“The imagination is a very weak little bird. It flounders, Cornelius, and it flaps about a bit.” This wholly remarkable book deals with the fictional 1978 visit of John Lennon to the west of Ireland in an attempt to reach the island he (actually) bought there in 1967. He intends to spend some time alone there, to do some screaming and cast off the weights that are stifling him both personally and creatively. As the epigraph from John McGahern suggests, the island he really seeks is the first person singular. In wonderfully fluid prose that slips in and out of John’s head, that concertinas time and clots and spreads itself over the landscape that is the dominant presence in the book, Barry describes John’s attempts to elude the press and reach his island with the help of his ‘fixer’ Cornelius O’Grady, an autochthonic foil for his mental slippages and ragged edges. The conversations between these two characters are a delight to read, perfectly nuanced and full of ironic resonance. One of the themes of the book is the effect of place upon the personalities, identities and trajectories of the people who live or visit there, and the extent to which memory and experience are properties of the physical, of objects and places, rather than of persons. Not every section of this book is equally successful – John’s visit to the self-actualisers in the Amethyst Hotel tries perhaps a little hard, though it makes convincing the experience that follows, and the section describing the author’s collation of material for the novel has something of the effect of turning the house lights up during a theatre performance (I haven’t decided yet whether this adds to or detracts from the overall effect) – but the novel is constantly playing with the possibilities of writing a novel, which is exciting, and the climaxes when John releases his voice, first at the press who appear in a boat as soon as he reaches his island (spoiler, sorry) and then as transcribed in the ‘Great Lost Beatlebone Tape’, share the liberating, unhinged transcendence of Lucky’s ‘thinking’ monologue in Waiting for Godot.
“I was dying. That much is certain. The rest is fiction.” I first came across Critchley in his Very Little… Almost Nothing: Death, philosophy and literature, a consideration of the counterpull between nihilism and meaning in Blanchot and Beckett and others (I read this book in hospital, however, and now have difficulty in disentangling it from the location in which it was read (though I do remember thinking that the quoted material was often more interesting than the thesis itself)). In this novella, which presents as a memoir and occupies various positions in the triangle between fiction, biography and criticism, Critchley inherits from a fellow philosopher Michel Haar a set of boxes containing artefacts and papers concerning memory, as well as a set of charts graphing the events and deaths of philosophers through history. When Critchley discovers that Haar’s charts predicted the deaths of people who had dies since his demise, and when he finds a chart predicting his own death in 2010, Critchley scales down his academic work and devotes himself to building a memory theatre, of the kind described in Frances Yates’ thoroughly interesting The Art of Memory, in his back garden. This attempt to symbolically represent the totality of knowledge in an accessible way obsesses him until the fateful day arrives and the whole enterprise is undercut. The book reads somewhere between a Borgesian work-at-one-remove and an undergraduate name-dropping exercise. Critchley, along with Tom McCarthy, is a member of the mock-serious International Necronautical Society.
In the great winter famine that struck rural Finland in 1867, a woman abandons her dying husband and sets out with her two children towards St Petersberg, where people say there is bread. The book bleakly shows how thin the veneer of civilisation is, and how easily it is thrown aside by crisis. Their encounters with other transients and with the people whose villages and land they pass through break down the social barriers that usually keep people from harming each other, and the increasing familiarity with hunger and death reduce the afflicted to merely going through the motions of their own desperation. The book ends with some hint of the possibilities inherent in the social and technological transformations resulting from Finland’s nineteenth century industrialisation, but, in the context of the famine, these possibilities are beyond hopelessness.
I am half way through this very interesting and unsettling book, which is told in rigorous reverse chronology. For the narrator, who seems to be a secondary consciousness, not quite a conscience, for the main character, and who is aware of the feelings of that character but is not privy to his thoughts, the characters grow younger, move from retirement into work or from childhood to babyhood (and thence to a hospital room where “two people enter but only one comes out”), letters are drawn out of the fire and read, food is taken from the mouth, put onto a plate and sold at a café, and doctors unstitch and cause wounds that are healed by the knives of assailants. The narrator is confused and uncomfortable about these patterns of events. The reversal of chronology is not only a reversal of causality but also a reversal of intention and morality, and the device has considerable philosophical and ethical dimensions. There are enough indicators already to suggest that the main character’s unspoken past, toward which he moves for the narrator and for the reader, is as a doctor assisting in medical experiments in a Nazi extermination camp. Here, I suppose, the character’s actions will at last make sense to the narrator: he will heal the sick and create life, playing his part in the creation of a whole race of people. Contributing to the Holocaust is a burden so intolerable that time itself is reversed to reverse its meaning, and the part of the mind capable of empathy is separated forever as a secondary consciousness, an impotent passenger for whom ordinary life can make no sense. I’m going to stop writing this now and keep reading.
Simpleton Lucien Minor sets out into the world in search of “something to happen”. This book is at once an adventure and a satire on adventures, a celebration of storytelling and a playful pushing of storytelling clichés a little further and just a little further until they fall suddenly into the unexpected. Unrelentingly deadpan, with constantly undercut characters and wonderfully hammed dialogue, the book is at once a satire on ‘bad’ writing and an unbroken string of small linguistic firecrackers. No sentence is left unturned.
The latest discoveries enable neurology to enter the preserves of psychology and philosophy. Eagleman’s descriptions of the behaviour of neurones tell us much about how we generate our idea of reality, our feelings and thoughts, our ideas about ourselves and our capacities. What makes humans so interesting neurologically is that we are born ‘soft-wired’, which means that the function of our brain is formed and reformed by experience. Of the many fascinating things that have been revealed by recent neurology is the fact that we do not attempt to make an idea of the world around us from sensual stimulation but rather that we form an idea of the world around us and only then test it against stimulation, showing our idea of the world to be primarily a creative act, the work of an author (which just happens to be subsequently fact-checked) rather than a piece of reportage. Discoveries like these have profound implications.
