Category: books

I started Jon Fosse’s SEPTOLOGY a few years ago and didn’t get far with it. His MELANCHOLY I-II kicked me out early on: an imagined instance in the early mental breakdown of painter Lars Hertervig, the opening sequence’s strong (to me) Kafka’s THE TRIAL vibe leads into the same kind of physical assault that always kicks me out of THE TRIAL. (Which did lead me to wonder if I wasn’t imagining a mirroring.) I don’t give a shit about Josef K after he lays hands on his neighbour, and my empathy for Hertervig similarly dries up. This is not intended as a criticism of Fosse. He has invented a form entirely his own, and the Nobel comes as no surprise. It is, on my current limited experience, built on an original application of repetition. The whole cadence is one step forward and two steps back, every breath observed and reconsidered. He uses this effect both meditationally and for a clever new creation of rising anxiety. (The opening of MELANCHOLY is remarkable in its evocation of anxiety.) He does like a near-infinite run-on sentence, but he doesn’t dance and play in them like, say, Krasznahorkai – it’s as cold and flat and steady as snowfall. It is, in fact, the observed and examined breath.

A SHINING is a short work that probably works well as an introduction to his prose approach. I really want to read his plays, of which he has written a great number, and I find myself wondering if, like Beckett, his plays may be more to my tastes than his prose. Fosse claims Beckett as a precedent, and Georg Trakl too, which I can see – Trakl repeated a good deal, and specialised in dissolution, the supernatural and the crumbling of the mental faculties, all which are in play in A SHINING.

(I also note that Fosse, a Norwegian, apparently does not write in Norwegian, but in a minority dialect called Nynorsk used by some 10% of the population, which summons to mind Beckett’s approach of writing in French and translating back to English.)

A SHINING is as simple as a one-act play. A clearly troubled man drives out to the edge of a forest, miles from anywhere, and gets stuck in mud. He decides to walk through the forest to seek help on the other side of it. But the forest doesn’t end, and is darker than it should be. There are moments of the ancient, and of the religious supernatural, and the nature of the man is revealed only in asides and hints scattered through the text. The man’s trance-like state becomes the reader’s, and the fraying of reality becomes shared between author, character and reader, to the point where the end becomes inevitable. It’s a fascinating set of effects.

A SHINING, Jon Fosse

THE BLINDED MAN is the first of the Intercrime crime novels by Arne Dahl, pseudonym of literary novelist, poet and critic Jan Arnald.  So popular are these novels that their TV adaptation is simply called ARNE DAHL.

If you’re into those novels that are absurdly polished exercises in structure, mechanics, all flawless tracks and joints and that great bell-like sound when all the parts of it suddenly come together, you’ll love this.  It is a glorious performance in Building A Book.

It was written in 1999, and is solidly within the original Nordic Noir space, being very much about Swedish society and politics.  It is… curious on the subject of women, and cannot quite decide whether it’s the detective protagonist who can solve every puzzle except women, or whether it thinks all women are unknowable aliens.

On the other hand, it has a large detective who performs a violent arrest on a moving van.

It’s the story of the killing of a big important man, and the last time a big important man was assassinated in Sweden the police and security services really fucked it up, so this time they’re assembling a crack team of Cops Who Don’t Follow The Rules to handle it. Yeah, I know.  Roll with it.  Arnald isn’t trying to change the world.  It’s a largely unapologetic yarn. With moments of chilly, distanced oddness.

Given that it was clearly made as a commercial move, the book feels remarkably uncynical. It’s really not afraid of being odd. Its voice is wry and bone-dry.  And, as noted, it’s quite the masterclass in building a machine.

It was wonderfully unputdownable.

