Some routines from my stage-act as a bookseller.

'by the same author' by Jack Robinson

A book exists. It has a reader. It has several readers, or many readers, some of whom at some point may well meet each other, perhaps in a circumstance in some way related to the book. People give the book to other people. Some people might steal the book (and other books). People interact with other people because of the book. The book has an author, whose relationship to the book is different from the readers’ relationship to the book, and whose relationship with the reader is different from the readers’ relationships with each other. The book has a publisher (or several publishers), a designer (ditto), a critic (several critics); the author has, perhaps, a biographer (and the biographer some readers of their own (though probably, in the main, readers shared with the author of the book (a subset of the readers of that book))). Things happen in the world because of the book that would not have happened if the book did not exist, or which would have happened differently if the book did not exist or had been a different book. This particular book, by the same author, by Jack Robinson (not his real name), is my favourite book about what books are, how they touch upon our lives and how our lives touch upon them (and upon each other because of them). The book is charming without being cloying, joyful whilst remaining critical, brief yet universal, profound yet light, pellucid whilst wary of the devotion we direct towards these portable vectors of something made by a stranger yet somehow integral to ourselves.

April 2016

   >> You can read a sample here.
    

'Goethe Dies' by Thomas Bernhard

The four stories in Goethe Dies were first published in German periodicals in the early 1980s, and in them we can see Bernhard exercising the devices and themes he used to greater extent and effect in some of the novels written in his last decade. The title story displays Bernhard’s puckish tendency to appropriate and subvert the biographies of actual people, as he did with Glenn Gould in The Loser. In this story, Goethe, on his deathbed, requests a visit from Wittgenstein, who is living in England (and, in reality, was born nearly 60 years after Goethe’s death). Apart from travelling to England and finding Wittgenstein to have died eight days previously and returning too late to report this to Goethe, the nameless narrator has no role other than to report the words of another character, or, more commonly, what one character reports of the words of another character, or, often, what one character reports of another character’s report of the words of yet another character. This device of narratorial passivity witnessing not so much the subject but what may well be little more than hearsay (about hearsay about hearsay) about the subject is a favourite of Bernhard’s, continually calling into question any certainty a reader may think they draw from the text. The story ‘Reunion’ destabilises the operations of memory and satirises the narrator who claims to have freed himself from the influence of the tyrannical parents who in fact still dominate him through his memories, compared with the old friend who listens to his rant, who, the narrator claims, never escaped the influence of his parents, and yet who seems not to remember any of the obsessive details of the narrator’s oppressive memories and may therefore be less affected by the shared unhappiness of childhood. These and the other stories display Bernhard’s resentment of reactionary and traditional power, whether that be in a nation (his will states that his books may not be published in his native, hated "Catholic, National Socialist" Austria) or in a family (but he also portrays his resentment is a base and ludicrous act). “Parents make a child and strive above all else to destroy it, I said, my parents just like yours and every parent altogether and everywhere.”

May 2016
 

'Is that Kafka? 99 finds' by Reiner Stach

Franz Kafka was an exceptional writer, not just in quality but in his qualities. He was also an exception to much of what has been thought of him since, or, rather, both as a writer and a person, he is compounded from exceptions, both to his literary and social milieu and to his own psychology. Not only that, he was an exception to those exceptions. Reiner Stach has written an exhaustive three-volume biography of Kafka, and, while doing so, he has collected these 99 snippets which, published together, display the broader Kafka behind the cliché and are a corrective to conceptions of ‘the Kafkaesque’ which often distort approaches to his works. Kafka never lied but he cheated in an exam, he liked to drink beer, he followed a fitness regime, he made presents for children, he devised, with his friend Max Brod, a series of on-the-cheap travel guides, he loved slapstick and he liked to be called Frank. Stach also provides a couple of plausible Kafka sightings in contemporary crowd photographs. Is that Kafka? Quite possibly, yes.

May 2016
    

'Thought Horses' by Rachel Bush

Rachel Bush's poetry is remarkable for the amount of meaning, feeling and wry humour it pivots on the ordinary details of life, and by the verbal lightness of touch brought to even the heaviest of subjects. Sadly, Rachel died recently. This, her last collection, contains some of her very best work. It shows the breadth of her poetic range and the quiet skill with which she assembled and polished her language, from the conversational asides to the deep fugual patterns which tie meaning to the particular and the ordinary.   

May 2016

'Vertigo' by Joanna Walsh

I first read Joanna Walsh in Hotel, in which she recounts her experiences as a hotel reviewer at a time when her marriage was falling apart. The movement in that book is from the particular to the personal to the theoretical, and Walsh succeeded in picking large enough holes in what at first seems like continuous thought to fall through, and to leave us on the brink with a feeling of vertigo. In Vertigo, a collection of short short stories, vignettes almost, Walsh reverses the current. Here the theoretical forces itself through the grille of the personal to induce the particular. The resulting text is perhaps flatter, less nuanced, than Hotel, but the stories are immediate, often pointed, and filled with sharply selected details which puncture, and thus reveal the emptiness of, the characters and situations her protagonist(s) encounters. When all that is left are the ordinary particulars of everyday life, and these particulars shrug off any ‘meaning’ draped over them, what is there to suppress the panic that arises when we question our relationship to those particulars?

