Category: books

He heard air-raid sirens wailing in the cities – those human fiends made a worse racket than the devil himself – but now they would get a taste of some real doomsday music.

Well, that was just fucking strange.

It’s hard to describe without blowing the experience for someone else. It’s about myths and legends, about mythologising, about fairytales and bedtime stories. The structure is a take on the Golem story, beginning during the Second World War, as an apparent alchemist is smuggled across Europe towards Iceland, carrying the raw clay of the thing that will change the world. And what a world. Time is murdered. Ghosts hang out on street corners and show you their death wounds.

the man in the bed gave the impression of being a half-mad skeleton who’d wrapped himself in skin for the sake of appearances

It’s a funny book, I have to say. Which is a useful anchor in what is otherwise a mad kaleidoscope of a thing, a spin of lies and grief and insanity and the supernatural. The third section massively reframes the first two parts and you find out what the book is really (mostly, kind of) about, and it’s both desperately sad and wonderfully soaring.

It is, as much as anything, a performance – Sjon showing what he can do when he tosses the rulebook and mixes styles and text formats and literary antecedents in an attempt to gather up Story (or perhaps fairy story) as a whole, and in fact to gather his own life as a whole, reaching across sixty years (or millennia) to snatch up every last scrap and stuff it in.

I thought it was amazing, and it held me to the end.

(One caveat: a quarter of the way in, there’s a short rape scene that threw me out of the book for a few days.)

CODEX 1962, Sjon (UK) (US+)

CONNECTED:

• THE WHISPERING MUSE, Sjon
• NOSFERATU (2024)

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Somewhere a window smashes; I hear the laughter of the larger shards and the sniggering of the splinters.

Rilke’s only novel, and you can kind of see why he was never troubled for another one. The first half is electric:

The woman was startled and started out of herself too rapidly and roughly, so that her face was left in her hands. I could see it lying in them, the hollow mould of it. It cost me an indescribable effort to keep my gaze on those hands and not look at what had been torn from out of them. I was appalled to see the inside of the facial mask, but I was far more terrified still of seeing a head bare and stripped of its face.

It’s the kind of fragmentary writing I love, presented as the entries in two notebooks of a man living in Paris at the turn of the 20th Century, town becoming city, mechanisation obliterating the past, people living closer together in greater numbers than ever before. Not a place for a sensitive young man from foreign countryside.

There is a creature that is perfectly harmless if you set eyes on it; you hardly notice it and instantly forget it. Should it somehow get into your ears unseen, however, it begins to evolve, and hatches, as it were; there have been cases where it made its way into the brain and flourished there, with devastating effect, like the pneumococci in dogs that enter by the nose. This creature is your neighbour.

He hates it. He is poor, lonely and becoming mentally ill. The prose lurches between beauty and disgust on a Baudelairean scale:

the laughter oozed from their mouths like pus from open wounds.

It’s inventive, peculiar, beautifully observed and reported. And then, around halfway through, the book shifts to recollection of his past, reaches for something strange and numinous, doesn’t quite grasp it, and descends into dull childhood reminiscence – nobody finds childhood that interesting except you -and a sort of “pale boy on fainting couch” whimper.

But that first half – fantastic stuff.

Here was the dark myth he left void, prepared against his death.

THE NOTEBOOKS OF MALTE LAURIDS BRIGGE, Rainer Maria Rilke (UK) (US+).

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I sometimes try to imagine what future historians will say about us. They’ll be able to sum up modern man in a single sentence: he fornicated and read the papers.

As noted previously, I use the winter to fill in the gaps in my reading, of which there are many because I am an uneducated oik. And so, THE FALL by Albert Camus, which was more entertaining than I expected.

In the internal monologue, ‘please accept my sympathy’ comes right before ‘now let’s get on with something else’. It’s the emotion felt by a prime minister or company chairman: you get it cheap after some disaster.

A tourist in Amsterdam makes the acquaintance of Clemence, once a Parisian lawyer, now in the self-selected job of “judge-penitent” in the seedy bars. Over several days, Clemence tells the tourist his life story, in order to reveal what “judge-penitent” really means. Over the course of these monologues, Clemence gleefully shows himself as an emotional monster, a serial killer of hope and joy, a cheerfully sociopathic mindfucker. One might imagine Bret Easton Ellis read it in the years before he conceived AMERICAN PSYCHO.

It’s rather brilliant and a fun, chilling read, if somewhat quaint and mannered. I wonder if even at the time it must have seemed somewhat genteel next to, say, Simenon’s romans durs.

(though it also occurs to me that it can also be read as a final middle finger to Sartre)

At least, you must have heard of the spitting cell that one nation thought up recently to prove that it was the greatest on earth? A brick box in which the prisoner is standing upright, but cannot move. The solid door that seals him into his cement shell stops at the level of his chin, so all that can be seen is his face, on which each warder spits copiously. The prisoner, cramped in his cell, cannot wipe himself, even though he is allowed to shut his eyes. Well, that, my good fellow, is an invention of man. They did not need God to dream up that little masterpiece.