On the verge of becoming a knight, Tiuri answers a call for help and ends up carrying a letter through many dangers to the king of a neighbouring kingdom. This quest teaches him about what the world, and he himself, has to offer, both kindness and cruelty, both friendship and betrayal. This book is exciting, thoughtful and written with a clarity and immediacy that makes it a pleasure to read. A sequel, The Secrets of the Wild Wood has just been translated into English (the books were published in Dutch in the 1960s) – I am looking forwards to reading it as the bedtime story soon.
Many of Walter Benjamin’s most important works, from ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ to The Arcades Project, have had their greatest relevance decades after when they were written, and it is sometimes easy to forget that they were brought into being out of what Benjamin saw as piles of cultural waste and intellectual decay. Benjamin regarded the world as a shattered and fragmented thing, not even a thing but a mass of shards and fragments that could only be assembled into something coherent, meaningful or (even) beautiful by careful collecting, by a picking-over of detritus, a cataloguing of disjecta which bear the indelible history of destruction or neglect, of the slippery transience of their identity. For Benjamin, this practice and burden of collecting, of cataloguing, was necessary (for him personally and for us all) in all areas of life: personal, practical, cultural and intellectual. Identity could be no more than a bundling of associated elements. When Benjamin committed suicide in frustration at being unable to cross the Pyrenees to escape Nazi-occupied France, he was carrying a suitcase bearing manuscripts now (presumably) lost – a collecting-and-cataloguing burden synonymous with himself. This remarkable book is another portrait of (another/the same) Benjamin. It reproduces, translates and annotates collections made by Benjamin: of his notes, notebooks and microscripts (he shared with Robert Walser, whose work he championed, the obsession with trying to write smaller than it was possible to write, and on all manner of found paper), of children’s toys, of his son’s ways of saying things, of postcards and photographs, of puzzles and word games, of forms which give shape to ideas. It is (only) on this level that life can be lived, with all its difficulties, and it is on this level that the only meaningful work can be done: “Rag-picker and poet – both are concerned with refuse.”
“I knock on the door of a man who knows he will die, hoping he’ll tell me how it feels to be a man who knows he will die.” For some months, Moreira Marques accompanied a palliative care team as they visited dying patients in the remote Portuguese region of Trás-os-Montes (‘Behind-the-Mountains’). She recorded her observations of the experiences of the dying and the way that the ending of a life realigns that life and those around it, before and after the death occurs. Her acute sensitivities have sheered her journalism (or anthropology, really) of any excesses, and what emerges is spare, poetic and moving. Her tenderness and her unflinching eye enable her to record the raw details of dying without making the mistake of attributing death any meaning or of portraying it as a ‘force’. This has the effect of re-establishing the end of a life as a full part of that life, and of reaffirming the individuality of the dying person rather than allowing them to be subsumed into a transpersonal story about death. Included in the book are three verbatim monologues or dialogues from the dying, their close families or the bereaved. These act as lightning rods to ground the experiences in the particular. The region of Trás-os-Montes is one which is becoming depopulated, and the book is also a record not only of the seeping of life from the region but of the particularity of that region’s life as well.
“What actually matters isn’t the attempt to reach the heavens. No, what matters is what’s left when that attempt has failed.” When reviewing this book, short-listed for the 2015 Man Booker Prize, I will assume that McCarthy maintains a careful authorial distance from the narrator, U, a ‘Present Tense Anthropologist™’ employed in the service of the enigmatic Koob-Sassen Project (a behaviour-control project so all-pervasive it cannot be perceived (being, I suppose, synonymous with reality itself)), a cod-intellectual who spouts a pastiche of cultural theory – an admixture of the obvious and the dubious - to the point of (presumed) satire. Interviews with McCarthy suggest that the distance I am assuming may not in fact be that wide (although McCarthy-the-interviewee is of course another of McCarthy’s fictional constructs) but I am giving McCarthy the benefit of the doubt because it makes the book more interesting. I have no mandate, perhaps, to speculate upon the author, neither to cast aspersions nor to defend him from such aspersions; regardless of his authenticity or otherwise, this book perfectly delineates the type of feckless poseur (of which McCarthy may or may not be another example) who ostentatiously play with the handles of doors they do not have the intellectual strength to open. Mind you, it may in fact be the conflation between the author and the narrator that makes this book more successful (or ‘successful’) than some of McCarthy’s previous books: McCarthy’s shortcomings and pretensions have here become voided upon the narrator and thereby tolerable and interesting. U’s inability to write his report until he realises (or at least speculates) that whatever happens is the report (that the report is a report on the report), suggests that this novel is about the writing of this novel, the author overcoming the seeming impossibility of achieving his intention (to write a novel (a novel that is the novel of the novel (experimental in form if not in style))) by removing the distance between the observer and the observed. This is a violation of anthropological methodology but one which, time and again in the field, has proven inescapable. U removes the distinction between ‘field’ and ‘home’, leaving us in a world of jumbled signifiers in which all data is flatly equivalent (“Write everything down,” said Malinowski!), capable neither of making authentic contact with reality nor of achieving the distance from it necessary to ascertain meaning. Of course, McCarthy does not believe in either reality or meaning, so jumbled signifiers are the best we can be left with. To remove oneself is as meaningless (and impossible) as to immerse oneself. The book ends with U at the Terminal resisting the surge of the crowd onto the ferry to cross the Stygian waters to the “grey lump” of Staten Island, yet reluctant also to return to the land of the living: “I found myself struggling just to say in the same place, suspended between two types of meaninglessness.” It is this suspension, sustained throughout the book, achieved by the narrator and offered to the reader, that makes the book coldly, lip-curlingly enjoyable. >> Before the book was published I watched this memorable trailer. The narratorial voice perfectly fits the book.
