Category: books

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+)

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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+)

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An extraordinarily difficult book to write about, even though I really liked it.

The idea is that direct literalness, surface and flow, self-identity and self-ramifying truth claim, negation and “the real” are the hallmarks of the present condition – in fact, that a total present is all there is — and art, fiction and medium and their functions of relating and speculating and sparking uncomfortable ideas have been tossed away. Everything is awful: soak in it.

Kornbluh has a vocabulary I can only dream of – in some sections I was going to the dictionary every five minutes – but it is a fun and fierce read. Her Marxism rises to the surface only occasionally, and a strong part of her argument is political: she feels like the current cultural climate is against organising, for example. But her point about negation of any possible way forward is well made.

She lays into all kinds of things with great gusto – her flensings of autofiction and autotheory are greatly entertaining and sometimes much deserved – but she walks critical theory back a bit by insisting on establishing foundations and building on to them. As much as she visibly enjoys cutting the fingers off idiots, her project is constructive. And in the course of the book she casts interesting light on a great many things, from streaming to the selfie.

Might be the best non-fiction book I’ve read all year.

IMMEDIACY, OR, THE STYLE OF TOO LATE CAPITALISM (UK) (US+)

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…and suddenly a crowd of white butterflies was fluttering around me like a shredded contract…

The language of this book took my breath away once every few minutes.

It is a collection of fragments on a handful of themes, wrapped up together with astonishing skill and wit in the final section. The sort of thing that makes me think hard about what I could and should be doing in my own writing, especially here. But “fragments” implies rough edges, and each of these pieces is a carefully, lovingly polished stone. It’s one of a group of books I’ve read this year that could be broadly labelled “women writing about death and the world,” and it can be bleak and it can be wearing on the heart. But it is unforced. It’s an honest rumination on impermanence.

It’s time to move on, toward whatever happens next.

And it is so beautifully written. And it finds pleasure.

From her own dormer window she can reach down to a gutter where she leaves peanuts, and in exchange the jackdaws sometimes bring her silvery gifts, leaving them in the same place. Recently she’s received a 5p piece, a single amber earring and, amazingly, a small coin from Hong Kong. Hong Kong! Where’d they find that, hereabouts? Maybe jackdaws have their own trade routes.

Look at that. Marvellous. And while it can be rueful or even sorrowful, the book never keens, it never reaches to coldly press buttons in your emotions. It has worry, but it wants peace.

In her own words, it is a book of distillations and observations. Expressions of place and of concern. Of what we lose, and maybe of what we need to lose. It’s a little miracle of a thing, and filled with such perfectly weighted and jewelled sentences it makes me ashamed to have ever gone near a keyboard.

CAIRN (UK) (US+)

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From the introduction:

Nicknamed the “City of Black Magic” by its tolerant Italian neighbors, Turin has a long reputation for everything disquieting and spooky. By dread coincidence, Turin has also lent its Italian name to the Torino Scale, used by astronomers to grade the chances that a near-Earth object might “threaten the future of civilization as we know it.”

This is a spooky book. Uncanny.

A decade previously, Turin suffered twenty days of mass insomnia marked by nightly massacres committed by persons unseen or indescribable. The many hundreds of witnesses cannot explain what happened. Today (and “today” is very much the 1970s), an aspiring Turinese author sets out to untangle the mystery of those twenty days. What he discovers is a thoroughly inventive and chilling strain of cosmic horror. Also a metaphor for how power and ideologies use ordinary people, because horror fiction, like science fiction, is at its most affecting when it’s social fiction.

Its most compelling invention, though – and remember this book was written in 1975, only translated into English by Ramon Glasov in 2016 – is the Library. From the intro:

Perhaps De Maria’s most farsighted invention is a Church-run charitable enterprise called the “Library,” created in a door-to-door appeal by a mysterious group of smiling teens. It consists of a reading room where citizens can donate their private diaries or browse the written thoughts of others.

The Library’s supposed goal is to help shy individuals find friends with similar interests and connect in “dialogues across the ether” after paying a nominal fee to learn the diarist’s identity. Read today, in a world driven by blogging and social media, much of this sounds too familiar. Without ever mentioning computers, De Maria has predicted the Internet’s evolution better than many cyberpunk novels from the eighties and nineties. Tellingly enough, the Library’s patrons turn out to be “people with no desire at all for ‘regular human communication.’ ” The institution becomes a colossal storehouse of memoirs by perverts and maniacs, taboo fantasies and even whole diaries devoted to bullying

“It had the variety and at the same time the wretchedness of things that can’t find harmony with Creation, but which still exist, and need someone to observe them, if only to recognize that it was another like himself who’d created them.”

Worse, rather than helping its users connect, the Library consumes their privacy in a “web of mutual espionage . . . malicious and futile.”

And though the Library’s initial form, housed in one location, is destroyed, it later reappears in a distributed network that covertly spans the whole city, as ineradicable as the Internet in real life.

It very much resonates with our contemporary condition:

“Do you think human beings are really like bottomless wells? That we can drain ourselves endlessly without sooner or later finding our souls depleted? In all likelihood, that’s what people did believe, otherwise we would have stopped soon enough; but, unfortunately, we preferred to let the vampires drain everything, with the most extreme consequences.”

This is, however, only one element of a fascinatingly creepy book. It’s very good at creeping threat and incidental weirdness. And I like a good haunted radio. The protagonist is nameless, the people he encounters are broken and fearful, but there is humanity to hold on to, enough that I found myself cringing in dark expectation when the narrator commits an obvious-to-me error. That’s testament enough to the book’s atmosphere.

It’s like a young Calvino rewrote an old Lovecraft, with Eco editing.

It may well have been a response to Italian domestic politics and terror of the 1970s, but it continues to speak in valuable ways. And is, to boot, a hell of a read.

THE TWENTY DAYS OF TURIN (UK) (US+)

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And thank you, O Lord, for speaking to us through the voting in the Conclave, and I pray that soon You will give us the wisdom to understand what it is You are trying to say.

That was a quick read. I’m sure it was longer, by word count, than a novella, but it read like one.

Cardinal Lomeli, recently denounced by his recently-deceased Pope as a mere manager, has to preside over the election of a new Pope, in the famed Conclave. It quickly goes full SUCCESSION, only with less swearing. It’s a slim structure, but the story cracks along, and Harris can clearly spin an attractive yarn in his sleep.

You think you can see the ending coming a mile off, but there’s a big twist at the end – it was signposted, but you don’t necessarily think Harris will go there. But he does. One suspects that the ending came first to Harris: it’s the posed question that the entire story radiates backwards from. It’s very well built, and one can sense Harris chuckling away as he gets to the bit that set the entire book up for him.

You can see why it’s going to be a film. The structure is slender, but it’s entirely sturdy enough to hang a standard screenplay off of, and there are five meaty parts for actors over sixty and one for Isabella Rossellini.

CONCLAVE, Robert Harris (UK) (US+)

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