'Familiar' by J. Robert Lennon

When Elisa is driving home from her annual visit to the grave of her son, she suddenly finds herself in different clothes and in a different car. The life awaiting her is different: her son hasn’t died, his brother has grown up differently, her relationship with her husband is different. Is this what she has longed for, for her son not to have died? Elisa bears the knowledge that her son has ‘really’ died, and so she cannot fit authentically into the space this life has reserved for her – or is her belief that her son has died a form of mental derangement, symptomatic of her repressed hatred of the role of wife and mother? This is a compelling and unnerving interrogation of the ambivalences of parenting and the fraught constructs of identity.

(December 2014)
 

'An Unreal House Filled With Real Storms' by Elizabeth Knox

Is it fiction's job to make the supernatural (whatever that is) natural (whatever that means)? Or to blur (or erase) the line between the two? Should (can?) 'genre' be hollowed out and filled with 'literature' (whatever that is)? How do the forces impacting on an author's (or a reader's) personal life alter the world view informing their writing (and reading)? What does loss leave you with? Can the omnipresent (whatever that is) be encountered in a taxi in a tunnel? What should (can) we make of all this? This unique insight into the tectonics of Knox's creative mind was delivered as the inaugural Margaret Mahy Memorial Lecture in August 2014. For me it raises more questions than it answers, and the implications of some of its assertions stretch over the border into what I would class as fantasy but Knox may well not, but it is exactly these restless and irresolvable blurrings (misclassifications?) between imaginative and quotidian worlds that makes Knox’s fiction so fertile, fresh and sometimes frustrating.

Dec 14
 

'Self-Portrait of an Other' by Cees Nootebaum and Max Neumann

“Transmigration of the soul does not happen after but during a life.” Nootebaum wrote his 33 texts in response to a series of striking, raw, unsettling images drawn by Neumann in charcoal and orange paint on brown paper bags. I ordered this book after being impressed by Neumann’s artwork in Animalinside, his collaboration with writer Lazlo Krasnahorkai. Nootebaum’s texts are like dreams or memories, evanescent, full of significance without consequence and transgressing the borders of identity.

(December 2014)

'The Rabbit and the Shadow' by Mélanie Rutten

Childhood is filled with loves, fears, ambivalences and incomprehensible impulses, all of which are facets of the same developmental imperatives. The same could well be said of parenthood. Dependence is both comforting and smothering; independence is both exciting and terrifying. In this this beautifully illustrated, thoughtful book, Stag cares for Rabbit. Stag fears Rabbit growing up and leaving, and Rabbit fears Stag growing old and dying. When they are separated, Rabbit meets a group of other characters – the child ‘Soldier’ who is full of anger, the ‘Cat’ who dreams of happiness, the ‘Book’ who wants to know everything, the mysterious ‘Shadow’ – and climbs the terrifying volcano, a shared adventure during which the participants reveal their fears and learn to trust each other. Different children will respond to different aspects of this story at different times, depending on what is (subconsciously) relevant to them. Don’t tell my niece, but she is getting a copy of this book for her birthday.

(Dec 2014)
 

'Three Stories' by J.M. Coetzee

Three stories, one written as Coetzee's Nobel acceptance speech, interrogate the nature of our relationships with the inanimate (‘A House in Spain’), the casting of our imaginations back into the uncertainties of history (‘Nietverloren’), and the feelings of a narrator towards his writer (‘He and his Man’, in which an autonomous Robinson Crusoe considers ‘his man’ Daniel Defoe as the tables between writer and work are turned (or at least very steeply tilted)).

December 2014
 

'Gargoyles' by Thomas Bernhard

“The catastrophe begins with getting out of bed.” Gargoyles (first published in 1967 as Verstörung (“Disturbance”)) is the book in which Bernhard laid claim both thematically and stylistically to the particular literary territory developed in all his subsequent novels. In the first part of the book, set entirely within one day, the narrator, a somewhat vapid student accompanying his father, a country doctor, on his rounds, tells us of the sufferings of various patients due to their mental and physical isolation: the wealthy industrialist withdrawn to his dungeon-like hunting lodge to write a book he will never achieve (“’Even though I have destroyed everything I have written up to now,’ he said, ‘I have still made enormous progress.’”), and his sister-companion, the passive victim of his obsessions, whom he is obviously and obliviously destroying; the workers systematically strangling the birds in an aviary following the death of their owner; the musical prodigy suffering from a degenerative condition and kept in a cage, tended by his long-suffering sister. The oppressive landscape mirrors the isolation and despair of its inhabitants: we feel isolated, we reach out, we fail to reach others in a meaningful way, our isolation is made more acute. “No human being could continue to exist in such total isolation without doing severe damage to his intellect and psyche.” Bernhard’s nihilistic survey of the inescapable harm suffered and inflicted by continuing to exist is, however, threaded onto the doctor’s round: although the doctor is incapable of ‘saving’ his patients, his compassion as a witness to their anguish mirrors that of the author (whose role is similar). In the second half of the novel, the doctor’s son narrates their arrival at Hochgobernitz, the castle of Prince Saurau, whose breathlessly neurotic rant blots out everything else, delays the doctor’s return home and fills the rest of the book. This desperate monologue is Bernhard suddenly discovering (and swept off his feet by) his full capacities: an obsessively looping railing against existence and all its particulars. At one stage, when the son reports the prince reporting his dream of discovering a manuscript in which his son expresses his intention to destroy the vast Hochgobernitz estate by neglect after his father’s death, the ventriloquism is many layers deep, paranoid and claustrophobic to the point of panic. The prince’s monologue, like so much of Bernhard’s best writing, is riven by ambivalence, undermined (or underscored) by projection and transference, and structured by crazed but irrefutable logic: “‘Among the special abilities I was early able to observe in myself,’ he said, ‘is the ruthlessness to lead anyone through his own brain until he is nauseated by this cerebral mechanism.’” Although the prince’s monologue is stated to be (and clearly is) the position of someone insane, this does not exactly invalidate it: “Inside every human head is the human catastrophe corresponding to this particular head, the prince said. It is not necessary to open up men’s heads in order to know that there is nothing inside them but a human catastrophe. ‘Without this human catastrophe, man does not exist at all,’ the prince said.”

