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Category: books

OPEN CITY, Teju Cole

Published February 8, 2025 by Warren Ellis

…not wishing to be alone with the image of Death hovering in the room with its cheap suit and bad manners…

I started OPEN CITY a few years ago, and picked it up again recently, just because it was there and open. It is a series of journeys undertaken by a performatively melancholy psychiatrist-in-training, Julius. Much about Julius is performative. His narration is filled to the gunnels with gathered and displayed knowledge of history and the arts. His assuming of emotions began to read to me like quickly donned shirts from a costume box, the occasion for each intelligently guessed at.

Riemenschneider, Stoss, Leinberger, and Erhat brought a complicated material knowledge of lindenwood to bear on their carving of it, and their attempts to marry the spirit of the material with its visible form, craftlike though it is, is after all not so different from the diagnostic struggle that doctors are engaged in. This is particularly true in the case of those of us who are psychiatrists, who attempt to use external Signs as clues to internal realities, even when the relationship between the two is not at all clear. So modest is our success at this task that it is easy to believe our branch of medicine is as primitive now as was surgery in Paracelsus’s time.

Having recalled the film ROME, OPEN CITY, I decided to look up the strict definition of the term “open city.”

In war, an open city is a settlement which has announced it has abandoned all defensive efforts, generally in the event of the imminent capture of the city to avoid destruction. Once a city has declared itself open, the opposing military will be expected under international law to peacefully occupy the city rather than destroy it. According to Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions, it is forbidden for the attacking party to “attack, by any means whatsoever, non-defended localities”.[1] The intent is to protect the city’s civilians and cultural landmarks from a battle which may be futile.

Attacking forces do not always respect the declaration of an open city.

The enemy, perhaps, is already through the gates, and the city has no defense.

I’m sure this would baffle and horrify Cole, but, after a while, my closest referent to this largely New York-based novel was AMERICAN PSYCHO.

Each person must, on some level, take himself as the calIbration point for normalcy, must assume that the room of his own mind is not, cannot be, entirely opaque to him. Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories.

The prose is beautiful, easy and riverine. It is concerned with identities, and also that 2010-ish point where Western life began its slide from the physical world to the flat screen. Julius haunts bookshops and record shops in their closing days like a serial visitor to terminal wards, and seeks out the experiential to ground himself. But those experiences are performative, and tend only to excite in him his cold oceans of book knowledge.

Julius is a sociopath, and when his original sin is thrown in his face he goes to see a concert, alone (in several ways.) After the concert, he finds himself locked out of the theatre:

My hands held metal, my eyes starlight, and it was as though I had come so close to something that it had fallen out of focus, or fallen so far away from it that it had faded away.

He goes to see the Statue Of Liberty and recites to himself his gathered knowledge about it, which centres around death.

It’s a fantastically written book, and I suspect I have taken away little from it that the author intended. Perhaps it was really a meditation on the flaneur, on the immigrant experience, on identity and psychology and history? But Julius chills me somehow, and, by the end of the book, I can’t help but suspect Teju Cole agrees with me a little bit.

OPEN CITY, Teju Cole (UK) (US+)

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THE BOOKSELLER, Tim Sullivan

Published February 7, 2025 by Warren Ellis

‘Do you want me to arrest you?’ Carson sputtered with as much dignity as he could muster, which wasn’t much. ‘Well, if you need to arrest someone, as you’ve gone to all this trouble, then please go ahead,’ he said, with a deferential smile.

That network tv procedural show that sticks like glue to its format, but which you watch because the machinery of it is so well-honed. These are the George Cross crime novels. And they’re at the point where you need to have read the last three or four before reading this one. You can’t just jump in with any book any more. If you’ve read any of the others, you’ll like this one, which pulls off its final twist pretty well.

This is, however, my last case with the autistic Detective Sergeant George Cross. Sullivan has built a lovely little device here, and he operates it very well. If you’re looking for cosy crime, try any of the three or four books previous to this one. And the little dives into the history of British bookselling are fun. But- and this is entirely personal feeling – cosy familiarity eventually drives me off, and so it is here.

A few moments later a door with a reeded glass panel opened and a ball of white hair, in the middle of which could be two small black eyes, appeared. Denholm Simpson, for it was he, had a resplendently thick mop of hair on his head and a vast white beard almost covering his entire face, ending just below his eyes. His mouth was completely hidden somewhere in this hirsute undergrowth, its location indicated only by a brown nicotine stain. He looked like an out-of-control muppet on a windy day.

“For it was he.” Gorgeous.

I am unsure as to how these books are not an ITV series yet.

