I feel like I’ve changed a lot in the last 10 years,” he said. “I don’t have the same kind of bitterness or ambition. I don’t feel the frustration of not being able to force my stuff to be made.”

[...] I asked him how he looks back on those days. He won an Oscar for “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” one of his four nominations; surely that was a great moment. But no. “It felt like nothing,” he said. “It did nothing.”

[...] For a while, as the conversation advanced beyond the polite ask-and-answer rhythm of most interviews, we talked about how fame and critical regard had surprised him. His nervy, melancholy time in quarantine seemed to hover in his silences. At last he found the words for what he wanted to say about success: “It solves nothing whatsoever.”

It was a bracingly definite answer from such a careful thinker. [It was also] the first time that he’d sounded, to me, like the specific sort of person who discovers that there are no answers and then sets out to look for them alone: a novelist.(Source)

Bonus: in an article the other day, Spike Jonze compared Charlie to Kanye West. In this one, Charlie gets compared to Gwyneth Paltrow.