Category: books

Han Kang won the Nobel for Literature this year (once again, my guy Krasznahorkai shut out), and I hadn’t read anything by her, so off to Amazon I went. Turns out I chose one of her slimmest books. Slim like a knife. Right in the gut.

The Nobel announcement strongly indicated she was a “trauma” writer in the general autofiction zone. There is a piece early on in this book that… if your chest doesn’t clench and your eyes don’t well, you’re probably dead. It was horrible, heartbreaking and perfectly weighted to destroy the reader.

What do the ghosts of this city do, these muffled early-morning hours? Slip soundlessly out to walk through the fog that has been holding its breath, and waiting? Do they greet each other, through the gaps between those water molecules which bleach their voices white? In some mother tongue of their own, another whose meaning eludes me? Or do they only shake or nod their heads, without the need for words?

Han started out to write a book about things that are white, apparently. This seemed quickly to lead her to death and horror – I have started to wonder if trauma-narrative isn’t just high literary horror – and to what I’ve seen termed “inherited pain.” Han had an older sister who only lived a couple of hours. Sequences of this book are Han imagining the world seen through her dead sister’s eyes.

her mind turned to thoughts of nebulae. To the thousands of stars like grains of salt whose light had streamed down to her, those nights at her parents’ countryside home. Clean, cold light that had bathed her eyes, scouring her mind of all memory.

It goes in hard and cold. In its own words, “cold and irrevocable.” There is nothing warm or soft in it. Everything in it has a frost-rimed edge.

A lot of it is set during a period Han spent living in Poland as a writing retreat, and I get the sense a European Fimbulwinter didn’t do her much good. It is, however, beautifully written, in a translation by Deborah Smith. (And suddenly I realise how much translated work I read these days.)

Only once does it let hopeful light in.

It is not true that everything is coloured by time and suffering. It is not true that they bring everything to ruin.

It is extraordinarily well done, but it is like living inside a grieving person’s nightmares. And that person is grieving for everything.

THE WHITE BOOK, Han Kang (UK) (US+)

OF WALKING IN ICE is an old book by Werner Herzog that I read in 2016. Part journal, part travelogue, part dream record, it’s the story of Werner Herzog’s walk from Munich to Paris to visit a dying friend — on the magical belief that if he walked there, the friend would not die. That’s six hundred miles. It’s kind of heartbreaking, in its way. And it’s the dead of winter, so Herzog is walking face-first into horizontal snowstorms for a lot of it. But it’s also very beautiful, in its descriptions of the frozen German countryside and his little pen-portraits of the people he sees (and mostly avoids) along the way. And the dreams are deliciously strange.

Is the Loneliness good? Yes, it is. There are only dramatic vistas ahead. The festering Rankness, meanwhile, gathers once again at the sea.

It’s short, often melancholic, but, in its way, weirdly life-affirming, even as he treads through the dead world towards a deathbed. A proper winter book. Herzog is a global treasure.

Together, I said, we shall boil fire and stop fish.

OF WALKING IN ICE, Werner Herzog (UK) (US+)

That idea crumpled when (Lenin’s) wife reminded him that he would give the game away on any crowded train because he shouted in his sleep. He would have woken an entire carriage, she was certain, with his outbursts, in vernacular but unmistakable Russian, about the perfidies of Kerensky and Miliukov.

He toiled in a high-tension frenzy, his stack of books a fortress wall, his pencils sharpened to cruel points.

It is full of wonderful observations, recovered reportage and bon mots.  Bons mot?

…German officers, who were said to have taken to soaking suspicious cross-border travellers in chemical baths to find out if there might be concealed writing on their skin…

‘Not one party was preparing for the great upheaval,’ remembered Nikolai Sukhanov, then thirty-five years old and working semi-legally as a socialist and writer. ‘Everyone was dreaming, ruminating, full of foreboding, feeling his way.’

Parts of it strongly echo against the walls of the 2010’s. Perhaps not surprising, when a Lenin-admiring political officer sat on the US National Security Council during Trump’s term.

…the new wave were shop-floor radicals who wanted more than talk and promises. Younger, more optimistic and often ready for a fight (Colonel Nikitin, the head of Petrograd counter-intelligence, described them as ‘the dregs of the nation’), the new recruits knew little about ideology or the niceties of Zimmerwald internationalism. They joined the Bolshevik Party because it was known to be the most extreme, the party of the dispossessed, the one whose members talked the toughest line.

LENIN ON THE TRAIN, Catherine Merridale (UK) ((US+)

You want to know how good GNOMON by Nick Harkaway is? I hate him for it.