(December 2014)
 

'Under the Skin' by Michel Faber

This is a strange and beautiful book. Isserley spends most of her time driving her little red car through the Scottish highlands, picking up beefy lone male hitchhikers. Why she does so and what happens to the hitchhikers is slowly made apparent, as is Isserley’s true nature as an extreme outsider who is subtly yet profoundly altered by contact with the world in which she is planted. Faber’s breath-taking prose and narrative restraint make Isserley’s pain at posing as what she is not, her emotional transformation through her imposture, the new empathy she unexpectedly discovers, and the uncertainty and vulnerability she feels as she is caught between what she can never return to being and what she can never be, into something believable, thought-provoking and moving. Our received attitudes towards ‘the other’ (however conceived) are constantly called into question and left inverted. Faber makes what should be familiar strange, and what should be horrific suffused with profound and beautiful melancholy.
>> I read this book after seeing the strange and beautiful film based on it.

'How to Be a Public Author' by Francis Plug

Francis Plug is the fictional alter ego of New Zealand ex-pat Paul Ewen. Until he wins the Booker Prize for the book he is writing, the alcoholic Plug works as a gardener for a wealthy banker, and attends author events with Booker Prize-winning authors to get some pointers on how celebrity authors behave and to get them to inscribe their books to him. Ewen attended all the actual events, which are hilariously and astutely reported, and the actual inscriptions to Plug are displayed in the book (a complete set of living Booker winners, up to and including Eleanor Catton) along with the conversations between ‘FP’ and the authors. Frequently Plug’s idiotic and disruptive drink-fuelled behaviour at the events veers off into fiction but it is not always clear just a what point this departure is made. As he ploughs his nose deeper into the berm of his extra-literary life, the puerile Plug becomes a surprisingly sympathetic character, a sort of pathetic everyman, sharpening the satire of literary success which makes this book so compelling as well as actually making me laugh quite frequently.
>> Francis Plug crashes the 2014 Man Booker short list.
>> Interview with Paul Ewen
>> Do you remember the actual-celebrity-nabbing fictional character Norman Gunston?

'What We See When We Read' by Peter Mendelsund

Peter Mendelsund has designed some of the best book covers of recent years, and one of the reasons that they are so successful is that they arise from his careful reading of the texts. In this book, which reminds me of Ways of Seeing and The Medium is the Massage in its interplay of image and text giving an appealingly light touch to a heavy subject, he is particularly interested in the visual effects of reading. These visual effects are non-optical and comprise mental images fished into awareness by the ‘unseen’ black hooks of text; they are the fictional correlative of the visual effects fished into awareness by ‘actual’ optical stimulation. I suppose a difference between reading text and reading actuality is that when reading text the scope of our awareness has been set for us by the authority of the author (our surrogate self), whereas actuality is undifferentiated and incomprehensibly overstimulative and the necessary repression of stimuli in the reading of it is dependent on personality, conditioning, socialisation and practicality. Emphasising that he is interested in the experience of reading rather than the memory of reading (if such a distinction can be sensibly made), Mendelsund treats in depth an aspect of what I would call ‘the problem of detail’: what is the role of the reader in ‘completing’ the text? Whereas the reader’s ‘actual’ experiences of course inform and colour their reading of detail, I’m not sure I entirely agree with Mendelsund’s opinion that when reading we ‘flesh out’ characters in our imagining of them or place them in ‘familiar’ contexts – while we are reading we may well also indulge in such extra-textual self-massage, but I don’t think that this is the reading itself.

November 2014

 

 

 

—Hey M, has Hamlet got ears?
—Um, well, I guess.
—What? And who do you think you are? Mr Shakespeare, I presume? You leave Hamlet alone! It’s not up to you to decide.
—Well, we aren’t told that he hasn’t got ears.
—So? We aren’t told that he has! Confine yourself to the text, Max, that’s all there is. Not much.
—Well?
—Or too much.
—Well, what about the ears? How am I supposed to think about Hamlet?
—You’re not supposed to think about his ears. That’s none of your business! Confine yourself to the text: that’s all you are permitted.
—But you asked about his ears!
—Yeah. I tricked you. Ha ha ha.