THE BLINDED MAN, Arne Dahl (UK) (US)

Going to need a copy of this:

To research his thesis on contemporary agrarian life, anthropology student David Mazon moves from Paris to La Pierre-Saint-Christophe, a village in the marshlands of western France. Determined to capture the essence of rurality, the intrepid scholar shuttles around on his moped to interview local residents. Unbeknownst to David, in these nondescript lands, once theatres of wars and revolutions, Death leads the dance. When an existence ends, the Wheel of Life recycles its soul and hurls it back into the world as microbe, human or wild animal, sometimes in the past, sometimes in the future. Only once a year do Death and the living observe a temporary truce, during a gargantuan three-day feast where gravediggers gorge themselves on food, libations and language. Brimming with Mathias Enard’s characteristic wit and encyclopaedic brilliance, The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild is a riotous novel where the edges between past and present are constantly dissolving against a Rabelaisian backdrop of excess – and a paradoxically macabre paean to life’s richness.

AT THE EXISTENTIALIST CAFE by Sarah Bakewell is a marvel. It’s the story of existentialism. No, don’t walk off. This is the story of crazy people and wonderful people and fucked-up people and dancing and drinking and thinking people. It starts with someone in a cafe in Paris explaining a new form of philosophy using a cocktail. Meanwhile, in Germany, a man is yelling for coffee so that he can make that philosophy out of it. This is phenomenology, which gave rise to existentialism, and Bakewell tells it all in terms of cafe conversation and jazz clubs and old houses and shacks in the woods, in occupied cities and military stations and mad dashes across borders, alternating between biography and the sort of clear, warm explanations of philosophical ideas that even uneducated laypeople like me can grasp. Husserl, Heidegger, Camus and the like are all here, and, of course, Sartre, but also, thank god, Simone de Beauvoir gets significant space, and pleasingly, so does the dancing master of humanism, Merleau-Ponty. I did not want this book to end. It’s marvellous. A great story, and, in some ways, a valedictory one, of the days before philosophy was completely subsumed by academe and became a thing of technical language and minor considerations.

(Side-effect: if you’ve ever visited Paris, it will really make you miss it.)

AT THE EXISTENTIALIST CAFE by Sarah Bakewell

…we heard him talk to God, as if begging for something or fighting against someone who made insistent claims and issued orders. Until one night that voice rose threateningly and irresistibly, demanding that he should bear witness to it with his mouth and with his entrails. And we heard the spirit enter into him as he rose from his bed, tall and growing in prophetic anger, choking with brash words that he emitted like a machine gun. We heard the din of battle and Father’s groans, the groans of a titan with a broken hip, but still capable of wrath. I have never seen an Old Testament prophet, but at the sight of this man stricken by God’s fire, sitting clumsily on an enormous china chamberpot behind a windmill of arms, a screen of desperate wrigglings over which there towered his voice, grown unfamiliar and hard. I understood the divine anger of saintly men.

It was a dialogue as grim as the language of thunder. The jerkings of his arms cut the sky into pieces, and in the cracks there appeared the face of Jehovah swollen with anger and spitting out curses. Without looking, I saw him, the terrible Demiurge, as, resting on darkness as on Sinai, propping his powerful palms on the pelmet of the curtains, he pressed his enormous face against the upper panes of the window which flattened horribly his large fleshy nose.

A short book that contains an entire universe. One of those times where I feel like I’ve found one of the early, root sounds of the music I like.

He seemed to have a dozen hands and twenty senses. His brittle attention wandered to a hundred places at once. No point in space was free from his suspicions.

You can find a shape in here. In a Polish city, a father goes insane. And then his son, the narrator, goes insane. And then the city goes insane, presaged less by the approaching comet in the sky than the father turning his brother-in-law into a doorbell. But it’s all going to be okay. Because perhaps insanity is the only way to live, and to truly appreciate the insane world we live in.

‘Am I to conceal from you,’ he said in a low tone, ‘that my own brother, as a result of a long and incurable illness, has been gradually transformed into a bundle of rubber tubing, and that my poor cousin had to carry him day and night on his cushion, singing to the luckless creature endless lullabies on winter nights? Can there be anything sadder than a human being changed into the rubber tube of an enema?‘

Commentators associate Schulz with Proust and Kafka, but I currently think both of those are lazy. Schulz goes full cosmic. Georg Buchner’s LENZ might be a better touchstone. There have also been comments on the quality of the translation, that Wieniewska simplified the sentences and polished the prose a little too much. I do kind of wonder what a different translation may have wrought, because I do detect an antecedent to Krasznahorkai here, and longer twistier sentences would only have heightened that. But Krasznahorkai is hard to read. Schulz is hard to read too, but in a different way. STREET is a short book that feels like a long one, because each paragraph is so incredibly dense with invention. You have to read and reread and revisit just to be sure you read what you think you read, and to extract all the meanings from it.