Imagine a highly-democratised total-surveillance state in the near future. I mean, extraordinarily fine-grained democratic action by and for the people, which also oversees an utterly transparent national surveillance operation. Refusing to participate will get you noticed. If you refuse an interview on the subject, your mind will be read – a process that is not only painless but also has health benefits!

And then someone dies under the process. An inspector is placed on the case to discover how such a rarity could happen. This involves taking the read into her own head, to relive the interviewee’s experience.

There’s something impossible in the read. There’s something impossible in the dead woman’s head.

This book has more than one book in it. It is an astonishing piece of construction, complex and witty and, frankly, evil.

It’s science fiction, but also historical fiction and social fiction and just plain odd fiction. It is a magnificent achievement. He’s never written a bad book, but this is the one that’ll see him mentioned in the same breath as William Gibson and David Mitchell (CLOUD ATLAS). Two names I evoke for very specific reasons.

This book seriously just destroyed me with joy.

GNOMON (UK) (US+)

(note originally written October 2017)

I started living with the seasons a few years ago. I walked out into my garden early one summer, saw it was an overgrown wreck – we hadn’t really touched it since the kid left home – and resolved to do something about it. Taking notice of the land, even my tiny piece of it, means taking notice of the seasons. Being more present in the world and in my body. I spend less time in the office, I don’t write less, but I do more in keyboard-time bursts and in notebooks, and a lot of that latter part happens outside. Or even just writing in my head while I work with the weather and the dirt.

I’m an autumn/early-winter person. I don’t really know how to eat in summer. I am English and I like my meat and root vegetables, my red wine and warming drinks rich with earth. I found this book quite by accident, while I was sitting here thinking about what to cook in a week or two when the warm weather finally passes and the air gets smoky.

I love cookbooks because I love cookery writing. It’s amongst the most lyric in publishing. I read them to read them as much as I read them for recipe inspiration. Diana Henry is a little keener on sour cream than I like, and the volumes of cream and sugar alone mark her as a cook of a certain era (the last contemporary exponent being the butter-crazed James Martin, will Satan have mercy on his arteries), but she has that lyric turn. She loves autumn and winter, its flavours but also its feel and its experiences. This is a writer who lives in the season and revels in its provision.

The pear, whether long and elegant like the Conference, or deliciously dumpy like the Williams, looks shy and drowsy in comparison. After all, practically the whole of its body is in its bottom. I won’t wake it now, I think.

I go out in the mornings now, with my enamel cup of ristretto, and test the apples hanging red with promise from the Bloody Ploughman and Christmas Pearmain. Autumn has sailed in. Soon it will tie itself to the posts of my garden and lay its bounty down for me.

ROAST FIGS SUGAR SNOW, Diana Henry, a classic autumn/winter cookbook. (UK) US+)

An abusive, stalkery, anti-Semitic kleptomaniac. Not quite what I expected when I started this book. But then, when I started that book on Kubrick I did not expect to run out of energy for it when he fucked someone over for the two hundredth time for apparently no other reason that it saved him a dollar and he quite liked it. The difference, perhaps, is that Godard, in his later isolation, seemed to have some self-awareness about it.

But the key view of himself that the film features is a black-and-white photograph of Godard as a child. Contemplating his own childhood image, Godard wonders why that unsmiling face has such a somber aspect: “I was already in mourning for myself, my sole companion, and I suspected that the soul had stumbled on the body and that it had left again without offering its hand.”

This book is admirably unsparing of Godard’s personal failings, but also meets its intent of focusing on the man’s work and method. Even during Godard’s fairly empty and pointless engagé/Maoist phase. What emerges for me is how much of a “record collection band” Godard was for a chunk of his career. He was a remixer, and his later essay films very much affirm that. He was a visual plunderphonics guy, and got away without paying sample fees because he was Jean-Luc Godard. The guy commuted on Concorde but nobody wanted to hit him for fees because he was a cinematic international treasure.

“For a long time I said that I was on the margin, but that the margin is what holds the pages together. Today I have fallen from that margin, I feel that I’m between the pages.”

The author is very very good at unwinding and presenting process and theory with clarity and intelligence. The book is chronological but all the threads of thought and production are well maintained throughout. There is, I think, a lot of value here for anyone in the creative arts. I found all kinds of stuff I can adapt and use and think about, which Godard, the great adapter and re-user, would probably approve of.

Godard was arguing that the aesthetics of cinema were inherently political, that movies passed along to their viewers a secret ideological code that viewers then, in their own communications, also passed along; he was refashioning his ideological advocacy as a theory of communication. This analysis was a radically dialectical version of Godard’s early insight that “at the cinema, we do not think, we are thought.”

EVERYTHING IS CINEMA: THE WORKING LIFE OF JEAN-LUC GODARD, Richard Brody (UK) (US+)