If you haven’t read the first two ‘Lockwood’ books, The Screaming Staircase and The Whispering Skull, it is about time you did; if you have, you will want to read this as soon as possible. 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. The books have excellent characters and are both genuinely scary and genuinely funny (Stroud adeptly moves between these poles as he tightens the screws of the plot). In this book Lucy finds herself developing sympathies for the ghosts, or ‘Visitors’, which both leads her closer to the cause of the Problem and puts her and her colleagues in peril, as does her developing antagonism towards the too-perfect Holly, hired by Lockwood and George as a ‘support staff member’. The first two books can be read as self-contained stories, but this one is barbed throughout with elements that demand further exploration and explanation. What do the ghosts want? Is the plague of ghosts in fact caused or exacerbated by the living? Who is trying to exploit the ghost plague for their own ends? And what ends? You see, I am ready for the next book already.
Written the whole way through like a joke for which the punchline never comes, this book tells the story of a Russian soldier who, first serving in the infirmary and then on the target practice range on the Kazakh steppes (where his job is to crawl along and reinstate the targets once they have been hit (an effect that looks mechanical)), is promised on discharge the gift of an indestructible iron tooth by his commander and the sets off on a rather madcap adventure involving the field ambulance and a corpse that needs transportation. The writing style is very democratic in that no detail is given more importance than another (thus sustaining an absurd effect) , so that reading the book is somewhat disconcertingly like crossing a bank of loose gravel but ending up rather further downhill than you intended because of the number of times it slides unexpectedly beneath your step.
Of the three friends who had studied piano together under Horowitz at the Salzburg Mozarteum, the narrator, Wertheimer and a fictionalised Glenn Gould, only Gould continued playing, for the others, though piano prodigies, were unable to continue their careers after having overheard Gould’s interpretation of Bach’s Goldberg Variationsand been ‘destroyed’ by his genius. Twenty-eight years later, Gould, having withdrawn from the world into his ‘isolation cage’ in the Canadian wilds, dies of a stroke while playing the Variations, and, soon after, the highly neurotic Wertheimer, who had been labelled ‘The Loser’ by Gould on their first meeting and who had been most deeply devastated by the unapproachability of Gould’s genius, for he, unlike the narrator, had set his heart on being a virtuoso, and who had withdrawn to his ‘isolation cage’ in the Austrian wilds after his sister, who he had obsessively dominated and controlled, had ‘escaped’ and married a Swiss industrialist, commits suicide by hanging himself near his sister’s new home. The book, in one relentless paragraph with the same sublime unpegged looping structures as Bach’s music and the wicked barbs, subversions and reflexive humour of an interpretation of Bach by Glenn Gould, represents the thoughts of the narrator as they loop over and over the relationship between the three characters, who can be seen as three aspects of Bernhard himself, his characters being blanks upon which he projects his own neuroses, invective, frustrated abilities, lung disease, impulses for self-destruction and, above all, stultifying ambivalence. A revulsion by everything, a precise analysis of the inescapable destructive cacophony of human relationships, a delineation of the self-annihilating effects of the ‘isolation cages’ that are the refuge from humanity, no thought is sooner expressed than it begins to appear ludicrous, the further developed it becomes, the more ludicrous, until it is left exploded, empty, food for its opposite, no less ludicrous. It takes well over half the book for the narrator to walk into the inn at which he will stay after visiting Wertheimer’s ‘isolation cage’ in Traich to search for the work Wertheimer had been writing, almost the entire content of the book taking place at at least the second if not the third or fourth remove, in a subjective hole so deep that the characters leach characteristics into each other as the narrator hysterically overdoes every analysis and statement to the extent that we come to believe that any statement is an overstatement and a false statement, or at least a statement within which truth and falsity cannot be disentangled. In this rereading I noticed that Wertheimer is briefly mentioned as having been writing something called The Loser (otherwise the narrator dismisses his writing as aphorisms “destined for the walls of dentists’ waiting rooms”), and I couldn’t get out of my mind that Bernhard identified strongly with his Wertheimer character, who has written this book as if narrated by his unnamed friend who would have found this work after Wertheimer’s suicide (Bernhard’s proxy suicide) had not he arrived at Traich to be told by the gamekeeper that Wertheimer had been seen to burn all his papers before his fatal trip.
Although in some ways the stories of Kiš resemble those of Borges, they are more shaped by sentiment and by the upwelling of popular memory (sometimes toying with the currency of cliché). Kiš builds vertiginous piles of detail and near-simile, much of it drawn from the heterogeneous history of the Balkans. In the title story, a woman is shut overnight in the Royal Library of Sweden, where she finds an encyclopedia with entries for every person who ever lived who does not appear in other encyclopedias. She finds her recently deceased father’s entry, which proves to contain every possible detail about his life. Because the ability to come up with an infinite amount of detail is closer to the fiction writer’s art than to the capacities of memory (let alone of historical record), this story I think is a key to the way Kiš proceeds. That the woman wakes up to find it was all a dream (except that a picture of a flower she copied from the encyclopedia turns out to look exactly like the cancer that killed her father) shows that Kiš is as interested erasing the border between waking and dream as he is in erasing that between history and fiction.
