Category: books

I noticed last month that I have a few different Sjon books in the pile. Apparently I started reading this and didn’t finish it. So I started again at the beginning.

Before embarking on his tales the mate had the habit of drawing a rotten chip of wood from his pocket and holding it to his right ear like a telephone receiver. He would listen to the chip for a minute or two, closing his eyes as if asleep, while under his eyelids his pupils quivered to and fro.

THE WHISPERING MUSE is a story about storytelling: about myth and legend, fish and culture.

To try and describe the affect, I’m going to be basic and crass and do an injustice to the work, but: tonally, it has the archness, historicity, unreliability and louche, slightly evil air of THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL. Completely unfair, but maybe you can see where I’m leading you here.

“I was thinking: could the voice you detect in the humming of the wood be your own voice? Like the poet who obstinately believes that he is writing about the world but is in reality only telling yet another story about himself?’ The idea was not entirely my own. My brother-in-law, the psychiatrist Dr Pázmány, had said something similar when the invisible people moved in with me during the winter of 1910–11.”

The extremely dubious narrator is the publisher and principal author of the journal Fisk Og Kultur, which presents a faintly Aryan argument that the Nordic race is the superior race because they eat lots of fish. The story revolves around the narrator, in his old age, being sent on a sea trip by his patron, a local shipping magnate – and the ship’s first mate, who, every night, tells in chapters a tale of Jason and the Argonauts. He tells this story after listening to a splinter of wood, which he insists is a piece of the Argo’s bow – and that he himself sailed on the Argo with Jason. The myth is the spine of the piece, weaving in and out of the man’s life and experiences on the boat. Myth rises like a tide and laps over events. Sometimes it washes away dissembling and reveals true character. The ending is unexpected and stunning. And funny. And, in the aftermath, unsettling. It’s a more complex book than it seems.

I’ve read Sjon before, but this book convinced me that I haven’t read enough.

THE WHISPERING MUSE, Sjon, trans. Victoria Cribb (learn more)

VERGE, Lidia Yuknavitch

First thing in the morning, when I take out the trash, I see it: syringe on the lawn. Still bloody. It spikes and chills my memory: four long years of youth sliding cold silver glint into waiting blue.

VERGE is a book of short stories by Lidia Yuknavitch, who wrote the fantastic BOOK OF JOAN, told in visceral, flensing language.

Bosch closes his eyes and focuses on this feeling, so he’ll remember it when it’s gone. For it will be gone, will it not? That is the way of things, that is time, and time is a fucker, and except for this one time in all his life he’d never cared about the boot-sludge drone of time, and suddenly it is everything, isn’t it?

These are, generally speaking, stories about sex, drugs and death in America. It tricks you. The first story has a glorious, life-affirming note to it. That note fades. Things get, frankly, more fucked up. You can almost think of it as a mosaic novel, connected by theme rather than character or setting: the dark facets of the world at its private fringes.

I used to wonder who would want to live here, like this, some dried-out town at the edge of the story line, the nightly news, never quite making it into the picture, its people crowding the geography somehow without evolution or design. There is a black-and-red sign over the door of the Texaco. It reads TEXAS, USA. No city. No need. That’s the whole deal, stuck up there on a piece of metal the size of a license plate. Like thought stopped for gas and died at the pump.

It took me a while to finish this book. Not all of the stories were successful for me, but the ones that really worked both outnumber those that didn’t land and were cold and silver and sharp enough to make me pause for a while afterwards. Not always an easy read, but a rewarding one, with wonderful language. I personally admired this line a lot:

…some people she passed looked at her with a kind of disaffected latte pity.

VERGE, Lidia Yuknavitch (link)

“Men are among the loneliest creatures. They lose their mothers and cannot carry children, and have nothing to comfort themselves with but their vestigial cockular appendages. This is perhaps the reason they move ever warward when they are not moving fuckward.”