THE BOOKSELLER, Tim Sullivan (UK) (US+)

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Published February 4, 2025 by Warren Ellis

I have not yet successfully cracked Jon Fosse’s longer works. He has perfected a kind of circular breathing of prose, repetition becoming mantra, and what that means for me is that there are no pauses or breaks. But I can handle the novellas, just about.

ALISS AT THE FIRE is probably as close as Fosse will ever get to genre. It’s a haunted house story. I’m sure many people, including Fosse himself, would argue about that, and it’s about loss and generational grief. But at its root, it’s about the house and the things that happened there.

A woman lays on a bench in the isolated home her late husband grew up in. She never left it after he vanished, presumed dead, twenty years earlier. She turns her head, and she sees herself, twenty years younger, standing at the window waiting for her husband to come home. And then we inhabit that younger woman as she waits and frets. The older woman remembers herself remembering her day-younger self talking to her husband, seeing her husband leave, and then we inhabit the husband, walking the paths that his family have walked for hundreds of years. And he sees a fire on the shore of the fjord they have lived a short walk from for hundreds of years. The fire shouldn’t be there, not tonight, not in this weather. And it is a pale purple. And there is a figure there, charring off sheep’s heads in the flames (sheep’s heads were peasant food in Norway hundreds of years ago). That is Aliss, his grandmother several great-grandmothers down. Aliss at the fire. Time collapses. We witness family units separated by centuries going about their lives. And the wife now and the husband twenty years ago see them. The men of the family are connected by water, by the fatal fjord that calls to them. The women are connected by this house they marry into, and by loss.

The ending, when it comes, is a sharp, wailing shock that I’m still thinking about.

You’ve got to be in the mood for Fosse. You have to be in the mood to be lost at sea and move like a wave through the text. You have to give up on time passing. If you are, then this experience is remarkable.

ALISS AT THE FIRE, Jon Fosse (UK) (US+)

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HOW TO STAGE A COUP, Rory Cormac

Published February 1, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Much mythologized and heavily romanticized, covert action is one of the most misunderstood aspects of the grey zone within international politics.

This was good fun. Essentially a tour of spookwork past and present (the book was published in 2022).

The grey zone is not some blurred line between war and peace; such a thing has always existed. The real grey zone is epistemic: blurred lines between what we know, what we do not know, and what we think we know. The novelty in all of this comes from the fluctuating space between covert action and public knowledge, the decline of state secrecy and the rise of multiple competing narratives churned out across a kaleidoscopic media landscape.

There are, perhaps obviously, things here that I can connect to the Prigozhin book, especially considering he ran the troll farm Internet Research Agency, and that book’s detailing of infighting in the adhocracy:

Russia seeks to seamlessly meld disinformation, subversion, offensive cyber operations and conventional military force. This is not to exaggerate the success of Russia’s approach, though. Putin is no chess grandmaster, deviously manoeuvring his pieces across a global board. Russia’s intelligence agencies compete with each other; covert action is the outcome of bureaucratic infighting. They might take on dangerously risky operations simply to outdo each other; they might encroach on each other’s turf; they might tell Putin what he wants to hear simply to curry favour. As one former Russian intelligence officer put it: ‘You do not bring bad news to the tsar’s table.’

Here, I came across the term liminal warfare, which I find defined elsewhere as “a type of warfare that involves operating near the threshold of detectability. It’s characterized by ambiguous actions that are designed to achieve political objectives without triggering a military response.” Per Cormac:

The Kremlin in particular sponsors operations which are ‘sufficient to keep the wound bleeding but insufficient, thus far, to warrant massive retaliation.

I also find herein this little gem:

One head of intelligence at the end of the Cold War acknowledged the secret services’ droit de mort, or right of death.

It’s a very readable book, rippling through ten aspects of global covert action, going deep into detail and unearthing all kinds of interesting stuff while transmitting lessons learned and marking out the immediate future in clear and often disturbing terms.

The next decades will witness more, not fewer, covert actions. As hidden hands become less hidden, these covert actions will rely on confusion, disruption, ambiguity and cynicism; they will reflect our age of formlessness.

Very educational for me. All kinds of useful stuff. Glad I read it.

HOW TO STAGE A COUP, Rory Cormac (UK) (US+)

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HIS PATH OF DARKNESS, Ed James

Published January 31, 2025 by Warren Ellis

The sixth in the “DI Rob Marshall” Scottish police procedural sequence. And you have to read the other five for this one to make any sense at all.

‘The blood tox came back saying she had drunk enough booze to banjax an aircraft carrier full of sailors.”