“Why this insistent past, I wonder, like a wad of phlegm that will not go down?” This claustrophobic novel is about a young man, Miles, whose small accumulation of experience becomes a shackle to him, or, I could say, the novel, narrated by Miles, is an attempt to divest himself of that shackle, but at the risk of making it heavier and tighter, of creating for himself some sort of embalming cognitive-therapy legend. Going back over his memories, especially those of his past relationship with Alice, from whom he seems incapable of satisfactorily detaching himself, he attempts to create a consistent story from his self-obsessed perspective but largely fails due to the limited perspective of this self-obsession (from which his other obsessions depend). Briefly, the novel moves from the first person into the third, allowing Miles a more objective (or ‘objective’) perspective, and even, almost, giving Alice’s experience of him a moment of expression (we otherwise must intuit this from his bald statements and lacunae), but we are swiftly drawn back into the limitations of his self-awareness. Sensing that he had insufficient authenticity to be a painter himself, Miles intends to write a book about Emil Bafdescu, a minor Hungarian Surrealist painter who abandoned Surrealism, became provincial and conformist, and finally disappeared (a trajectory that is perhaps Miles’s own). “For a long time I thought of myself as a painter. The thought, the knowledge that I was, at heart, an artist, protected me against every other failure. I always felt as if I were carrying around inside myself an invulnerable seed that would burst into the world sooner or later. But it didn’t burst. It withered and wrinkled and finally it died away. … Having given up on that, I wonder whether I am good enough to write a book about painting, instead. … My fear is, if I fail at this, I will have run out of things to fail at.” Miles, obsessed with Bafdescu, tracks him across Europe and attempts to meet his descendants, without getting at all closer to him. This book could be seen as Miles writing a book about his failure to write the book he wanted to write. His own memories, which superimpose themselves on whatever he is aware of, and the fact that Bafdescu, apart from his meagre oeuvre, lies irretrievably in the past mean that his project is impossible. Whatever Miles is aware of is distorted by his subjectivity; authenticity lies always beyond the fence at the edge of himself.
Even just to see the cover of this book is to fall in love with it. The pictures and the story they tell with just a small amount of added text are touchingly tender and thoughtful. A gentle lion finds a wounded bird who cannot fly off with its flock and makes it a bed in a slipper, nursing it back to health as they become close friends through the winter. Spring comes and the flock returns. Will the bird leave the lion to rejoin them? The story is full of subtle observations about attachment and freedom, about seasons in the year and also in relationships, about being true to your nature and about the strength of friendship, but these are not shouted and the reader is entirely involved in the characters’ immediate feelings. This might well become your favourite picture book.
My 12-year-old and I read this together, a chapter a night, and enjoyed it very much: deliciously Dickensian characters, a grimy setting, a plot that is both emotionally and intellectually engaging and keeps you guessing until the end (and beyond), plenty of good information about various kinds of misfortune prevalent in Victorian London, incandescent similes and other turns of phrase, the irrepressible verve both of Pullman’s writing and of 16-year-old Sally Lockhart, determined to find out the truth behind her father’s death. What more could you want?
When the writer Gromov (1910-1981) died his books passed, deservedly, into obscurity. Some time later and under various circumstances that fulfilled the requirements, various persons discover that reading these books endowed them with superhuman abilities: Fury, Memory, Strength, Power, Endurance, Joy, Meaning. Throughout the USSR, and especially from the ranks of the outcast and unfortunate, cells of readers, known as Libraries, form in secret and battle each other for control and collection of Gromov’s works. What will happen when the young and exceptionally unremarkable Alexei inherits a Book of Memory (a.k.a. The Quiet Grass) and becomes a Librarian? The absurdity in this book has a very Russian flavour (incidentally, Elizarov won the Russian Booker Prize), and Elizarov sets out to see just how far silliness can get him. There is something of Daniil Kharms in this work, but with two differences: Kharms’ absurdity necessarily expends itself in extremely short stories and dramaticules whereas Elizarov extends absurdity to relentlessly epic length; also, Kharms’ absurdity was eloquent in its rejection of any serious attempt at meaning in a society in which any meaningful statement he might make was likely to earn him a ticket to the Gulag. In the absence of this context for the contemporary Elizarov, the absurdity of this book stands in relation to a different kind of powerlessness and a different sort of frustration. To read this book is like riding a wheelybin downhill: pointless if you go slowly but somewhat more fun (though just as pointless) the faster you go.
In the title story of this collection, the narrator is a feckless private detective attending, under an alias (of course), a convention of private detectives. His determined but hopeless attempts to act like a detective, even when inappropriate to the circumstances, and his truly detective-like attention to the details of his story, even if attending to the wrong details, and certainly even when this serves him no ostensible purpose other than the procession of the story, make this story a funny and sharp critique of not only both conventions and detection, but also of human aspiration, limitation, vulnerability and the subsumption of these by overarching structures, expectations and social mechanisms. The other stories, whether dealing with extreme marketing (the launch of the new Ford Kafka automobile) or literary readings or corporate innovations, share this approach and interrogation of both detail and language as they uncover the ludicrous disjunctions between human beings and their familiar situations.