'The Whispering Skull' (‘Lockwood & Co.’ #2) by Jonathan Stroud

The world is beset by a plague of ghosts that only children (and only some children) can overcome. Lucy, George and Lockwood comprise London’s smallest but most talented psychic investigation agency. In this second adventure (if you haven’t read The Screaming Staircase, it is time you did) a horrific mirror removed from a disinterred coffin attracts the attention of powerful forces among both the living and the dead (including that of a haunted but safely encapsulated skull that ‘just happens’ to be in the Lockwood & Co.'s possession, and with which Lucy finds herself able to communicate). These books have excellent characters, are both genuinely scary and genuinely funny (Stroud adeptly moves between these poles as he tightens the screws of the plot) and demand to be read and read until they are finished. This second book is even better than the first.

(Oct 2014) 

'Infidelities' by Kirsty Gunn

Gunn’s last book, The Big Music, which won the 2013 New Zealand Book of the Year, was a novel of vast scope and innovation, an exploration of the forces of pattern and place on emotion and (in)action. The stories in Infidelities (divided into three sections: ‘Going Out’, ‘Staying Out’ and ‘Never Coming Home’) narrow the scope to examine various kinds of infidelity and betrayals of trust, sometimes devastating, sometimes so subtle that a mere ripple of barely recognised possibility is enough to change a life’s direction, or to retain an undischargeable potency in a life whose direction is not changed. Gunn is good picking out the tiny flaws and irregularities in the knit of relationships at which unravelling will seemingly inevitably begin, and at presenting small details upon which the characters’ lives and the reader’s understanding of them turn (Gunn’s time attuning herself to Katherine Mansfield (read Thorndon) is very much in evidence). The title story, about a writer trying and failing to realise in fiction the potential for infidelity not realised in an actual brief incident much earlier in her life, epitomises Gunn’s interest in emotional ambivalence and the possibilities and impossibilities of the eddies and countercurrents beneath the surface of ordinary lives.

(Oct 2014)

"After Me Comes the Flood' by Sarah Perry

It is hard not to read a book that begins, “I’m writing this in a stranger’s room on a broken chair at an old school desk. The chair creaks if I move so I must keep very still.” A man is on his way to visit his brother during a heat wave when his car overheats on a country road. He walks to find water for the radiator and comes across a secluded house where he is greeted by a woman he at first takes for a child, and then by other residents of the house, who all seem to have been impatiently anticipating his arrival and greet him by name. Not assertive enough to point out their mistake, he is shown to ‘his’ room, where he finds the luggage of another man, whose name is a near-homonym of his. As time goes on it becomes more and more difficult for the incomer to deny what he feels is the role of an imposter, and his relationships with the residents become more complex and entrenched and frightening. The book, which switches back and forth between first and third person in a way that effectively robs the main character of agency whilst fatalising the consequences of his choices, is permeated by a feeling of dread: who are the residents of this house which exists in almost timeless isolation from ‘life’? What are they doing here and what do they want of him? Perry’s extremely claustrophobic book captures the terror of feeling that you are an imposter in your life, caught by the expectations of others, effective strangers, whose motivations are hidden by their surfaces and who are affected by your actions (or lack of them) in a way that further implicates you in a role you become increasingly powerless to escape.

(Oct 14)
 

'American Smoke: Journeys to the end of the light' by Iain Sinclair

Sinclair is an outstanding psychogeographer, best known for his walks through parts of London whose neglected multivalent histories are under threat from bland internationalist renewal. His work is satisfying for the same reason as W.G. Sebald’s: both writers unshackle historical detail from the narrowing of meaning normally concomitant with the passing of time. In American Smoke Sinclair travels across the United States, ostensibly in search of the psychic spoor of the writers associated with the Black Mountain College and the Beats – Charles Olsen, Malcolm Lowry, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs et al – but really tracking the literary veins of his formative years as a young man in Dublin. For Sinclair, every journey outwards is a means to an inward journey, each observed detail leads to a core sample of history and possibility and unleashes a web of resonance and understanding through the fractal reach of his incredible prose. If you are interested in the Beats, this book will provide a richness and subtlety of understanding unavailable from other sources (and possibly beyond the scope of its subjects (the book is, after all, about the possibilities of being aware of something rather than about the thing itself)); if you are not interested in the Beats this is still a very rewarding book to read: open to any page and a detail will begin to refract and vibrate with unexpected understanding (and who knows, you might inadvertently become a little more interested in the Beats (twisted as they were from flaws and failures) once the clichés of their legacy have been discharged).

(October 2014)
 

