Category: books

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+)

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+)

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+)

A work of mournful autotheory. The theme is sight and how we see, and also how we don’t see things, and how we remember. I seem to have accidentally read a lot of sad essay-books this year.

Here’s what attracted me to it:

I wanted to keep alive the nature of my practice, which is to travel the question rather than try to answer it, and then to unsettle my subjects so that they tilted a little as in Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘… tipping/of an object toward the light’.1 My intention has been to draw things to the surface, place them in arrangement while keeping the parts apart, and to leave the reader free to cast their own light and to turn these things over in their own mind as I have in mine. I’ve come to think of this form as the exploded essay, and a record of how thought builds and ideas emerge. Each is a series of short texts that cast light on one another rather like the aspects of a poem. They align artworks, myth, strange voyages, scientific scrutiny, reminiscence and a poet’s response.

Exploded essays.

I like to be taken to the edge of my understanding and language and ideas, and to have my mind slowed so that I can experience what I would describe as wonder. Something has such an impact that I detect a moment of emptiness before the brain rushes in to build an explanation. A moment of wonder is a tremendous relief. There are no words. I can rest now.

She will find a thing she’s interested in, and interview experts about them. Often, they look for a poetic explanation for her, as Greenlaw is a poet, which sometimes comes off a little condescending. But she does look for the poetic in science, like me, and an odd scientific term will thrill her:

I met a Finnish psychiatrist who was an expert in Arctic Personality Disorder. He said that darkness is less of a problem than the cold, which makes the body hoard blood around the heart, depriving the brain. He explained that the Arctic personality is characterised by sisu – adaptability and perseverance. Such people had a tendency to be greedy, stingy and ruthless. They hoarded information, were suspicious of strangers and ‘sexually specialised’.

She marbles her explorations of sight (photography, cinema, the eye, painting) with personal notes of loss and mourning: she wants to be the human observer, not the omniscient narrator. It sets a peculiar tension between the expert exploratory and the personal, and the latter feels like a strain to occupy the commercial space of autofiction rather than a natural extension of the themes. That said, those digressions are sometimes charming and sometimes she manages to hook them directly into the book’s main engine.

She’s a wonderful writer, observer and gatherer, and in general these essays are models to be studied. I’ve read very little like it, though it could be usefully stored next to CAIRN and THE WHITE BOOK and LIMBO.

THE VAST EXTENT, Lavinia Greenlaw (UK) (US+)

Fog on the glass. She touches that and its cold shoots a fern up her arm.

A fern. The shape of frost. Immediately recognisable, yet made strange.

A woman visits hotels across the world, alone. Sometimes she has sex. Sometimes she doesn’t.

Her hard-won victories over the excellent carnage of being young.

What she’s doing, and why she’s doing it, is slowly revealed across the course of the book. The narrator is the mystery, and we are the detective. Even when she tries to cast herself as the detective in our eyes, we know she’s hiding something.

Anyone who’s travelled a bit recognises the aura of the anonymous hotel, the random hotel, the different yet stale hotel, the lie of the promise of the next hotel room. She captures that perfectly.

A sudden new light from behind casts her shadow out. His dreamt-of departure from the bathroom perhaps coming to pass – which is welcome news – but casts her outline monstrous onto the deserted streets of Prague.

“Casts her outline monstrous”: now that is someone who knows how to write a sentence, knowing the risk in that particular framing, and making it fucking glow with newness.

It is a hell of a performance, the slow unwinding of the bandages around one woman’s heart, and joyful as the last twist is pulled off. And the language of it is exquisite: sentences made strange, but happily providing of the keys to their rooms.

Twinkle twinkle there you are, a solitary life on an anomalous star

STRANGE HOTEL, Eimear McBride (UK) (US+)