Léger was commissioned to write a short biographical entry on Barbara Loden for a film encyclopaedia but ended up writing a very interesting and quite unusual book. Loden directed one film, Wanda (1970), about a woman who leaves her husband and who, passively and therefore pretty much by chance, attaches herself to a man who is planning a bank robbery for which, following his death in a police shoot-out and despite her lack of initiative and her not even being present at the robbery (she took a wrong turn in what was supposed to be the getaway car), she will be sent to jail for twenty years. The book operates on many levels simultaneously: it is ‘about’ Léger’s attempts to excavate information about Loden, principally beneath the ways in which she has been recorded by others, notably her husband the Hollywood director Elia Kazan, who also wrote a novel in which Loden features, thinly disguised; it is ‘about’ Loden’s making of the film Wanda; it is ‘about’ the character of Wanda in that film, a character Loden played herself and with whom she strongly identified personally; it is ‘about’ the tension between the “passive and inert” Wanda character with whom Loden identifies and Loden as writer and director, and about the relationship between author and character more generally in both an literary/artistic and a quotidian sense; it is ‘about’ Léger’s search for and discovery of the true story that inspired Loden to make the film, a botched 1960 bank robbery after which the passive and inert Alma Malone politely thanked the judge for handing her a twenty-year sentence; it is ‘about’, therefore, the relationship between inspiration and execution, and between actuality and fiction; it is ‘about’ portrayal and self-portrayal and ‘about’ who gets to define whom (“To sum up. A woman is pretending to be another, in a role she wrote herself, based on another (this, we find out later), playing something other than a straightforward role, playing not herself but a projection of herself onto another, played by her but based on another.”); it is ‘about’, cumulatively, the way in which, as she delved more deeply into the specifics of another whom she sought to understand, Léger come up more and more against the unresolved edges of herself so that the two archaeologies became one (she also ended up learning quite a lot about her mother and the imbalanced mechanics of her parents’ relationship). When Wanda was released in 1970, it was disparaged in many feminist circles for its portrayal of a passive woman. Léger shows the film to be a useful mirror in which to recognise passivity as not only an impulse for self-erasure on a personal level but as part of the wider social mechanisms by which women are erased and colonised by projections, and in which the feminist critique and frontline necessarily become internal and self-reflexive. There is also in this book a strong sense of the inescapability of subjectivity, that in all subject-object relationships the subject perceives only and acts only upon a sort of externalised version of itself (the object being passive and without feature (effectively absent, effectively unassailable)); and also that when attempting to be/conceive of/portray oneself one has no option but to use the template of that with which one identifies but which is not in essence (whatever that means) oneself (except to the extent that one’s ‘self’ perhaps exists only in the mysterious act of identification). Oh, yes, and Léger‘s writing is exquisite (click here for a sample).
During World War 2, the writer and painter Bruno Schulz was kept from the gas chamber by a Gestapo officer who wanted him to complete a mural for his children’s nursery. One day he was shot in the street by another Gestapo officer while returning to the ghetto with a loaf of bread. In this little book, Maxim Biller imagines a time just before the German invasion of Poland, with Schulz hidden from fear in his cellar and writing a letter to Thomas Mann, imploring his help and warning him that Mann’s sinister double, or at least someone claiming to be Mann, is present in Schulz’s town of Drohobycz, presaging in many ways the coming German invasion. Biller’s Schulz is having trouble concentrating and in making his message to Mann clear, and has to restart many times, each attempt being less successful than the last. The letters are invaded by fears and memories, or the doubles or stand-ins for fears and memories, and it soon becomes unclear which elements belong to the description of Schulz writing, which to the letter he is writing and which exist only in the head of Schulz and not in what he is writing or in the world in which he sits and writes. Even if it all only exists in Schulz’s head, and of course it does (he is alone), this three-fold distinction, or rather the inability (of Schulz and of the reader) to make this three-fold distinction remains. Biller’s text is followed by two of the actual Schulz’s most representative stories, ‘Birds’ (about a melancholic father’s increasing over-identification with birds) and ‘Cinnamon Shops’ (concerning the dissolution of the actual city into one built of dreams and memories as a boy is sent home from the theatre to fetch his father’s wallet). There is certainly something of Kafka in Schultz’s narratorial relinquishment of initiative to a less-than-conscious weight that presses against the text from below (or within (or wherever)), but Schulz has a wistfulness that gives his writing a flavour all of its own.
The Vorrh is a vast sentient forest in which the restrictions and distinctions that pass for knowledge are suspended, or rather upended, in which the monstrous and the beautiful are continually sloughed off by some unreachable, seemingly intelligent, possibly capricious force, under the influence of which cause and effect are loosened or inverted, humans behave like objects and objects display sentience or, if not sentience, will. Reading this book is like reading Ballard on steroids (either Ballard or the reader, take your pick), like setting off fireworks in a tent, like overinflating a balloon until, after pressing you against the wall, it bursts the room and sends you flying backwards into the world outside. In this work of speculative fiction as vast and dense as the Vorrh itself, Catling exercises his muscular obsessions with the mechanisms of colonisation, both mental and physical, with intrusion, pursuit and control, and with the obverse faces of all of these. Following any of the converging narratives is like walking along a beam only to have it twist and invert beneath you in mid-stride, leaving you to find yourself walking upside-down.
Like icebergs people collide, adhere and part first beneath the surface of consciousness, and often become aware of these occurrences, if at all, in unexpected ways. Levy’s stories present characters who are worn, damaged, stressed, eczematous, emotionally misshapen through past (usually unspecified) experiences and have them touch and part in subtle, melancholy, hopeful and surprising ways. Full of wry observation and attuned to the opportunities that could be made possible only by unhappiness, these stories show how people’s lonelinesses can be deformed and reformed by the proximity of each other’s magnetic field in ways other than the ways they touch.
What can we make of the fragments that remain of things otherwise lost? To what extent do these fragments embody the unregainable whole or even retain the force of loss that has been brought to bear upon the lost? Lynn Jenner’s thoughtful book ranges from the Christchurch earthquakes to the fragments of Sappho to her own close reading, from the loss of a ring to the disappearance of an individual person to the annihilation of whole communities. With the digressive range and vigour of Sebald but without his crucial narratorial slipperiness, Jenner wrings meaning out of minute detail and subtly interrogates both memory and the clichés that so easily take its place. In the last part of the book she makes one of the most difficult of literary approaches: the Holocaust and the tendrils of antisemitism that appear in unexpected places. Where Sebald succeeds in addressing the trauma of the Holocaust by writing around its edge, pointing to it with all the details that appear to be about something else, Jenner succeeds by approaching it directly but by writing always about her approach, about herself and about asking how it could be possible to think about the Holocaust from her situation in present-day New Zealand, if it is possible to think about the Holocaust at all. Jenner’s careful, unblinking, occasionally squinting awareness of herself as emotional litmus, affected by whatever she dips herself into but always tightly observed and recorded, makes this an interesting, fresh and unpredictable book. “A book could, perhaps without the writer’s intention, contain old pieces of extremist ideas, broken down into tiny grains, worn smooth from all the times they have been handled. These grains could emit a high-pitched whistle, which members of a particular group hear and experience as very unpleasant, but most people, perhaps including the author, do not hear. My book might be whistling right now at a frequency I do not hear.”