'Shark' by Will Self

The edges of personality are permeable, we exist in each other’s memories and imaginations more clearly than we do in our own (if memory or imagination can be called our own), and our minds (if they can be called minds) are a seething mass of voices, ceaseless and from all sources, coagulating and dissolving against the bows of consciousness as it passes, impelled by unseen currents and capricious winds as much as by the hand that affects to grasp the tiller. Shark is a remarkable portrayal of the movement of thought as it skitters, with or without attempts to control it, across the slippery surfaces of circumstance. What starts with the Joycean image of the protagonist, Zac Busner, shaving, moves, with Joycean fluidity and corresponding linguistic maximalism, from mind to mind and voice to voice between the characters Busner 'contains', principally the residents at the experimental anti-psychiatric community he runs along the lines of those of R.D. Laing. Self is very interested in the formal pressures exerted upon narrative by unacknowledgeable forces (in the way that a work by W.G. Sebald may be ‘about’ the Holocaust without directly mentioning it), and has said he wanted to write a book that was ‘Jaws without the shark’ (the shark in this instance being drug-addiction (of which Self has personal experience)). The trauma that percolates through the characters and discharges from mind to mind during an ill-advised therapeutic LSD session (this is 1970) is the involvement of one of Busner’s patients in an (actual) historical incident: after delivering the atomic bomb that would be dropped on Nagasaki, the USS Indianapolis was sunk by a Japanese submarine and, before the delayed rescue, 600 men were eaten by sharks. This book is both terrible and tender, both challenging and a lot of fun, and Self’s vast, playful, fierce intellectual achievement is informed also by deep feeling and compassion.

(October 2014)

 

'Finnegans Wake' by James Joyce

Occasionally, usually when suffering from a fever, my mind takes words and phrases and pulls them apart and recombines them and distorts them and relates them to other words and phrases and hybridises them and separates them from their sense and plays around with their pronunciation. This is distressing. I used to think that this was caused by the neurotoxic side-effect of a pathogen or the delirium of fever, but soon came to believe that this is the nature of language: without our constant yet relatively feeble and fleeting attempts to coagulate it into meaning, language is a heaving sea of chaotic association and permutation, endlessly fertile but ultimately not conducive to sanity. We expend a lot of effort resisting language’s inherent tendency towards chaos, generally with good reason: we seek clarity and sanity. I recently bought a nice copy of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, in which the author pulls down all the dykes and lets the sea wash over the land. Herein lie all the linguistic symptoms it usually takes illness to induce. Joyce spent seventeen years compulsively holding the idea of the novel underwater, holding it in that moment of uncertainty when drowning and developing gills seem about equally likely. Having prescription for roxithromycin filled before reading this book is probably a good idea. (Note: my edition has 28 pages of ‘Corrections of Misprints’, which make enjoyable reading (too bad the misprints were corrected in later editions and this addendum not reproduced). I wonder how many compositors died in the printing of this book.)

Sept 2014
 

'Works' by Edouard Levé

This book describes works conceived of but not realised by its author, starting with #1: “A book describing works conceived of but not realised by its author”. The following 532 ‘works’ of art and literature are variously conceptual, silly, profound, irritating, revelatory and mercilessly inventive. Some, such as Amérique (a road trip across America to photograph towns named after places not in America), were later realised, but for many reading about them is sufficient (or the only possible way) to extract their worth (if they have worth). Here’s another, chosen at random: #72 “The eraser residues of all the students in a fine arts institute are collected for a year and assembled into a cube”. And another: #282 “Drawings are made while the artist is suffering from a blinding migraine that obscures the centre of his visual field”. I will add one of my own: #534 “A book is briefly reviewed by a man who was born on the same day in the same year as the author and a half-hearted attempt is made to make this coincidence significant”.

(Sept 2014)
 

'Silence Once Begun' by Jesse Ball

After the disappearance of several people in Narito, Japan, in 1977, the police received a signed confession. The arrested man refused to answer questions or ask for food (even when starved) and was eventually executed. Decades later, a writer named Jesse Ball, disconsolate after the breakdown of a marriage in which his wife suddenly stopped talking to him, sets out to record the details of the case. We learn from the start that the confession was false, signed on the loss of a wager, but that the detained man, Oda Sotatsu, did not recant the confession. From Ball’s ‘verbatim’ interviews, we receive various and conflicting accounts from members of Sotatsu’s family and from a prison guard, and the writer sets out to find first Jitto Joo, a woman who was present at the wager and then visited Oda Sotatsu every day in jail (and to whom the writer clumsily tells his own story as a way of attaining hers), and then Sato Kakuzo, the deviser of the confession. Although we learn some ‘facts’ about the case, the motivations of the protagonists, and particularly the part played by Jitto Joo in holding Oda Sotatsu firm to the confession, become if anything more opaque. The more personal the revelations, the less convincing they become. Ball’s very plain style, which at times has the non-literary feel of a hasty translation (it’s not), gives this novel of personal dislocation a surface through which meaning cannot penetrate without losing its authenticity. This feeling of understanding becoming increasingly unattainable through the compounding of immediate details reminded me of the novels of Kobo Abe (The Box Man, The Face of Another).

(Sept 14)
 

'My Prizes, An accounting' by Thomas Bernhard

When I begin to despair of the rottenness of the world I find it helpful to self-medicate with a dose of Thomas Bernhard. There is no pretension he will not mock, no relation he will not excoriate, no balloon he will not puncture - and it is all done in sentences so beautifully wrought that the reader is left breathless. Some of the targets of his invective are the institutions of his native Austria, which he sees as ossified with Catholic and Nazi values (his will forbade the publication of his work in Austria). My Prizes, a playfully vicious account of his acceptance of nine major literary prizes, is not only a biting-of-the-hand (while demonstrating why the hand deserves to be bitten) but also a kind of self-assassination and an assault on the reverence society holds for literati. Always less than gracious, Bernhard chooses to accept the prizes for the money attached, and delivers scandalous speeches (one of which causes the culture minster to walk out on the ceremony). The only award he approves of is one from the Federal Chamber of Commerce – he accepts that one as a recognition of the great example he sets for shop-keeping apprentices. Bernhard portrays himself as overweening and feckless: he decides to use prize money to buy a farmhouse (even though he despises the countryside) but can’t be bothered looking around and buys the first rotten house he is shown. Why does reading Bernhard make me feel better? Maybe because, although he gives his attention to the unremitting uselessness of everything, his attention (and the quality of his sentences) remains unassimilated by this uselessness. Of the periods in which Bernhard did succumb to hopelessness and despair and found literature pointless, no record was produced.