Ed James writes these books fast, and they fizz with that energy, even as he seems on the verge of losing control of the material completely. The crime plots are excellent, there’s a sense of humour at play, and James delights in subverting the norms of the form just a little bit. At this point in the sequence, there are too many characters – it does that thing anyone who’s read a later M*A*S*H book recognises, where the plot contrives to use every single bloody character from all the other bloody books — but James has realised this and goes a bit Mick Herron in this one. One hopes that the surprise cullings open up space for some of the cast to get more space in the next book, rather than creating slots for new characters. I personally also hope James has developed a taste for blood and decides to remove some more of that cast.

But I read Ed James for the intelligently built crimes and investigations, and this was a good one. Marshall himself is often good company – even if I was shouting at him and James at the end of the book. Which in itself is probably a sign of well-cultivated investment.

HIS PATH OF DARKNESS (UK) (US+)

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DOWNFALL, Anna Arutunyan and Mark Galeotti

Published January 31, 2025 by Warren Ellis

A short, dense, sharp book about “Putin’s Chef,” the man who formed and ran the Wagner private military company, the man whose armed mutiny nearly reached the Kremlin itself.

…he was ‘sitting’ in Russian parlance, stuck behind barbed wire in what was known as the Zone, the Soviet penal camp system. Old hands in the criminal subculture of the vorovskoi mir, the ‘thieves’ world’, would claim that their real life was that lived inside the Zone.

Prigozhin travelled the world and made millions upon millions, but he never truly left the Zone. This is the story of a born thug and career criminal who learned how to manipulate power but never learned how to armour his own ego against the fact that he was always going to be the hustler with his hand out.

This is, after all, how Putin’s system works. To a considerable extent, it is a modern, bureaucratic state like so many others, its day-to-day actions defined by rules, laws, regulations and institutions. Atop it, though, is an almost medieval court, in which constantly competing factions and individuals are struggling for the most important currency of them all: Putin’s favour. That, in turn, can be converted into whatever else one could want: wealth, fame, power over one’s enemies.

Not that dealing with that world worked out well for everyone in post-Soviet Russia.

…the only man who knew for sure where all the money was, Central Committee treasurer Nikolai Kruchina, fortuitously fell out of a window.

There is a dark dry humour woven through the book. Which isn’t out of place when you’re tracing the life of a street criminal who became a restauranteur and caterer who became a mercenary army commander.

Wagner, so named for the callsign used by Utkin, a man who, as one Russian newspaper report so coyly put it, was ‘known for his commitment to the aesthetics and ideology of the Third Reich’. (He would even sometimes greet Prigozhin with ‘Heil Petrovich,’ using his boss’s codename.) Naming a mercenary army after the German composer may seem surreal, but it later led to a whole slew of supportive memes, with the force being referred to euphemistically as the ‘orchestra’.

The Russian Defense Ministry described Prigozhin thusly: “no morals, no conscience, and no hobbies … He is a machine in the bad sense of the word.” He made himself into a machine for gathering money and power, but the book makes it clear he was always on the outside of real power. The story would almost be a tragedy if Prigozhin wasn’t such a fucking monster. It seems apt that, towards the end of his story, he came full circle:

The first videos that emerged showed Prigozhin standing in a circle of zeks, Russian penal colony prisoners, in their black and white uniforms. He made no bones about the fact that he was from Wagner, that the war was hard and that he was looking for ‘stormtroopers’, but he made his pitch based on equal parts patriotism, machismo and self-interest: ‘no one falls back, no one retreats, no one surrenders’, if need be on pain of a firing squad, but after six months of honourable service, they would be discharged and free. Or dead: ‘I take you out of here alive, but don’t always bring you back alive.’

Admittedly, at least then their families would receive a 5-million-ruble payout (worth some $57,000 at the time). In many ways, this was quintessential Prigozhin. The ever-resourceful businessman had found a new source of manpower for the war, but he could now be out in the open, and talking to the kind of people he had been able to understand and engage in his twenties and still could today.

The follow up to that teaches me a new phrase: “meat wave.”

To a large extent, they would be used as poorly armed and poorly trained cannon fodder, deployed in so-called ‘meat waves’ to wear down or draw out the Ukrainian forces and shield the more experienced Wagner veterans, and their casualties were inevitably frightful.

It’s perhaps a little light on detail in its final chapter or two, partly because at the time of writing it was (and is) still unknown precisely how Prigozhin was killed. But we all know why. Perhaps the real subject of this book is not Prigozhin, but what examining his life reveals about how modern Russia works. The adhocracy, headed by an ageing tsar who puts off hard decisions for entirely too long.