May 2016
    

'Bookshelf' by Lydia Pyne

A bookshelf is the means by which the private, plausibly subversive but certainly separate, worlds of books are tamed, ordered (or otherwise ‘arranged’) and placed in the context of the ‘actual’ world’s physical and societal space. This book looks at how, as the nature both of the book and of society have changed through history, the artefact (the bookshelf) where they meet has changed also to reflect and to shape these changes. What does the history of bookshelves tell us about changing conceptions of the book and its place in society? How does control, from authoritarianism to utility to fashion, over the means of arranging books affect the ways in which we approach and read them? The bookshelf is where books align with or battle with their contexts.

May 2016

'The Invisible Mile' by David Coventry

What is it, at base, that enables us, or forces us, despite it all, the suffering, the mental cost, the weight of the past, the exhaustion, to continue? Do we come into being in the saddle in some endless Tour de France, our very existence, so to call it, such as it is, or more as it was, abraded by the sequence of present moments we struggle through? We can’t go on. We go on. We are muscle-bound, nearly crippled, deformed by the effort in our bodies and our minds, not much good for much else once necessity has had it way with us, clinging to that shrinking space of freedom, call it freedom, we hope we might inhabit, even briefly, should imperfections in the necessary overlap imperfections in the impossible. Not only all that, though all that would be enough, more than enough, to finish us off, we must stay on course, at speed, though memory threatens to overbalance us at every moment, both as a weight within, too highly set to be merely ballast, and as a hazard in the landscape through which we labour, a cross-rut pulling at our wheel whenever we expect it least. I have begun reading this exquisitely written, compelling and thoughtful novel set in the 1928 Tour de France, in which the New Zealand and Australian Ravat-Wonder team was the first English-speaking team to ride, and already I am greatly impressed by Coventry’s ability to control time by the deft manipulation of immediate detail and the restraint with which he applies the slow force of plot upon narrative, by his rapturously fresh sentences, by his ability to write successfully on a number of different levels at once, by his sublimation of metaphor to the thematic depths of the book, leaving the surfaces to pulsate against the darkness. “Speed is a thing. Though its measure is ratio, all else about it is malleable; remove your hand from the bars as you drop off a hillside and feel the thickness of the air, open your mouth and chew on its rubbery substance. The sky, the hills, the trees – they become rumours, then the whole world is a blur and you are the only stationary thing. That is speed.” 

May 2016
    

'Sidewalks' by Valeria Luiselli

“A writer is a person who distributes silences and empty spaces,” writes Luiselli in this book in which she distributes silences and empty spaces to specific locations in various cities around the world (Mexico City, New York, Venice) and uses these silences and empty spaces to think about everything from the quicksilver of identity to the enduring yet strangely erasable legacies of history, to the penumbral meanings of words. From a manifesto for viewing the city and achieving solitude on a bicycle to speculations on the idea of ‘home’ and the relationship between a place and the individuals who live in it, Luiselli writes with subtlety, elegance and wry humour. This is a book I will enjoy reading again.

April 2016
    

'The Yellow Arrow' by Victor Pelevin

“It is the most difficult thing in life. Riding on a train without being a passenger.” A train without beginning or end rushes onwards through Russia, never making a stop or reaching a destination. The passengers live their lives on the train (until they die and are pushed out through the windows) and know no other life, though a few dream of leaving the train (some of these experience something of being outside by riding occasionally on the roof). Although the text as a whole is metaphorically resonant, the writing is spare and sharp, and Pelevin manages to be both savagely satirical and bleakly metaphysical at the same time (à la Gogol), and the book can be read on several different levels simultaneously. When everything is rushing on, on-track, predetermined, and the freedom to which most aspire, if they aspire to freedom, is the freedom to move about within an on-rushing prison unaffected by the ‘freedom’ within it, what will be the fate of Andrei, who says, “I want to get off this train while I am alive”?