Memory and personality are interdependent and could be seen to be aspects of each other. Both are constructs that enable us to function practically and socially, but both are tentative, fragile and vulnerable to erosion. When Erwin Mortier’s mother developed Alzheimer’s Disease at the age of 65, her loss of memory was also a profound loss of personality and Mortier began to find it difficult to associate the memories he had of his once-vivacious mother with the person whose rapid mental and physical diminishment made her more of a lingering absence than a presence. Mortier’s book is beautifully written, intensely sad, unsentimental, unflinching and tender. His ability to use a tiny detail or turn of phrase to evoke a memory of his mother or his childhood or a step in his mother’s loss of memory and language and personality is remarkable. Written while his mother is still alive in an attempt to fix his memories of her lest they get sucked away in the slipstream of her departure, the book expresses the hope that, following her death, these memories will be freed from the mental decline which currently overwhelms them and that, through words, they may come together again to form an idea of the particular person his mother was. Perhaps our individuality, dependent as it is on language and memory, is what is gradually (or rapidly) eroded in Alzheimer’s, and what is left, the whimpering animal full of fear but occasionally responsive to small immediate comforts, is what we all have in common, what is always at our core, but which we obscure with layers of language, personality, belief and knowledge (all relatively recent evolutionary innovations) in order to function, to survive, to bear existence, to comfort ourselves and others.
“I don’t like surprises,” the narrator of Mildew says, “and since the last one had been an affair between my husband and my niece, I was not feeling in the mood for another one.” On the eve of her daughter’s wedding, a woman finds a green spot on her pubis. She scrapes at it half-heartedly but fails to remove it and it rapidly spreads over her lower body, a sort of mould or fungus about which she seems strangely not distressed but even seems to become rather fond of. As she wanders about her house, she wanders also through her memories, particularly concerning her niece, with whom she shares a name (and all the literary doubling that that implies), and the switching of her husband’s affections from the older to the younger Constanza. The further the mildew spreads, the less grip the narrator has on the habitual patterns of her life, or, rather, the less she is gripped by them, and the more her memories are shown to be arbitrary, partial, unreliable, self-seeking (or self-harming). As the mildew spreads, the reader, too, finds their grip on facts loosened and the psychological forces which underlie the narrative send filaments up through the pores in the surface of reality and softly overwhelm both its momentum and its meaning. Despite the great psychological weight carried in this book it is written very lightly and directly, with a sharp pen and not a wasted word, and the damp claustrophobia of the narrator’s mind is perfectly expressed, as is the release she (sort of) experiences as the mould or fungus becomes a symptom and externalises whatever it is that it is a symptom of. Mildew shares the spare, immediate, resonant writing with another of my favourite books of the year so far, Jonguitid’s fellow Mexican Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World. Mexico needs more investigation.
On 29 May 2012 I was 47 years old and sitting writing at the small green table in the sitting room when I found I was incapable of using my left hand. I found this confusing and somewhat frustrating (though, strangely, not frightening), so, after one-handedly peeling and eating the egg I had boiled for myself, I decided I should probably go to the hospital and one-handedly drove myself there (not a good idea, in retrospect). When I arrived I realised I was in fact feeling rather strange, and, after a CAT scan, I was told that I had had an ischemic stroke, though a very mild one. Control of my hand returned after a few hours, and, after a sleepless night and day in hospital with electrodes on my chest, an MRI, an echocardiogram and every kind of blood test, I returned home to recuperate through three months of gradually abating mental fatigue. No certain cause for the stroke was identified. I cannot say I am the same as I was before the event, partly due to neurology: the permanent loss of three small areas of my brain; partly due to psychology: the experience (the awareness of the ever-present nearness of personal cessation and the reprioritising of values consequent to this, and the loss of trust in the integrity of my person (whatever that is or was) due in part to the uncertainty of the cause of the stroke); and perhaps due to the anti-platelet medication which I am advised to take indefinitely. One day, when he was 42 and editor-in-chief of Faber & Faber, Robert McCrum woke up completely paralysed on his left side. His stroke was of a different kind from mine, and near the other end of the scale of seriousness - he spent months as an invalid lying on his back and over a year slowly recovering his function – but it is interesting correlating his experience with mine (for instance, he also was confused and irritated but unfrightened by the event; his stroke also had no identifiable cause). In this book he describes the transforming effects of being shunted the short sudden distance to disability, the reassessment and rediscovery of his life that resulted from time in the ‘antechamber of death’, and the deepening of his relationships with those who cared for and about him. The disjunction of the mental and physical aspects of existence is profoundly disconcerting, time henceforth flows differently, and the natural compulsion to look for meaning in life’s occurrences finds itself frustrated at a deep level. What carries on has a different texture from what came before.