And Aleksander Dugin pops up!

Putin doesn’t care, because he has created a system in which there are always more waiting for their chance. Take, for example, the philosopher Alexander Dugin, a man whose greatest genius may be in self-promotion. For a short while in 2014, his nationalist views aligned with the interests of the Kremlin and he was elevated to scholarly superstar status, his books on every shelf, interviewed on every television channel. Then official policy changed, and Dugin – who for a while was being described as ‘Putin’s brain’ in the West – was no longer needed. The TV appearances dried up, and he even lost his position at Moscow State University. Yet still he stayed loyal – what else was there for him?

Brilliant book. Zips along, and yet feels very complete. And if, like me, you haven’t read deeply into current Russian politics, it feels like a great primer for the actual state of things inside the Kremlin, and explains much about the current situation.

DOWNFALL (UK) (US+)

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THE YEARS, Annie Ernaux

Published January 28, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Dazzling opening, then a steady pulse. Annie Ernaux spent her life looking for the right form for this book, a combination of autobiography and sociocultural history. Born in 1940 in France and reporting the years and years to the late 2010s.

By retrieving the memory of collective memory in an individual memory, she will capture the lived dimension of History.

It’s a strange and bewitching mix of the personal and the political. Ernaux steps outside herself, uses she rather than !, looking at her past selves through photographs that trigger and sort memories. In her words, it works to “convey the passage of time inside and outside of herself, in History, a ‘total novel.’”

(A total novel! Connects in my head with Simenon’s “pure novel.” As well as this quote found in Badiou’s POCKET PANTHEON, regarding the Wagnerian “total work of art”: ‘Wagner’s work bequeaths his posterity an impossible task: going on with what has been completed.’)

From the horribly repressive 1950s when nobody had much of everything – and, honestly, the grim enclosure of a French rural childhood in the Fifties was surprising to me – to the 2010s when they had everything and felt like they had nothing.

Men pissed along the walls in broad daylight. Education aroused suspicion, a fear that through some obscure sanction, a punitive reversal that awaited those who tried to rise above their station, learning made you batty. Teeth were missing from every mouth. The times, people said, are not the same for everyone.

a brown stain on sheets belonging to her grandmother dead for three years, and which her mother inherited – an indelible spot which violently attracts and repels her, as if it were alive

Not having much experience of French common culture, I ended up looking up a lot of things. There was a radio show called THE CHRONICLES OF ORDINARY HATRED! There was a French version of Spitting Image called Les Guignols de l’info. These are absolutely just sidelights, but I like learning these things. Who wouldn’t want to find a radio column called THE CHRONICLES OF ORDINARY HATRED on, just before the evening news?

Television sets were turned in for newer models. The world looked more appealing on the colour display, interiors more enviable. Gone was the chilly distance of black-and-white, that severe, almost tragic negative of daily life.

But look at that. That’s perfect, that weird angle on something ordinary. This is what she does: her angles of attack on the world are entirely her own. It’s a stunning work. An experiential recording. You can touch its skin. Smell its air. It has both a ruthlessness and a richness to it, and the presence of both seems magical.

The moon, when we looked up at night, shone fixedly on billions of people, a world whose vastness and teeming activity we could feel inside. Consciousness stretched across the total space of the planet towards other galaxies. The infinite ceased to be imaginary. That is why it seemed inconceivable that one day we would die.

A necessary, awe-inspiring and recharging book.

THE YEARS, Annie Ernaux (UK) (US+)

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POCKET PANTHEON, Alain Badiou

Published January 22, 2025 by Warren Ellis

I at first thought of calling this set of tributes to philosophers who are no longer with us ‘Funeral Orations’.

Now, I hold the view that neither death nor depression should be of interest to us.

Essentially a collection of obituaries for philosophers that the philosopher Alain Badiou has known and liked and/or argued with.

There’s a fair amount of Badiou writing about himself and fingering away at Marxism, Maoism and communism like fetishes. In many ways, it seems he never got past 1968. Badiou seems a peculiar figure: his philosophy adopts mathematics in various ways, but his grasp on maths seems to be primarily poetic and symbolic. He is also very much a part of the academe where philosophy went to die, which makes him a difficult read, even when he’s writing obits.

And thought is nothing more than a burning to a chaotic infinity, to the ‘Chaosmos’.

The section on Althusser is endless and nigh unreadable. I do not think Badiou meant a human reader to come away with the notion that Althusser turned bullshit-artistry into a tenured academic career.

Philosophy has no real object. It is not thinking about an object. The immediate implication of this point is that philosophy has no history, because any history is normed by the objectivity of its process. As it has no relationship with any real object whatsoever, philosophy is such that, strictly speaking, nothing happens within it.