THE BOOK OF JOAN by Lidia Yuknavitch is a science fiction story about women. Women who love, women who hate, women who kill, women who destroy. It’s a story about what happens after the end of the world, where (another) other-humanly elite has gone to orbit to live out sexless, loveless lives of bizarre art and ritual.  

Christine Pizan, a denizen of the orbiting station that may be all that’s left of the human race, is an artist of skin.  Through a braille-like process of branding and skin grafts, she wears stories on her skin.  She is the Book of Joan — Joan being Joan of Dirt, the superhuman child soldier who fought the good fight down below and was burned at the stake for it. The term used for Joan’s superhuman condition is engenderine – from engender, whose more archaic definition is “to cause to be born.”

Any book that starts with a quote from Doris Lessing’s mighty SHIKASTA has me on its side.

The medieval writer Christine de Pizan’s last work was an eulogy of Joan of Arc.

The station is run by a mad misogynist called Jean de Men.  De Pizan’s intellectual status in her time was partly made by her dissection of the misogynist writer Jean de Meun. Not being a student of the period, these are things I learned after reading the book. Joan of Dirt is an obvious avatar of Joan of Arc, but I didn’t know the rest. It didn’t make the book any less fascinating to me.

The hunger for love replaced the hunger for god or science. The hunger for love became an opiate. In a world that had lost its ability to procreate, the story of love became paramount. “It was a wish like the moth’s wish for flame. It was a wish to fuck the sun. To be burned alive inside a story where our bodies could still want and do what bodies want to do.”

It’s not a happy book, I warn you.  There are moments of joy that blaze through it, but, contra to the first quote above, it’s a book about war and women, and birth and the earth. It’s a huge fable about the end of the world, told with pieces of history. It is ambitious, frequently beautiful, and weirdly haunting.

THE BOOK OF JOAN, Lidia Yuknavitch (link)

“Poe won’t even take medicine when he’s supposed to. He’s been prescribed codeine for an abscess in his tooth and I found the unfilled prescription a fortnight ago in a book he was reading. He’d written a list of his favourite sausages on the back.”

THE BOTANIST by MW Craven is a joyful burst of pure pulp fiction. Craven specialises in vastly over-complicated murder plots, and this, the fifth in his Washington Poe sequence, is him trying to top himself. It is, frankly, fucking absurd. And once you accept that, and accept that Craven himself accepts that and is just telling you a completely over-the-top weird crime yarn, you can relax into it.

I’ve only read the third and fourth of the sequence, and I suspect you’ll get the most out of this if you’ve read at least one of those. But, if you’ve read the last one and were unsure about this one – yeah, Craven goes for it, and puts energy into moving the world forward.

It is built around two demented locked-room mysteries, the solutions for which are so incredibly complicated and overwrought that I couldn’t help but laugh along with the author as he stacked his bricks up.

Supposedly there is a sixth book in the pipeline. Not sure he tops this one for plot mentalism. Maybe he switches gears. I’ll be curious to see.

Anyway. If you, like me, have just ground through a bunch of dry non-fiction books, this may be the weird palate cleanser you need.

THE BOTANIST, MW Craven (link)

I’ve been doing research reading, and I finished BRITISH RADIO DRAMA 1945-63 by Hugh Chignell last week. Some of the most revolutionary, groundbreaking and future-facing drama in the world during that period was done with the BBC on radio.

This appreciation of radio drama as having a unique capacity to understand and reveal psychological states was one identified fifty years earlier by arguably the most important radio drama producer of the post-war era Donald McWhinnie who wrote the following: ‘Perhaps the most potent quality of the spoken word in close focus – not projected artificially to several hundred people – is its power to communicate secret states of mind, the inner world and private vision of the speaker.’

For McWhinnie, radio drama is at its best an exploration of the inner world, an intimate representation facilitated by the original use of sound.