(September 2014)
 

'Things I Don’t Want to Know' by Deborah Levy

In 1946 George Orwell wrote an essay ‘Why I Write’, in which he described some events that marked his development towards becoming a writer and outlined what he saw were the four main motives for writing: ‘Sheer egoism’, ‘Aesthetic enthusiasm’, ‘Historical impulse’ and ‘Political purpose’. He explained that he would not naturally have become a political writer had circumstances not demanded it. Responding to this essay but contrasting the bluntness of its assertions with a subtler and less direct approach, Deborah Levy, who re-emerged from undeserved obscurity when she was shortlisted for the 2011 Booker Prize for Swimming Home (now shelved beside 1989’s Beautiful Mutants at home), takes Orwell’s four ‘motives’ as titles for pieces of memoir: of her childhood in South Africa (where her father was imprisoned for five years as a member of the ANC); of her teenage years in England, wishing to ‘belong’; and of a time she spent in the off-season at a small mountain hotel in Majorca, despondent, wondering how to deal with things she didn’t want to think about and doubting her ability to get her writing out into the world. As she talks with a Chinese shopkeeper, another displaced character, over dinner, she comes to some resolve: “To become a writer I had to learn to interrupt, to speak up, to speak a little louder, and then louder, and then to just speak in my own voice which is not loud at all”.

(August 2014)
 

'Dept. of Speculation' by Jenny Offill

This book, comprised of short paragraphs, observations, quotes and quips - poignant, skittish, acute or throwaway - contains a familiar domestic narrative, albeit one related at such speed (first uphill then down with the accelerator fully depressed) that it hardly adheres to the corners. The narrator, a writer and would-be ‘art monster’, unforeseeably marries and has a child (as tends frequently to happen to would-be art monsters), providing a husband and daughter to vie with writing for priority in her life. The narrator feels an ambivalence towards marriage and parenthood that she cannot fully acknowledge: love and frustration, joy and boredom - nothing seems quite to fit or satisfy, but then nothing ever seemed to fit or satisfy. We are given information about missions into space. Then, suddenly, in the midst of all this cherished but ill-fitting domesticity, the narrative switches from first to third person as the narrator’s agency is annulled by the discovery of her husband’s infidelity. The paragraphs become more cynical and bitter, the child falls out of the narrative (her absence from mention here being perhaps the most painful part of the book), the factoids concern lost arctic explorers, we are treated to bursts of (somewhat ironic) Rilkean ecstatic misery. The wife visits one of her writing students who has bandaged wrists, contemplates admission to a hospital, decides upon forcing a family relocation to the country. Only in the very last paragraph of the book is the first person narration regained, so subtly it almost isn’t noticed, intimating the possibility that something here is worth reclaiming, that something here could be rebuilt.

Aug 2014

 

'A Million Windows' by Gerald Murnane

The great concern in Murnane’s writing is the relationship between the fiction he writes and what he calls the ‘image world’ (he insists this is nothing to do with ‘imagination’ in the sense of making things up (he is, he says, incapable of making things up)), and, to a lesser yet strongly implied degree, the relationship between these two and the ‘actual world’, which he seems to regard as little more than an access point to (or of) the image world, and a place of frailties, disappointment and impermanent concerns. When Murnane describes the “chief character of a conjectured piece of fiction… a certain fictional male personage, a young man and hardly more than a boy” preferring the image-world relationship he had inside his head with a “certain young woman, hardly more than a girl” he sees every day in the railway carriage in which he travels home from school to the actual relationship he starts to develop (and soon abandons) with her after they eventually start to converse, he underscores a turning away, or, rather, a turning inward to the more urgent and intense image-world. Like some woefully under-recognised antipodean Proust, Murnane is fascinated by the mechanics of memory, which he sees as an operation of the image-world upon the actual, giving rise to the ‘true fictions’ that allow elements of the image-world to present themselves to awareness in a multiplicity of guises and versions. Murnane differs from many theorists of fiction in that he does not attribute primacy to the text but to the image-world to which the text gives access and which may contain, for instance, characters who have access, perhaps through their fictions, to image-worlds and characters inaccessible (at least as yet) to us. The million windows (from Henry James: “The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million”) are those of “a house of two or maybe three storeys”, inhabited by writers, all perhaps versions or potential versions of Murnane himself, who look out over endless plains as they engage in the act of writing fiction, or discuss doing so. The multiplicity of this process stands in relation to an unattainable absolute towards which memories and other fictions reach, or, rather, which reaches to us in the form of memories and other fictions. Murnane’s small pallet, his precisely modulated recurring images and his looping, delightfully pedantic style are at once fascinating, frustrating, soporific and revelatory.
>> Meet Murnane here.