Reading Anna Smaill’s The Chimes (especially the astounding first half) earlier this year reminded me of Riddley Walker, so I re-read it (after a space of about what must now be three decades). The book is set many hundreds of years after what was evidently a widespread nuclear devastation, and the surviving humans scratch a hard life and have raised themselves to a level of acculturation equivalent to the iron age (the practice of farming is spreading, iron is salvaged from machines in swamps). What makes this book so much more than quite interesting, though, is the language in which it is told. The narrator, Riddley Walker, is the first person to begin to write down the phonetic speech, a degenerated and reforming dialect of English which perfectly conveys a conceptual world which is being rebuilt from the chance survivals and recombination of various pieces of cultural, religious and scientific jetsam. The government (Abel Goodparley the Pry Mincer and the others of the Mincery) maintains order through the performance of puppet shows, which re-enact the founding mythos of Eusa, Mr Clevver and the Littl Shyning Man the Addom, conflations of the rags of the story of St Eustace combined with the tatters of atomic theory. When Riddley finds a buried Punch head from the old times (with a puppeteer’s hand still inside), he climbs over the fence and, accompanied by a pack of wild dogs (one of the major threats to post-apocalyptic survival) leaves the life he knew, and frees a young eyeless mutant, the Ardship of Cambry (from ‘Archbishop of Canterbury’), from the hole in which he is being kept until he can be brought together with other genetic mutants (the Puter Leat (from ‘Computer Elite’)) in a ceremony seemingly intended to recreate the atomic reaction that marked the cultural escarpment that meant that humanity had to restart itself. “O wat we ben! And what we come to. How cud any 1 not want to get that Power back from time back way back? How cud any 1 not want to be like them what had boats in the air and picters on the wind? How cud any 1 not want to see them shyning weals turning?” Climate change may have replaced nuclear war as the looming agent of societal collapse, but that the prospect of the near-animal struggle just to stay alive may belong to our near future rather than just to our deep past is as urgent as when the book was written. The broken-and-remade language forces the reader to slow down and be initiated (indelibly) into a different way of thinking, full of surprising beauty and import.
“What can we, who are incapable of thought, understand of what the inability to think means for a thinker?” If Waiting for Godot’s Estragon and Vladimir were young philosophy lecturers instead of aging tramps, one of them might have written this book about their friendship and about their failures to gain existential traction (either because of personal insufficiency or philosophical impossibility (mostly personal insufficiency (or at least the cultivation of the excuse of personal insufficiency)). Lars and his friend W. consign themselves to the lower rungs of intellectual achievement by seemingly expending their efforts verbally greasing those rungs. They have been born too late for great thought, even if they had been capable of great thought. Damp and then mould spreads through Lars’s flat but, consistent with the stagnation they claim for themselves, nothing happens or develops in the novel (if it is a novel). The book is very funny, and retains its buoyancy by the fact that the narrator, Lars, only appears as described by W. “’Your problem is that you fear empty time’, says W. as we head back to the city. ‘That’s why you don’t think’. And then: ‘Thought must come as a surprise, when you least expect it’. Thought, when it comes, always surprises him, says W. But he’s ready with his notebook, he says, which he keeps in his man bag. ‘That’s why I need a man bag’, he says, ‘in case thought surprises me’. But I fear the empty time which makes thought possible, says W., so I don’t need a man bag.” The incidence of passages like this, that I would like to read again, together with the book’s complete and intended lack of shape or resolve, means that, instead of reading the book again, I might as well read the next one, Dogma (it’s a trilogy!), which I have but which is unfortunately at the moment a bit too far down the stack in the hall to get out safely (I will have to read my way down to it).
A few years ago, thirty boxes of manuscripts were discovered in a provincial archive in Germany. These turned out to contain a vast and interesting collection of fairy tales collected in northern Bavaria in the 1850s by Franz Xavier von Schonwerth, whose work was admired by the Brothers Grimm but only very partially published. There has been much and long discussion as to what extent the stories collected by the Grimms, and, even more, by Andersen and Perrault, have been ‘worked over’ in preparation for publication. This collection, now available for the first time, is a tohu-bohu of psychologically resonant symbols, urges and adventures, a soup of images in which strands of story form and dissolve, some resembling familiar stories in their combination of elements, some developing in quite unfamiliar directions. Although much of the material is very raw, the stories are so rich, so immediate, often so violent and horrible, so full of desperation, beauty and horror, that they make for compelling reading, a handbook to the messy edges of our mental environment as well a glimpse into the minds of mid-nineteenth century Bavarians living in a world fragile to the whims of natural and human forces.
“There are other worlds, but they’re all in this one,” wrote Paul Eluard, quoted by Murnane (in a slightly different translation) in Inland. The multiplicity and porosity of identity, not only of personage but also of occurrence and of place (the overarching (or underarching?) predominator of Murnane’s writing), destabilises received notions of ‘the novel’ and deprives the reader of the tools traditionally used to work on text whilst keeping it at a safe, ‘practical’ distance. Instead, in a world in which “each thing is at least two things”, in what Murnane elsewhere calls the ‘image world’, the image, usually, in Murnane’s case, deeply saturated with old longing, is the determinant, its expected anchors or referents plunging through so many layers of fiction and memory (so to call them) that the distinctions between these are dissolved, the resonating image, that which is (mis)taken for an impression but which is more the last upon which both fiction and actuality receive a form, retained at least for the duration of contact but more often sufficiently long to be cupped together with other fictional and actual layers similarly impressed, is what both shapes the text and disavows the possibility of shape. Inland begins with a Hungarian writer who has been written by another writer who appears to be some written version of Murnane, telling the reader that he is anticipating his translator (for whom he yearns romantically (there is contradictory evidence as to whether they have never met or have shared a past)) reading what he is writing, thus, since it is implied that we are reading the text as purportedly translated by the said translator, adding another layer to the cocoon of text which stifles the postulated Murnane in his very attempts to make contact with the world beyond himself. During the course of the book, the layers of obfuscation are wound away, a process during which Murnane abandons (for good) fiction as usually understood, and replaces it with a multileveled examination of the nature and behaviour and mutability of memory, an examination of the potency of an image over time. Wound in the centre of this book and revealed towards the end is what the narrator (the purported Murnane (a constructed personage just like any other)) ‘remembers’ of his twelve-year-old self, of his undeclared love for a “girl from Bendigo Street”, who, according to a mutual friend, liked him “very much”, the closest the narrator gets to actual contact with a fellow person, though he is aware that each of them was almost certainly perceiving and relating primarily to someone in the image world rather than an actual person. Murnane continued his examination of the relationship between images, memory and ‘reality’, and into the way in which text reaches out to and yet pushes further away the world inhabited by others, in Barley Patch and A Million Windows. Apart from all this, and in fact necessitated by all this, or at least indistinguishable from all this, Murnane writes beautiful, exquisitely pedantic, sad, subtly barbed and often very funny sentences, and I might well agree with him when he stated in a recent interview, “My sentences are the best-shaped of any sentences written by any writer of fiction in the English language during my lifetime. The previous sentence is a fair average sample of my prose", even though the ironic valency of his statement is highly uncertain.