I need to read it again and make more notes, as I found myself getting lost in the rich layers of detail Chignell brings to bear. But here’s the deal:

Dominated though it was by white men, sometimes writers whose work could be of a misogynist cast – and even though the internal and artistic struggles were chiefly of patrician old white men against “angry” younger white men, so the stakes look absurdly low to us now – the period under consideration here provided some of the most challenging and innovative narrative art in the world.

Samuel Beckett’s WAITING FOR GODOT may have been setting fires in theatre, but Beckett’s first play specifically for radio, ALL THAT FALL, not only directly led to the inception of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop just to be able to make it; not only is it actually a bit of a skeleton key to understanding Beckett’s work; but it builds, rather than collapses, things.

(One way to enter Beckett’s work is to think of him as an outlier genre writer like Lessing or Vonnegut. ALL THAT FALL is a deconstructed crime story. His ENDGAME is science fiction – and I always found it amusing that it (and maybe GODOT) was the obvious and main influence on the post-apocalypse comedy THE BED SITTING ROOM by Spike Milligan and John Antrobus. WAITING FOR GODOT is Laurel & Hardy’s first horror film.)

I’m wandering. This is the story of a group of men and women at the BBC, in a time we generally conceive of as smotheringly conservative, working to evolve a new art form and introducing challenging and often avant-garde narrative art to a mainstream culture.

I read this for Reasons: to learn the history, and look at the early tools. I grew up with radio drama, and there is still wonderful radio drama being produced – go look for WHO IS ALDRICH KEMP? by Julian Simpson, which is really fun in a modern Steed/Peel AVENGERS way. Alan Bennett’s monologue plays are always most chilling on radio. But you can never be sure what’s been left by the wayside, which routes to the future got overgrown and hidden. This book did a lot of scything of weeds for me.

There’s an honourable mention of US radio drama, too:

…around the middle of the twentieth century, radio drama in America was not only a ‘theatre of the mind’ but also ‘that as American broadcasters built a theatre in the mind, radio drama necessarily became a theatre about the mind, in an era in which that concept was a site of extraordinary contest’.

…okay, reading back, I’m not sure any of that was useful or made sense, so I will stop here. Good book.

BRITISH RADIO DRAMA 1945-63, Hugh Chignell (link)

NUMERO ZERO was the final Umberto Eco novel. If you know me at all, you know I have unholy love for Eco’s work, fiction and non-fiction. So I’m probably very biased here. It’s a short and sweet little book, like a tiny aftershock from FOUCAULT’S PENDULUM, set in the early 1990s and concerning a newspaper that doesn’t exist.  Almost in the manner of Bigend’s “Node” in Gibson’s Blue Ant trilogy, an unseen actor is creating a sequence of dummy runs of a newspaper in order to practise causing effects upon the power structures of the day.  Reading from our own vantage, we know it’s doomed, of course, and Eco has a lot of fun with layers of short-sightedness and some score-settling knifework upon the Italian newspaper industry as well as the obvious media mogul targets. There are joyful bursts of old Eco in here — a group of delirious pages about fake orders in Malta, big passages of mad wordgames — and then, joyfully, a big weird conspiracy plot, Eco’s love of genre in full effect.

I’m sure it will be racked as “minor” Eco, but even minor Eco is worthy of any thinking human’s attention. It was a pure pleasure to hear one more refrain from that great orchestra of a mind. I had a fine time with NUMERO ZERO.

NUMERO ZERO, Umberto Eco (link)

STARRY SPECULATIVE CORPSE is the second of Eugene Thacker’s books about the horror of philosophy / the philosophy of horror.  It is as recommended as the first, more famous volume, IN THE DUST OF THIS PLANET.  This one feels like more of a historical discourse on the subject of nothingness — and is, generally, much more interesting than that would suggest.  The fourth section is difficult, and started out with a premise or two that I couldn’t support — but sections 1 – 3 and 5 are marvellous. This is big stuff about how we see the universe and how we relate to space, time and the human interior, and he talks about philosophy and philosophers engagingly and with dry humour.  Also, unafraid to point out where a philosopher is boring or just a really bad writer.