August 2014

 

'Solaris' by Stanislaw Lem

A psychologist, Kelvin, is sent to a station on the ocean-covered planet Solaris to determine whether to terminate the mission because of lack of progress and a high rate of insanity. The station is beset by strange occurrences and appearances, including, eventually, the presence of Kelvin’s dead wife. As the scientists futilely attempt to observe the planet, the sentient planet is seemingly probing their psyches, giving form to their fears and desires. Ultimately, no communication is possible: all interaction with the Other is nothing but reflection, all observation reveals nothing but the observer. Containing passages of weird beauty and compelling philosophical speculation, this science fiction novel makes provocative points about the insularity of our (largely illusionary) realities and the impossibility of experiencing anything beyond ourselves.
Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film can be seen here. 

(July 2014)
 

'Jim’s Lion' by Russell Hoban and Alexis Deacon

A boy is seriously ill in hospital, and fearful of the operation that may or may not save his life. A nurse tells him he must find in his dreams his animal ‘finder’, which will protect him and bring him back from wherever his illness and the doctors take him. In dream and in delirium, and wherever the mind goes when under anaesthetic, Jim and his lion help each other overcome  a series of symbolic entities and dangers, mapping out for us a kind of understory to the clinically observable disease and treatment. Some of Jim’s experiences reminded me of when I was once delirious with fever and ‘saw’ the disease I was subject to as a vast crystalline being looming in the corner of the room. Hoban’s poetic story of illness overcome has been wonderfully captured and extended by Deacon’s powerful and imaginative illustrations, which construct, out of ludicrous and frightening fragments, a picture of a young mind grappling at the deepest level with agents that seek its extinction. Hoban and Deacon first collaborated on the memorable Soonchild, the last book Hoban wrote before his death in 2011.

(July 2014)
 

'Old Masters' by Thomas Bernhard

One voice entirely dominates this novel, not the voice of the narrator Atzbacher, but that of Reger, an aging music critic who has been coming every second day for thirty years to sit in front of Tintoretto’s Portrait of a White-Bearded Man in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum. In the first half of the single paragraph that floods this book with intricately structured reports of Reger’s liberally misanthropic invective, Atzbacher arrives early to meet Reger and observes him from another gallery, recalling things Reger has said to him on previous occasions. In the second half, what Reger says to Atzbacher that day is interwoven with what Reger has said during a previous meeting at a hotel, eventually revealing details of the death of Reger’s wife, which underlies much of the near-hysterical nihilism that Reger pours out of himself and through everyone else. During the passages dealing with the death of Reger’s wife the temporal structure of the narrative is more fragmented, reflecting Reger’s distress. Atzbacher, the museum attendant Irrsigler, and, we learn, Reger’s unnamed wife all function as nothing more than mouthpieces for Reger’s rather Bernhardian opinions, Reger who claims that the relationship in which the parties know as little as possible of each other is the ideal relationship, the relationship which does not contradict his projection. Reger’s opinions, though often sharply barbed and frequently desperately funny, are not supported by argument and are repetitively over-inflated and generalised, undermining their authenticity as opinions but strengthening the dominating voice of the incurably isolated Reger. As with all Bernhard’s novels, the primary content of Old Maters is its form. Reger’s inability to find worth in his world is desperately ambivalent: “I am resisting this total despair about everything, Reger said. I am now eighty-two and I am resisting this total despair about everything tooth and nail”. The art of doing this is the art of existing against the facts: “Art is the most sublime and the most revolting thing simultaneously, he said. But we must make ourselves believe that there is high art and the highest art, he said, otherwise we would despair. Even though we know that all art ends in gaucherie and ludicrousness and in the refuse of history, like everything else, we must, with downright self-assurance, believe in high and in the highest art, he said. We realise what it is, a bungled, failed art, but we need not always hold this realisation before us, because in that case we should inevitably perish, he said.” The novel ends with Reger taking Atzbacher to a performance of Kleist’s Broken Pitcher at the Burgtheater (“the most hideous theatre in the world”), and in the very last line Atzbacher gets to express an opinion of his own: “The performance was terrible”.

(July 2014)
 

'Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death' by Otto Dov Kulka

A child exposed to experiences of a kind and scale that cannot be assimilated will create their own mythology to make life liveable. Otto Dov Kulka was a child in Auschwitz, and went on to become a prominent historian of the Holocaust. This book is remarkable as it deals specifically with the internal aspects of surviving in an intolerable situation, young Otto’s ‘Metropolis of Death’. One of the tragedies of the Holocaust was the way in which millions of people, each with their own personal narrative, were subsumed by a single narrative (one which led to the gas chambers and crematoria). It is unfortunate that even many of the most sympathetic portrayals and histories tend to reinforce the single narrative, the erasure, and it is interesting to read Kulka express his feelings of alienation when reading or watching accounts of concentration camp experiences. One of Kulka’s achievements in this deeply thoughtful book is to show how an individual can retain that individuality, and even find a sort of beauty and meaning, even under the irresistible weight of a subsuming narrative such as the ‘immutable law of the Great Death’.

