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For I do not exist: there exist but thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms reflecting me increases.

— Vladimir Nabokov, The Eye

This is flat out one of my books of the year. Ian Penman sat down to write a book about the director/writer Rainer Werner Fassbinder, couldn’t get going, and decided to blast the book out in four weeks the way Fassbinder used to blast out everything.

How to recapture him in all his stubborn, unyielding, messy glory? How to proceed in the spirit of? I decided to try and write the way Fassbinder himself worked: get straight to it and get going right away. The very opposite of what Robert Musil called an aesthetic of postponement.

In something like four hundred numbered pieces, some no more than a few lines long, Penman creates a kaleidoscopic view of Fassbinder and that which surrounds him. Perhaps you, like me, only have a glancing familiarity with his work. Doesn’t matter a bit. Because it’s the story of a creative life and creative acts. And the cost of those acts:

Everything in excess: food, sex, drinks, drugs, cigarettes; but also work. Fassbinder gives the lie to the idea that productivity is in itself a ‘healthy’ thing. There is nothing necessarily ‘healthy’ about the pursuit of any demanding or difficult or very personal art. There may be cruelty involved, to self and others. It throws into question what we might consider a ‘healthy’ productive life at all. The line between self-medication and lethal dose become increasingly thin. The same thing that cures you of one malady exacerbates another.

Life lived at a hurtling rate: beyond a certain point impossible to tell whether it’s speeding up or skidding down or whether finally these now amount to the same thing.

It’s an insanely quotable book – “such palm-smoothed coin-words.” It’s an absolutely thrilling consideration of edge culture and edge creativity, time and place, damage and achievement, art and life.

Yet again, another winner from Fitzcarraldo Books. What an amazing house they are.

FASSBINDER THOUSANDS OF MIRRORS, Ian Penman (shop)

The beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.

I never read JONATHAN STRANGE & MR NORRELL – didn’t look like my sort of thing. But, given the attention paid to it, I was interested in reading Susanna Clarke’s prose. So I picked up the shorter PIRANESI, which looked more like my sort of thing, and then it sat on the digital pile for god knows how long. I opened it one Friday night, and finished it on the Wednesday night. I did not get much sleep. It is really very good.

Also very hard to talk about without serious spoilers, but let me try: there is a man who lives in The House, an apparently infinite arrangement of vast halls filled with giant statues, all constructed upon an ocean with occasionally dangerous tides that provides him seafood to live on, and subject to its own internal weather systems. This is the entire world. He has always lived in The House – however, he possesses education, objects and modern locutions that suggest this is not the case. He is visited twice a week by The Other, the only human he knows, who gives him tasks of observation and measurement in pursuit of The Great And Secret Knowledge. The Other calls our man Piranesi.

Piranesi is not mad. But he has been lied to. A lot.

It is a supernatural/science-fictional mystery novel, but it’s chiefly a study of solitude and empathy, and of living fully in a world full of marvels. (And, perhaps, the old saw about “where we get our ideas from.”) The mystery, by the way, is wonderful. But there’s an argument to be made that the book is really an allegory for how we live and how we don’t live, how we see and how we don’t see, and how the things done to us and taken away from us can sometimes lead to a new life that has its own wonders and joys.

PIRANESI, Susanna Clarke (shop)