Thacker attempts to place life in its proper context while leaving space for something akin to a sense of wonder.  It’s worth thinking on.

…perhaps, we do nothing but carry around a corpse that itself carries around the sullen grey matter that occasionally wonders if the same sullen stars that occupy every firmament at every scale also occupy this starry speculative corpse.

And, as an additional note: like the best books on philosophy, it introduced me to a lot of new thinkers and new ideas, and led me on more than a few rabbit holes down Wikipedia and bookshop shelves.

STARRY SPECULATIVE CORPSE, Eugene Thacker (link)

I spent a chunk of time in Oregon in the recent past, and a signature note of the time was seeing locals smirk at drought-ridden California next door, and then pointing at snow-capped Mount Hood and grinning that they were just fine for water.  Just a few years later, twenty of Oregon’s thirty-six counties were in official drought condition, under the lowest snowpack level on record.

I don’t know if Paulo Bacigalupi would agree, but, to me, his new novel THE WATER KNIFE bears the mark of John Brunner’s monolithic works of social science fiction, THE SHEEP LOOK UP and STAND ON ZANZIBAR.  THE WATER KNIFE is not as strict in its structure, or as forbidding — it follows a standard thriller-novel structure, following three different people’s lives and then tangling the threads of their stories — but, nonetheless, the near-future coping situations for creeping environmental disaster and the deeply involved observation of their social situations remind me of Brunner’s two great statements.  It crackles along as a thriller, and I particularly (predictably?) enjoyed the skein following the journalist Lucy Monroe in a dust-choked Phoenix AZ as it dies of thirst.  But the book lives in the details: from people on the street drinking their own piss through water-processing sacs to the legal and physical mechanics of managing and stealing water supplies in an America of permanent drought and existential panic.  As a speculation, its accessibility, intelligence and storytelling velocity may make it the most effective near-future warning sign of the last decade.

THE WATER KNIFE, Paolo Bacigalupi  (link)

I was sent a copy of THE YEAR UNDER THE MACHINE by its author, Peter Danielsson.

It’s a lovely object, dark and compact with a beautiful finish to the hardback case.

Each chapter is no more than a paragraph or two long: each one an epigram, a recounting of a diary entry, a fragment of a witness testimony. One person’s story of the year under the Machine.

I don’t know who came up with the name, but I suppose it was a journalist. It was actually misleading; there were no mechanical parts, no gears, no pistons. Just a motionless pitch black disc overhead.

For some reason the name stuck, maybe because it didn’t feel right to call it something we all recognised. It wasn’t a spaceship, a UFO or a flying saucer. No-one could explain how it arrived or what happened to the people who vanished. So we might as well call it something completely different.

The Machine.

It is a starkly affecting piece of work about a slow-motion end of the world, one which progresses by making each of us more alone. Each section is framed by a large piece of energetic black and white abstract art, into which we read the action of the Machine:

THE YEAR UNDER THE MACHINE is a full experience. I found it completely inspirational.

Check it out and order your own copy at this link here.

NETWORKS OF NEW YORK is a book by Ingrid Burrington, whom I met when we were speaking together at Haunted Machines in Manchester. She is extremely clever, extremely well-read and exiremely observant, and this book showcased all that to great effect.

It is, simply put, a field guide to the physical signs of the network in New York. It’s also a history, and a consideration of the nature of living inside the internet. It is completely fascinating, from the hobo code of street markings to the spider-ate-fly corporate evolutions that tangle up the law and the money mantling every cable, pipe and junction under the city. It’s a history of the internet, a history of New York, a history of communications and a history of business, all at once. And it’s a gorgeous production – the design of the physical edition is superb. Very recommended.

NETWORKS OF NEW YORK, Ingrid Burrington