(June 2014)

 

'Double Negative' by Ivan Vladislavic

In the first of the three decades of this book, a rather unfocussed young man stands on a hill above apartheid-era Johannesburg with a renowned photographer and a journalist. As a game, they each pick out a house in the city below, and descend. The photographs the photographer takes at two of the houses become iconic images of a social-realist sort. They don’t reach the third house, the one chosen by the young man, because of failing light. In the second section, the disaffected narrator returns to South Africa following the fall of Apartheid (which occurred in his absence in London). He is now an aspiring photographer himself, and visits the third house to photograph whoever lives there. By the third section, he has become an established photographer (a more superficial version of the first one) and is being interviewed by a rather unfocussed young journalist. Vladislavic’s prose is clear and open, and he gently uses photography as a metaphor for his musings on change and memory, depth and superficiality, authenticity and appearance. What sort of perspective does an instant give on a process, or a detail on a complexity, or a surface on an interiority? Do our experiences and memories really give us much of an understanding of the times we live in and of the lives of others? If we do manage to make more than superficial contact with another person, how is it possible to communicate this when we have only superficial means?

(June 2014)

 

'Can't and Won't' by Lydia Davis

The narrower the aperture, the greater the depth of field. The best of Lydia Davis’s stories are little more than a detail or an image or a wry observation presented without a misplaced word or superfluous comma, precise enough to suggest that great slabs of life hinge about her words, without these slabs being fiction as such. Perhaps the distinction between actuality and fiction is too coarse to be relevant to such literature of the infra-ordinary and should be left to the literatures of the ordinary (for which this distinction is constantly contestable if ultimately unimportant) and of the extra-ordinary (for which it is pre-established in the effective contract between author and reader). Thrifty with her language, characterisation and narrative to the point of asceticism, Davis’s work attains a whittled acuity subtle enough to glance off the surfaces they address without (generally) becoming imbedded in them. The contents of this book are of three kinds: 1. Stories (though, really, except for a few that don’t work so well, they aren’t stories in the usual sense); 2. Dreams - Davis’s and others’ (although these are sort of interesting, I don’t think they belong with the stories (being extra-ordinary)); 3. Translations from letters by Flaubert (which are rather good but could perhaps have been grouped separately). One memorable story in this collection, which exemplifies the deft irony which makes Davis’s humour at once sympathetic and brutal, is ‘I’m Pretty Comfortable, But I Could Be a Little More Comfortable’: merely a list of quotidian irritations that are all the more irritating for being entirely inconsequential.

(June 2014)

'How Should a Person Be? A novel from life' by Sheila Heti

What is the relation between the real-life Sheila and the Sheila of this book, her real-life friend Margaux and the Margaux of this book, between her other real-life friends and acquaintances and their counterparts in this book? These are not interesting questions (unless you happen to be Sheila’s demon-lover Israel (in which case, serve you right)). This book is at once an excoriating self-examination, a pitiless self-satire (although it may in fact not be as satirical as it seems to be) and an unforgivably self-indulgent exercise in self-exposure (and is these things all at once and not by turns). You will be irritated by Sheila, but she is irritating in pretty much the same way that you are irritating to yourself, and you will grow tired of Sheila, but in the same way that you grow tired of yourself. You will put the book aside, but, without really knowing why, you will keep coming back to it in pretty much the same way you keep coming back to vaguely important but imprecise and somewhat irritating aspects of your own life. Sheila nobly asks herself “How should a person be?”, and gets the same unsatisfactory, earnest and ridiculous answers as you would get if you asked yourself the same impossible question. The book contains passages of painful honesty and vapid bullshit (both at the same time, mostly), and beautiful, sad and hilarious passages, too (again, beautiful, sad and hilarious all at once and not by turns). By asking big questions in a life that contains only small answers, Sheila holds herself up to show us that we don’t know how to be, or how to make our lives the way we want them, or even to know what we want with any sureness or consistency: “Most people live their entire lives with their clothes on, and even if they wanted to, couldn’t take them off. Then there are those who cannot put them on. They are the ones who live their lives not just as people but as examples of people. They are destined to expose every part of themselves, so the rest of us can know what it means to be human. … Some of us have to be naked, so the rest can be exempted by fate.”

(May 2014)
 

'The Essential Schopenhauer' by Arthur Schopenhauer

“Life is a business that fails to meet its costs,” declares Schopenhauer (1788-1860), setting off to demonstrate that we live in the worst of all possible worlds. The human condition is that of “a pendulum between suffering and boredom”, and yet we persist, drawn into and through existence by an unsuppressable and unsatisfiable “will-to-live”, a malignant innate force against we must struggle to escape. Life should consist of a constant (paradoxical) struggle against one’s own willing, which “springs from want, and hence from suffering” which in turn is “simply nothing but unfulfilled and thwarted willing”. Schopenhauer’s strident pessimism and his investigations into individual motivation introduced Eastern philosophies into European thought, and underlie the work of Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein, Tolstoy, Mann, Borges, Beckett and many others. How then to go on? Society, and indeed all functional existence, is predicated on collective and individual self-deception. Thomas Bernhard puts it well in ‘Walking’: “There is no doubt that the art lies in bearing what is unbearable and in not feeling that what is horrible is something horrible. Of course we have to label this art the most difficult of all. The art of existing against the facts.”