The language is stunning.

Each wrinkle of his deeply lined face expressed incredible cunning. In each fold of skin, a missile of irony lay hidden. But occasionally inspiration widened the spirals of his wrinkles and they swelled horribly and sank in silent whorls into the depths of the winter night.

I have saved a lot of pieces of the book, and could quote from it a lot. There is a grand magnificence to the writing, but also a slyness in the way it slips in a dark joke here and there.

THE STREET OF CROCODILES.

I’d read Joan Didion before, but had somehow never sat down with THE WHITE ALBUM, even though it’s the one all the famous quotes come from. I picked it up as part of my winter projects of filling in the gaps in my reading I’d never got around to attending to, and then didn’t actually open it. During a week’s insomnia, I opened it up just for something to do. I’d already read the opening essay somewhere, but most of the rest was new to me.

Joan Didion was a reporter, author and screenwriter. In a lot of ways, I think she was always a reporter first. In the Sixties and Seventies, she was labelled as part of the New Journalism crew alongside Wolfe and Thompson. She shares a lot of creative DNA with Hunter Thompson – they both typed out entire Hemingway novels in their youth to get a feel for how that language worked – and early/mid Thompson has a similar music. But Didion was always more subtle. No less a mythologiser, in her way, but in a very different register.

I have never been sure what the word “nouveau” can possibly mean in America, implying as it does that the speaker is gazing down six hundred years of rolled lawns.

The sentences are glorious. I don’t even want to quote the famous ones. All of them have the glow of inspiration and the shine of polish. I highlighted this one because it is so clear and so timeless:

There is one of those peculiar social secrets at work here. On the whole “the critics” distrust great wealth, but “the public” does not. On the whole “the critics” subscribe to the romantic view of man’s possibilities, but “the public” does not.

(She was writing here in a time when “man” stood in for “humankind.”)

I could go on at length, but all that needs to be said is that this is a classic collection of reportage and memoir with beautiful, resonant writing, and I wish I’d read the whole thing years ago.

It occurred to me finally that I was listening to a true underground, to the voice of all those who have felt themselves not merely shocked but personally betrayed by recent history. It was supposed to have been their time. It was not.

THE WHITE ALBUM, Joan Didion

For I do not exist: there exist but thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms reflecting me increases.

— Vladimir Nabokov, The Eye

This is flat out one of my books of the year. Ian Penman sat down to write a book about the director/writer Rainer Werner Fassbinder, couldn’t get going, and decided to blast the book out in four weeks the way Fassbinder used to blast out everything.

How to recapture him in all his stubborn, unyielding, messy glory? How to proceed in the spirit of? I decided to try and write the way Fassbinder himself worked: get straight to it and get going right away. The very opposite of what Robert Musil called an aesthetic of postponement.

In something like four hundred numbered pieces, some no more than a few lines long, Penman creates a kaleidoscopic view of Fassbinder and that which surrounds him. Perhaps you, like me, only have a glancing familiarity with his work. Doesn’t matter a bit. Because it’s the story of a creative life and creative acts. And the cost of those acts:

Everything in excess: food, sex, drinks, drugs, cigarettes; but also work. Fassbinder gives the lie to the idea that productivity is in itself a ‘healthy’ thing. There is nothing necessarily ‘healthy’ about the pursuit of any demanding or difficult or very personal art. There may be cruelty involved, to self and others. It throws into question what we might consider a ‘healthy’ productive life at all. The line between self-medication and lethal dose become increasingly thin. The same thing that cures you of one malady exacerbates another.

Life lived at a hurtling rate: beyond a certain point impossible to tell whether it’s speeding up or skidding down or whether finally these now amount to the same thing.

