a writer's notebook
Laszlo Krasznahorkai has won the Nobel Prize in Literature today, proving that the arc of the universe does sometimes bend towards justice. I’ve made various notes about his work over the years here, and here are some of them:
CHOKEPOINTS by Edward Fishman was really bloody good. It’s the story of how the US began to develop and deploy economic weapons – identifying chokepoints in other countries’ economies and strangling them. They did it to Iran, for example, and it worked really well. Economic weapons were very powerful warfighting tools right up until Putin went all the way into Ukraine.
…the Russian government underestimated the severity of the sanctions it would face. And deterrence can’t work if your adversary underestimates your ability or willingness to act.
if it’s true that sanctions could never have deterred Putin, the West would have been better served by weakening Russia’s economy as much as possible before the invasion. The G7’s costliest error was to defer serious discussion of oil sanctions until after the war began, at which point it took nearly ten months to implement the price cap and the EU oil embargo.
And now we’re in a multipolar world again, deglobalising, and these weapons are going to stop working. The book is a wonderfully readable primer on economic weapons, where they came from, and where we’re heading now that they’ve been used.
We don’t yet know when the Age of Economic Warfare will end, but we can envision how. The trade-offs facing policymakers in Washington, Beijing, Brussels, and Moscow can be thought of as an impossible trinity consisting of economic interdependence, economic security, and geopolitical competition. Any two of these can coexist but not all three.
Don’t be put off by the list of acronyms in the front. I didn’t have to refer to it once, because Fishman takes pains all the way through to keep clarity and context. It is a really well written book, very readable, very well structured, very recommended.
CHOKEPOINTS, Edward Fishman (UK) (US+)
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I got this a full year ago and apparently didn’t note it here. I picked it up from the LRB Bookshop, and it’s sold out now, but I imagine copies are floating around out there.
A unique tribute to a remarkable writer, film-maker and walker, in an edition of only 400 numbered copies – each signed by Iain Sinclair – this 192 page A4 illustrated publication features over 170 contributors, including Peter Ackroyd, Caroline Bergvall, Keggie Carew, William Gibson, Xiaolu Guo, Philip Hoare, Toby Jones, Stewart Lee, Esther Leslie, Rachel Lichtenstein, Robert Macfarlane, Jonathan Meades, Dave McKean, Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore, J.H. Prynne, Denise Riley and Marina Warner.
Featuring original essays, poems, images, letters and reflection from writers, artists, musicians, publishers, friends, critics, booksellers and readers, it is not only a celebration of a unique body of work but also a de-facto history of the last 60 years in experimental literature and culture.
I’m sure much to his horror, Iain Sinclair has become a British cultural touchstone. I remember discovering WHITE CHAPPELL, SCARLET TRACINGS around the age of 19 and being knocked flat by the thing. You have to remember, I’ve spent most of my life living an hour from London, and half my family came from the East End, and so Sinclair’s London rites and quests spoke very directly to the mists of my history.
Iain is a British writer, documentarist, film maker, poet, flaneur, metropolitan prophet and urban shaman, keeper of lost cultures and futurologist.
The son of a Welsh GP, Iain studied in Dublin before moving to London with his wife. His early work was self-published, and he worked as a teacher and labourer while researching occult aspects of the city’s past.
If you’ve read the entire LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN cycle, you’ve met Sinclair – he is Norton, the prisoner-ghost of London. His influence stretches across all the back streets of the London-adjacent writers’ work and all who look for magic in the urban ancient.
Of his later work, I would also recommend AMERICAN SMOKE, which takes him out of London, much to his benefit.
Liz Truss’ chief of staff, Mark Fullbrook, had contacted me about my work on how to characterize and optimize successful premierships. Here, after forty years of writing about Prime Ministers, was my first opportunity actually to shape a premiership. To my dismay and discomfort, she took almost all of my advice on board, by design or, almost certainly, by accident.