Readman's stories in this beautifully presented collection are as savage and precisely thrown as the finest nail-bombs, full of diamond-headed nails. Whether telling of a woman who keeps cutting her boyfriend/husband in half, replicating him until she lives with a myriad possible versions of him; or of the teenager who inherits (literally) the secret of irresistible attraction, and the concomitant pleasure of walking away, from her aunt; or of the girl whose mother has a latent Elvis awakened in her by a young woman as she works at the local fish and chip shop; or of the girl with the head of a dog, Readman serves up stories that are at once surreal and subtle, funny and tragic, crazed and psychologically astute. Several of the stories remind me of those of Angela Carter: children push through into an adulthood that has not had a chance to prepare itself for them, stereotypes are worn inside-out to show their linings, characters crushed by society escape through the cracks opened by that crushing.
I am currently reading Thomas Bernhard’s memoir of the first two decades years of his life. The extent to which the account is ‘true’ is unimportant, rendering questions such as how-certain-circumstances-could-produce-the-kind-of-person-who-would-write-the-kind-of-novels-that-Bernhard-wrote extraneous. Given the similarities in tone, substance and approach between the novels and the memoir – the supercharged ambivalence, the nihilism shot through with tenderness and humour, the simultaneously monstrous and pathetic characters, the terrible circumstances that give rise to something resembling nostalgia – what is interesting is the relationship between this book and the others: to what extent is this memoir a sort of petri dish in which the novels were seeded, or to what extent has Bernhard rewritten his life as a kind of adjunct to, or reflection of, the concerns developed in his novels?
For reasons she is never quite able to formulate, Elyria flees her marriage and New York and runs away to New Zealand, where she wanders about, falling short of either achieving or escaping personhood (the closest she achieves to a self-nullifying stability is when working in the garden of an aging poet, who eventually frees himself of her with the necessarily blunt observation, “You are a sad person, and I’m not a person who can tolerate other people’s sadness”). Elyria is caught in a tourniquet of self-observation which borders at times on the hysterical. She thinks back to the early period of life with the person who became with her husband, when “I was not an observer of myself, but a be-er of myself, a person who just was instead of a person who was almost”, but we know that this relationship, with a man Elyria met because he was the last person her sister talked to before her suicide, was both formed and deformed by a trauma Elyria could not face, a trauma which the relationship is unable to either heal or address. Although Elyria recognises she has a problem with authenticity (“A rational person would feel upset instead of just knowing she was upset.”), this appears to be incurable, existential, as she is incapable of relaxing the vigilance that keeps her ‘inner wildebeests’ hidden and thus prevents her escape into authenticity: “I was not a person but just some evidence of myself”. Only at the end of the book, when she has returned and been rejected by her husband and is walking through New York in torrential rain, does she perhaps (but only perhaps) exhibit an awareness of her surroundings that is not distorted by self-obsession, but this clarity (possibly fleeting, possibly terminal) is predicated on a relinquishment that is uncertain in its implications.
I am half way through this very interesting and unsettling book, which is told in rigorous reverse chronology. For the narrator, who seems to be a secondary consciousness, not quite a conscience, for the main character, and who is aware of the feelings of that character but is not privy to his thoughts, the characters grow younger, move from retirement into work or from childhood to babyhood (and thence to a hospital room where “two people enter but only one comes out”), letters are drawn out of the fire and read, food is taken from the mouth, put onto a plate and sold at a café, and doctors unstitch and cause wounds that are healed by the knives of assailants. The narrator is confused and uncomfortable about these patterns of events. The reversal of chronology is not only a reversal of causality but also a reversal of intention and morality, and the device has considerable philosophical and ethical dimensions. There are enough indicators already to suggest that the main character’s unspoken past, toward which he moves for the narrator and for the reader, is as a doctor assisting in medical experiments in a Nazi extermination camp. Here, I suppose, the character’s actions will at last make sense to the narrator: he will heal the sick and create life, playing his part in the creation of a whole race of people. Contributing to the Holocaust is a burden so intolerable that time itself is reversed to reverse its meaning, and the part of the mind capable of empathy is separated forever as a secondary consciousness, an impotent passenger for whom ordinary life can make no sense. I’m going to stop writing this now and keep reading. 
If you haven’t read the first two ‘Lockwood’ books, The Screaming Staircase and The Whispering Skull, it is about time you did; if you have, you will want to read this as soon as possible. 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. The books have excellent characters and are both genuinely scary and genuinely funny (Stroud adeptly moves between these poles as he tightens the screws of the plot). In this book Lucy finds herself developing sympathies for the ghosts, or ‘Visitors’, which both leads her closer to the cause of the Problem and puts her and her colleagues in peril, as does her developing antagonism towards the too-perfect Holly, hired by Lockwood and George as a ‘support staff member’. The first two books can be read as self-contained stories, but this one is barbed throughout with elements that demand further exploration and explanation. What do the ghosts want? Is the plague of ghosts in fact caused or exacerbated by the living? Who is trying to exploit the ghost plague for their own ends? And what ends? You see, I am ready for the next book already.