It’s an insanely quotable book – “such palm-smoothed coin-words.” It’s an absolutely thrilling consideration of edge culture and edge creativity, time and place, damage and achievement, art and life.

Yet again, another winner from Fitzcarraldo Books. What an amazing house they are.

FASSBINDER THOUSANDS OF MIRRORS, Ian Penman (shop)

The beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.

I never read JONATHAN STRANGE & MR NORRELL – didn’t look like my sort of thing. But, given the attention paid to it, I was interested in reading Susanna Clarke’s prose. So I picked up the shorter PIRANESI, which looked more like my sort of thing, and then it sat on the digital pile for god knows how long. I opened it one Friday night, and finished it on the Wednesday night. I did not get much sleep. It is really very good.

Also very hard to talk about without serious spoilers, but let me try: there is a man who lives in The House, an apparently infinite arrangement of vast halls filled with giant statues, all constructed upon an ocean with occasionally dangerous tides that provides him seafood to live on, and subject to its own internal weather systems. This is the entire world. He has always lived in The House – however, he possesses education, objects and modern locutions that suggest this is not the case. He is visited twice a week by The Other, the only human he knows, who gives him tasks of observation and measurement in pursuit of The Great And Secret Knowledge. The Other calls our man Piranesi.

Piranesi is not mad. But he has been lied to. A lot.

It is a supernatural/science-fictional mystery novel, but it’s chiefly a study of solitude and empathy, and of living fully in a world full of marvels. (And, perhaps, the old saw about “where we get our ideas from.”) The mystery, by the way, is wonderful. But there’s an argument to be made that the book is really an allegory for how we live and how we don’t live, how we see and how we don’t see, and how the things done to us and taken away from us can sometimes lead to a new life that has its own wonders and joys.

PIRANESI, Susanna Clarke (shop)

Henry might grow up to do something really evil like run for political office, if he were destined to grow up at all, which is something I’ll take care of later on.

Steve Erickson has a weird tempo as a writer. He will slip into ponderous longeurs, and then blast you out of your seat with a violent pivot. He doesn’t sustain: RUBICON BEACH has long sections that are hypnotically wonderful and then it’s like he slips below the surface and sinks into ocean mud for what seems like ages. The only one I’ve read that doesn’t do that is THE SEA CAME IN AT MIDNIGHT, which is a thrilling piece of work. TOURS OF THE BLACK CLOCK doesn’t have the wide dead spaces of RUBICON BEACH, but tests the patience here and there. You have to hang in there and wait for Erickson to set off another of his bombs.

The Chinese peasants of Davenhall routinely hung on the graveyard trees the bodies of the Davenhall dead, sometimes days, sometimes weeks, before interment. It was the peasants’ conviction that if one died without speaking his or her name in the final breath, then to seal away the corpse that had been wrenched loose of its identity by death would exile the spirit to some netherbetween place.

At each funeral witnesses would be called forth to verify that, before dying, the dead one had established without doubt his memory of himself. If no witness could attest to such a thing, the body would hang in the graveyard trees until the universe chose to write his or her name in the sky, so that he or she could read it and call the name out.

It has the scent of fable, beginning with the boy who tries to leave the island he was brought up on, after witnessing a terrible act, but ends up as the ferryman taking tourists to and from the island. The island’s dreamy gravity never lets him go. His story launches the second story – the truth about that terrible act, and its victim, and his role in the splitting of timelines.

It’s also about the man who wrote Hitler’s porn.

The most straightforwardly entertaining of the Erickson novels I’ve read, THE SEA CAME IN AT MIDNIGHT, is explicitly about connections. This is less explicitly also about connection, a darker web of mycelial fastenings. It is about the power and fear of names and naming, and the sundering and reforming of life paths.

It has its slow parts: but when it’s moving and inventing, it is magnificent and magnificently strange. Erickson remains, for me, a writer to study.

TOURS OF THE BLACK CLOCK, Steve Erickson (shop)

See also: Destruction’s Motor: RUBICON BEACH, Steve Erickson