(May 2014)
 

'Tristano #11615: A novel' by Nanni Balestrini

Nobody else in the world has read this book, at least not in the way I have read it. In the mid-1960s Balestrini wrote ten fields of short paragraphs which were intended to be randomly ordered, generating a potential 109,027,350,432,000 different versions of his novel. At last computer technology has made it possible to realise his experiment, and each copy of this edition is different (a bibliographer’s headache!). The ‘story’, such as it is, concerns some lovers in Milan: can they escape and be together or will contingencies get in their way? As the reader reads their unique text, a unique story should be revealed. Whilst this is a very interesting experiment (reminding me of B.S. Johnson’s considerably more profound The Unfortunates) and worth having a copy of for this reason (comparing a few different versions also presents itself as an interesting thing to do), Balestrini unfortunately makes it hard to judge the results of his experiment by writing in a way that resembles randomness anyway, so that the effect of the randomisation is unclear. Combinatory permutations of more straightforward basic elements under strict laboratory conditions would perhaps have revealed more about the role of temporal structure on the reading of fiction.

(May 2014)
 

'The Notebook' by Agota Kristof

In an unnamed country [Hungary] during an unnamed war [WWII], twin brothers from the Big Town are deposited with their unknown grandmother in the Little Town [near the German border]. Their belongings are immediately taken and sold by their grandmother, apart from their father’s big dictionary, which they use to write their story in the big notebook they demand from the local bookseller on the basis of ‘absolute need’. They set rules for their writing: “The composition must be true. We must describe what is, what we see, what we hear, what we do. For example, it is forbidden to write, ‘Grandmother is like a witch,’ but we are allowed to write ‘People call Grandmother a witch’. We would write, ‘We eat a lot of walnuts’, and not, ‘We love walnuts,’ because the word ‘love’ is not a reliable word. Words that define feelings are very vague. It is better to avoid using them and stick to the description of objects, human beings, and oneself, that is to say, to the faithful description of facts.” The twins describe how they perform ‘exercises to toughen the body’ – hurting themselves and each other until they no longer cry when they are hit, and ‘exercises to toughen the mind’ – subjecting each other to verbal abuse until they no longer blush and tremble when people insult them, and also repeating the words of affection their mother used to use to them until their eyes no longer fill with tears: “By force of repetition, these words gradually lose their meaning, and the pain they carry in them is assuaged.” Unable to be separated, controlled or opposed, the twins practise the only virtue left in a world rendered amoral by war: survival. ‘Absolute need’ is the basis of their interactions with others: they demand boots from the cobbler so they can go about in the winter, they blackmail the priest on behalf of the unfortunate Harelip, they comply with the masochistic requests of the Foreign Officer because of his ‘absolute need’ (which is no less absolute for being psychological), they wreak disfiguring revenge on the priest’s housekeeper because of her mocking of the passing [Jewish] Human Herd’s absolute need for bread. The narrators’ dual identity, the pared-back matter-of-fact prose without metaphor or superfluity, the rigour with which small and horrendous matters are treated with flat equivalence make this book powerful, moving (while remaining unsentimental) and memorable. In her brief autobiography, The Illiterate, Kristof describes how The Notebook began as a set of memories of her own childhood, which she wrote in French, a ‘foreign’ language she was learning as a (rather regretful) refugee. The Notebook was one of the texts used in The Quiet Volume, an interactive reading experience for two that was a highlight of Writers Week at the recent New Zealand Festival. I got myself a copy straight away. The Notebook is my discovery of the year so far.

(May 2014)

 

'The Great Fire of London: A story with interpolations and bifurcations' by Jacques Roubaud

In failing to write a novel entitled The Great Fire of London, Roubaud has instead written a fascinating, frustrating, mathematically careful account of that failure, and of the porosity of the conceptual barriers between circumstance, experience and intention. As he writes, and by writing (and by writing about the act of writing), Roubaud attempts to come to terms with the death of his wife: his rigorous and highly complex literary project, with its arbitrary rules, its avoidances and confrontations, its extremities of scale and focus, its halls of mirrors reflecting other mirrors in which other mirrors are reflected, its endless digressions and insertions, shows a mind unbalanced and refashioned by love and grief. Roubaud is a member of OULIPO (a group of writers who seek to realise new potential in literature by the application of constraints.
Some of Roubaud's mathematical poetry.
The OULPIO site (in French).
A few OULIPO writing exercises. 

(April 2014)
 

'The Absent Therapist' by Will Eaves

To read this book is to be drawn into a kaleidophone of voices, first-person narrative fragments, tiny stories bearing the impress of larger, untold stories; wry observations unknowingly made by unobservant people, anecdotes with perfectly deflating punch-lines, almost-jokes that meticulously leave off at being almost-jokes without aspiring to be jokes; gauche quips, mundane miseries treated with both sympathy and humour; small lives writ small and at once satirised and celebrated for their smallness; an encyclopedic accumulation of human experiences of the kind that usually evanesce without being recorded even in the experiencers’ memories let alone on paper. All these thousands of voices are captured pitch-perfectly by Eaves, who, with a cold eye and a warm heart, and with an unbelievably sensitive ear for what all sorts of people say and how they say it (or, what they think and how they think it), has written a very enjoyable book that manages to be both sharp and blunt at the same time to the extent that the distinction between sharp and blunt has been removed.

(April 2014)