Sir Anthony Seldon, be warned, comes off as something of an arrogant prick in the foreword. He has a long and storied reputation as a historian, educator and author, and so can be forgiven some of his tone due to his achievements, which include several best-selling books about successive British Prime Ministers. This is his book on Liz Truss’ time in Number 10, and I find this book’s title delicious.
At the conclusion of one meeting, towards the end of August, Hope passed a note to a senior Cabinet Office official: ‘No way you can do this politically. It would mean not hitting the 20k increase to the police force, massive real terms cuts to the NHS, breaking the “triple lock” on pensions, not delivering on the AUKUS pact [trilateral security agreement with the USA and Australia], schools falling in, the Defence Secretary and Home Secretary resigning.’ For good measure, he added, ‘It’s f**king mental.’
It is a mildly venal and painfully hard look at Liz Truss’ forty-odd days as a disaster of a Prime Minister and all the things she could have done differently. In many ways, she was hobbled from the start, by events and, in common with Rishi Sunak, all the charisma and political acumen of a lumpfish. But it’s not unfair to say she made the worst possible fist of it, and this little knife of a book probes into all the ways she fucked it up.
Seldon makes attempts to be fair, or at least empathetic, but, um..
Placing the spotlight on her personal journey up from comprehensive school, in contrast to rich public schoolboy Sunak, invited a focus on her personality and intellect, neither of which she was capable of sustaining.
It’s an illuminating, slightly gossipy book, exhaustively sourced and probably a very fitting capstone for the radioactive dump of her brief reign.
HOW NOT TO BE PRIME MINISTER (UK) (US+)
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He seemed almost like he was doing his best impression of the way a regular human being walked, but having never seen one before.
Labutut’s recent speciality is fanciful fictional biographies of real scientists. He very much bends the boundaries between novel, essay, reportage and invention, and, as in his previous book, WHEN WE CEASE TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD, you didn’t always know which was which and what was happening. It was an excellent book.
This one zeroes in on John von Neumann, and is told in a series of statements by the people who knew him. All of which is invented, although the bare biographical elements and timeline are true. Like I said: a fictional biography. And it’s just brilliant.
Von Neumann was one of the scientific/mathematical prodigies of the 20th Century, with a deeply conflicted legacy – initiating our digital world, but using those tools to ensure the hydrogen bomb worked. And the device he used to do that, he named the Mathematical Analyzer Numerical Integrator and Automatic Computer. The MANIAC. And a maniac is how the genius von Neumann is presented – an alien child.
Superbly written – each chapter is its own little story of him, and some of them are fully eerie. Very recommended.
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He secured the entrance of the path from the highway to the forest with a so-called Selbstschuss consisting of two fire-arms with reversed locks aimed horizontally at each other, affixed at chest height in a bush on each side of the path, with the triggers connected by a length of strong, transparent fishing line, so that when someone unsuspecting intended to turn into the woods and reached and triggered the line the Mannlichers would go off and the victim would execute himself. This “Selbstschuss” was originally used for big game, primarily bears, but of course Herman had other targets in mind.
A slim collection of three stories. The first, THE LAST WOLF, is one of old Laszlo’s single endless sentence jobs, played primarily for laughs and cringe through the first half, and then descending into his regular trick of using that form to inform a story of compulsion and obsession. There’s a tender little idea at the end of it.
The love of animals is the one true love in which one is never disappointed.
The last two stories are in fact the same story told from two different perspectives, thematically related to THE LAST WOLF, combining to create something of a cautionary tale about solitude, self-mythology, gossip and legend.
More of a curiosity than an essential Krasznahorkai, but time spent reading him is never wasted.
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They offered tribute to strangeness because it was strangeness that they appreciated most in the world when they were alive.
A long short story, good for a single sitting. A professor who’s been studying an ancient Irish stone tomb is returning to it just before Christmas, curious about the tale he’s been told about what happens there on the shortest day of the year. The ghosts in the tomb dread the possibility, as it may block the light – the only light they receive all year, and which they subsist on for the next year. More than that will spoil it for you. I always enjoy Toibin in short form. Really nicely turned.