THE FALL, Albert Camus (UK) (US+)

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A pox upon you. You’re a pack of mudheaded bigots who loathe excellence on principle and though one might cordially wish you all in hell still you wont go. You and your nauseating get. Granted, if everyone I wished in hell were actually there they’d have to send to Newcastle for supplementary fuel. I’ve made ten thousand concessions to your ratfuck culture and you’ve yet to make the first to mine.

THE PASSENGER is unexpected. It’s the funniest McCarthy I’ve ever read – like he sat down, cracked his knuckle and said, fuck you, Pynchon, DeLillo and all your crowd, this is the real music. The book is, by turns, fucking hilarious, tragic, scary, fascinating, heartbreaking and just plain weird.

The Kid was at the window looking out at the raw cold. The snowy park and the frozen lake beyond. Well, he said. Life. What can you say? It’s not for everybody.

Bobby Western is a deep sea diver who’s hired to survey a sunken passenger plane. When he gets inside it, he finds one passenger and the plane’s navigational console missing. You think you’re getting a conspiracy thriller. You’re not. The missing person and the missing navigational gear are the metaphor. This is the story of a man who lost his way, and a man who was in love with his sister: a genius mathematician with severe mental issues who killed herself. This is all sometime in the early 1980s.

Just his daily list of things to do. Pick up cleaning. Call mother. Fuck chickens.

Occasionally, conspiracy thriller tropes rise – and, strangely, whenever they do, the book loses juice. I have seen that people were unhappy that this is essentially a plotless novel. Do not listen to them. This is a book about spooky action at a distance. It is a book of encounters and conversations on a dizzying array of topics, and those conversations are so compelling that you won’t want a conventional plot.

Sometimes you get the sense that McCarthy believes the Twentieth Century actually ended in the 1980s and we just didn’t notice.

I should also note that the Western’s father worked with Oppenheimer on the bomb, and that plays into a lot of what happens.

They carried their skin bundled up in their arms before them like wash that it not drag in the rubble and ash and they passed one another mindlessly on their mindless journeyings over the smoking afterground, the sighted no better served than the blind.

It is intercut with the experiences of his lost sister, Alice, with her cohort of recurring hallucinations. These two threads tangle together towards the end in an entirely surprising way. It is, in lots of ways, a novel of the unexpected, but also one of circularity and inevitability. It had me riveted, and I think it’s a small final triumph, the perfect descending note at the end of an amazing life.

THE PASSENGER, Cormac McCarthy (UK) (US+)

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During victory marches, captured enemy warriors walked along as proudly as they could – death by sacrifice guaranteed prosperity in the afterlife – but with their hearts in their throats: dying on the sacrifice stone was no picnic, and before getting there they sometimes had to spend months in a cage in the yard of the warrior who had captured them. With white-lipped stares, their eyes darting reflexively here and there, they would watch the crowd waving their little flags and tossing flowers, imagining that eventually one of these bastards would buy a strip of warrior arm or loin in the marketplace to eat in magic tomato salsa on a tostada.

Hernan Cortes and his ragged little conquistadore army shamble into Tenoxtitlan in the year 1519, to discover an alien world ruled over by Moctezuma, a tired and hallucinogen-addled king of a culture run on blood and drugs.

…the reason his office had invested so much in these rituals was that the Tenochca believed in them – or pretended to believe because they brought wealth to Tenoxtitlan, gave the world solidity, and permitted the flow of magic mushrooms and vision-inducing cacti that made life tolerable in a city where everyone worked without cease.

Sometime a little too meta for its own good – the foreword seems to go on forever and it’s too gleeful in pulling its own ending apart – but when it’s focused, which is much of the book, it’s great. These last days of the Aztec Empire are imagined in dirty detail, an experimental meta-historical fiction that roams across many different aspects of the culture and the players, giving a good deal of depth and grain to its lessons.

The priests did as they liked – Moctezuma had given them too much power – and now they could scarcely put two and two together, afflicted with the shakes from excess consumption of leg of sacrificial victim, and high as kites from stuffing themselves with mushrooms, cacti and magic tomatoes.

It does frequently go nuts, by the way. This is one of the moments where the metaness works:

I love this room, said Moctezuma, you can’t imagine how I miss being a priest. Where there were splotches of blood, he saw sprays of flowers. The withered fingers of the hands of great warriors sacrificed during the year’s festivals swayed pleasingly like the branches of a small tree to the beat of some music he couldn’t place, though in a possible future we would have recognised it. It was T. Rex’s ‘Monolith’.

Don’t think you know how it ends – it wanders a little into alternate history possibilities at a couple of points, but the author sets things up so his story-within-the-story both lands, and lands feasibly enough to be pleasing.

By turns deeply interesting, really funny and absolutely fucking chilling, this is a real ride of a book. Don’t worry too much about the fake foreword thing – the book is careful enough in its writing that you won’t miss much by just skimming it and getting on to the human meat of the book.

YOU DREAMED OF EMPIRES, Álvaro Enrigue (UK) (US+)

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