But the other pieces have their fascinations. It shares with the non-fiction books I love the joy of scattering little nuggets of strange joy.

In The Differend, Lyotard repudiates the notion of Human Rights. Neither ‘rights’ nor ‘human’ are appropriate, he quite rightly notes. He also posits, again quite rightly, that ‘rights of the other’ is not much better. And he finally suggests, in a magnificent expression to which I bow, the ‘authority of the infinite’.

There’s only one woman in here, Francoise Proust, of whose thought he writes:

For once it is assumed that being is primarily power, the basic problem is to demonstrate that, far from being univocally on the side of the active force as such, creativity, inventiveness and the new are on the side of the activation of the reactive force.

And there’s a nice little thing here I want to save:

Borreil states: ‘the attention to the aleatory nature of a gaze that does not decide a priori what is worth looking at and what is not’.

Soft eyes. Letting everything in. I like that.

Mostly a very interesting little book, occasionally even charming, and salted with useful ideas derived from many people I haven’t read deeply on or in a few cases hadn’t even heard of. I have learned things.

POCKET PANTHEON, Alain Badiou (UK) (US+)

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WAR FOR ETERNITY, Benjamin Teitelbaum

Published January 14, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Benjamin Teitelbaum is an ethnomusicologist who got interested in the rise of the nationalist far right. This connection probably makes more sense if you’re European: Oi, turbofolk, National Socialist Black Metal etc. As he gained direct expertise in the scene, he started to see something from his deep reading show up in the world:

By Traditionalism—with a capital T—we were referring to an underground philosophical and spiritual school with an eclectic if minuscule following throughout the past hundred years.


Amid startling political gains for nationalist, anti-immigrant forces in the twenty-first century, Traditionalists on the right appeared to be carrying on with a fantasy role-playing game—like Dungeons & Dragons for racists, as a student once put it.

And Traditionalism connects Steve Bannon, the Russian philosopher/Putin-influencer Aleksandr Dugin, and the Brasilian ideologue Olavo de Carvalho. Which strongly suggests this weird and obscure “philosophy” has underpinned a lot of the strange shit of the last ten years.

I have 55 highlighted text pieces off this book. It’s an absolutely thrilling ride into crazytown. Dugin once had what was essentially a small private army who wore chaospheres as their insignia! Mike Moorcock invented that!

The book is wonderfully readable, a real-life conspiracy-theory rabbithole dive, connections made and explored and explained like the best weird thrillers, digging up stuff I’d never heard of or only encountered at its edges and brought out into bright light.

It’s interesting, too, how Teitelbaum can clearly question and abhor the ideologies present here and also empathise with, and sometimes quite enjoy, the humans. I think he quite likes Bannon, and I think Olavo charmed him a little. None of that gets in the way of Teitelbaum’s sight of the threats presented by these people. But also, there’s a sense of how small these people are. How they’re not as smart as they think they are. How fundamentally damaged some of them are. How they fail.

First book I read front-to-back this year and it was brilliant.

WAR FOR ETERNITY (UK) (US+)

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HOW WE GOT HERE, David Shields

Published January 3, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Full title: How We Got Here: Melville Plus Nietzsche Divided by the Square Root of (Allan) Bloom Times Žižek (Squared) Equals Bannon. I admire the typography-only cover. This book is paired with a film that I haven’t seen yet – it’s on Amazon and Tubi, apparently.

David Shields did REALITY HUNGER, the book that was ground zero for the autofiction / autotheory boom, a large collection of quotations interspersed with the work of the author himself, all attributions scrubbed off so you could never be sure who was who. HOW WE GOT HERE utilises a similar style, but with all the sources named.

His point here is very simple:

…politics as nothing more or less than performance art: After forty years of warning us about the dangers of postmodernism, the right now sounds like Jacques Derrida, and in the wake of Trump’s kidnapping of Perspectivism, the left now sounds like (conservative philosopher) Allan Bloom.

And he assembles his argument like a more spiteful James Burke in CONNECTIONS, hooking together moments in several thousand years’ worth of philosophy as a journey towards professional untruth.

The purest surrealist act is walking into a crowd with a loaded gun and firing into it randomly. —Andre Breton

I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters. —Donald Trump

It’s an entertaining piece of assemblage, eccentric, often funny, generally intriguing. Shields is a skilled collagist, and it’s a bit like reading an Adam Curtis documentary with a sense of humour and more of a handle on human nature.

HOW WE GOT HERE, David Shields (UK) (US+)

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