THE SHORTEST DAY, Colm Toibin (UK) (US+)
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‘You’re only ever half serious, Poe,’ she said. ‘I think it’s because you have a sunny disposition, although DCI Flynn says it’s because you suffer from mild retardation.’
MW Craven is an entertaining crime writer, and this latest in his Washington Poe sequence is light on its feet and propulsive, with a fairly clever serial crime at its centre. This is book 7 in the sequence, and it’s starting to show signs of “series problems” – series gain a returning cast that thins out the time given to the central characters – Poe’s wife to be, formerly a formidable pathologist, is barely used — and new characters injected for energy just steal more time from them. Also, Craven is starting to refer back to previous books more, which can be an advantage or a curse. That said, the final twist in the book suggests Craven knows all this and is about to make a big leap away, and there’s a fun structural game in the book that was very pleasing.
‘The last time we had contact there was considerable . . . unpleasantness.’
‘How unpleasant?’
Locke cleared his throat. ‘He said if he ever saw me again, he’d, and this is verbatim, “Take those stupid glasses off your head and stick them up your bony arse.”’
It’s a fun, fast read, and made for a few days of lovely summer escape.
CONNECTED:
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The telegram, addressed to the man who had hired me to investigate the case, said briefly and somewhat obliquely that they were never coming back: “WHAT ARE WE LETTING IN WHEN WE SAY GOODBYE?”
A fascinating short novel, beginning as a weird detective story and ending in a descent into living folklore. There may be something about this first quarter of the 21st Century – I feel like I’ve read a lot of novels, particularly in the last ten years, that are about the emergence of myth, legend and folklore into the contemporary moment. Eruptions of old dreams into modern day.
The case of the woman who disappeared behind a whirlwind. The case of the castrated men. The case of the woman who gave her hand, literally. Without realizing it. The case of the man who lived inside a whale for years.
The detective is hired to find a missing couple – really, a missing wife and the person she vanished with – and finds herself in the Siberian taiga, tied to a translator and getting lost in a forest of stories. I’ve seen people tempted to see the book as Latin American magical realism, but that feels lazy. The fairy tale is a universal language. It creeps around our bones like Siberian frost or forest lichen, and it never lets us go. I really liked this mysterious little book.
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I guess if they get me I won’t care much.
Haven’t, to my recall, read Parker before. But I enjoyed the JESSE STONE tv movies with Tom Selleck, and I assume the wit in them came from the books. I was quite right – Selleck and his crew clearly loved the books, and the best lines are all to be found on Parker’s pages. I was interested to discover that the Jesse Stone of the books is a good fifteen years younger than Selleck was when he made the films, and I have a new admiration for the careful nature of the tv adaptation. They’re worth watching, not least because they’re shot largely in Canada and therefore access some of the great Canadian character actors of the time – Saul Rubinek, Stephen McHattie and William Devane.
This book reads like butter. I see how they hook people. You almost don’t ask yourself how the embattled police chief of a small town in Massachusetts has time to fuck literally every attractive woman he passes. (Even despite telling everyone who even looks at him that he’s obsessed with his ex-wife.) Despite the smoothness, Parker is a restrained writer. He generally avoids painting on the page, but will occasionally drop in pieces like “the old unlovely snow” to remind you he’s there with his hand on the tiller. Hemingwayan emotional elisions abound, the dialogue is entertaining, Parker knows how to keep a thin and simple plot/counterplot cooking with short punchy scenes, and I always enjoy an open crime story (the COLUMBO style, where we know who the bad guys are almost from the start, and the pleasure is seeing them and the detective trying to outsmart each other).
A fun, easy read for the most part, and I feel better educated by having finally read Parker.
STONE COLD, Robert B Parker (UK) (US+)
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