April 2016
    

'A Short History of Decay' by E.M. Cioran

Emil Cioran’s works display an extreme pessimism, even nihilism. He is the philosopher of personal and collective frailty and failure, of emptiness, of hopelessness, of the eschewing of all answers (“Having resisted the temptation to conclude, I have overcome the mind.”). He rails against society, against both choice and necessity, against all values. I thought I would like him more than I do. Perhaps it is that he trumpets his nihilism, that he shouts out the immanence of our demise from the event horizon of whatever black hole we are heading towards, that his pessimism is, above all, dramatic (does this call its authenticity into question? (I don’t think so)), that makes me tire of him (he should perhaps be read (by me, at least) in small doses). Our differences are perhaps more of temperament than of territory; to me the underlying nullity of existence is more irredeemable than tragic, and I am to a degree suspicious of the heroic trappings and lyricism of his despair. That said, Cioran is an important, interesting (and frequently amusing) thinker, an heir to Nietzsche, and there is much to admire (and be amused by) in his books. His words dissolve civilisation as acetone dissolves paint (that’s got to be a good thing). The contents page of this book reads like the publishing list of an American academic publisher (“Genealogy of Fanaticism – In the Graveyard of Definitions – Civilisation and Frivolity – Supremacy of the Adjective – Apotheosis of the Vague – The Reactionary Angels – Militant Mourning – Farewell to Philosophy – Obsession of the Essential” &c, &c) , and the book itself contains enough nihilistic aphorisms to fill a lifetime’s worth of anti-inspirational calendars (now, there’s a publishing project…), for example: “One is ‘civilised’ insofar as one does not proclaim one’s leprosy.” Great stuff.

April 2016
    

'Shackleton’s Journey' by William Grill

This beautiful, irresistible large-format picture book tells the story of the failed attempt by Ernest Shackleton and the crew of the Endurance to cross Antarctica on foot, starting in 1914. The expedition never set foot on the continent: Endurance was slowly crushed by pack ice in the Weddell Sea and the crew decamped several times across the ice to reach Elephant Island, from whence Shackleton and a few others sailed to South Georgia Island, where there was a whaling station from which they arranged their rescue, but the story is one of success of the human spirit: beset with the harshest physical and psychological conditions for two years (largely spent waiting, the most hazardous of human activities), none of the crew was lost. Grill’s wonderful illustrations capture the bleakness of the environment, the fragility of human presence on the ice and the myriad details upon which survival depended: the (named) dogs, the supplies, the activities of the individual in the crew. “I believe it is our nature to explore, to reach out into the unknown. The only true failure would be to not explore at all.” – Ernest Shackleton

April 2016
    

'The Untouchable' by John Banville

John Banville is exemplary in his ability to convey the thought processes of his characters, and in the restraint with which he gives us access to the stories they conceal (by largely concealing and slowly releasing them, often causing us to re-evaluate their reliability and the accuracy and context of what they have hitherto revealed about themselves). I am currently reading the self-disclosure/self-concealment (concealment through the cracks of which disclosure seeps) of art historian and double-agent Victor Maskell, largely based on real-life double-agent Anthony Blunt, following the ‘outing’ by the British Prime Minister for his role as the 'fourth man' in the Burgess-Maclean-Philby spy ring during the Cold War. Banville is at his best, the text written with a scalpel and full of wit, quirks and sly observations.

April 2016
    

'Seraphina' by Rachel Hartman

My thirteen-year-old son and I have started reading this book and we are both enjoying it very much. It is forty years since peace was made between the humans and the dragons, and the two species co-exist uneasily in Goredd, with the dragons taking human form. As the anniversary visit by the dragon leader approaches, the Goreddi prince is found murdered in a way that suggests the work of dragons. Sixteen-year-old Seraphina, a gifted musician, assistant to the court composer, is drawn into an intrigue indiciative of the disintegrating relationship between humans and dragons, aware that she must hide her secret: her father is human but mother was a dragon, and this not only gives her special gifts but also puts her in immense danger, both from the species-hatred of many Goreddis and from the peculiarly peopled landscape of her own mind, scattered with memories left for her by her mother. Hartman’s exploration of difference (both internalised and politicised) is nuanced and immensely sympathetic, and the book’s world is particular and convincing (discovering its characteristics reminds me of the convincing wonder I experienced as a child discovering the characteristics of Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea). Hartman’s writing frequently achieves flights of great beauty. I look forward to each evening’s instalment.

April 2016
    

'Hotel' by Joanna Walsh

As a relief from an unhappy marriage, Walsh got a job as a hotel reviewer and spent a period of time living only in places that are intended to be alternatives to home (places in which ‘staying’ means not remaining but merely deferred leaving). In this series of short pieces, with occasional appearances by Freud, Dora (the subject of Freud’s early work on hysteria), Katherine Mansfield, KM (her alter ego), and the Marx brothers, Walsh plays rigorously with the idea of the hotel and with the idea of home that is its complement and shadow. Throughout the book, she does such a thorough job of picking away at ideas that vertiginous spaces open up within them, terrifying emptinesses in what had seemed like smooth and continuous thought. She is, understandably, intent on the mechanisms and ellipses by which her marriage has disintegrated: is the fault in the idea of marriage, in her husband or in herself, or is this “only ordinary unhappiness”? Walsh is adept at the re-flexing of banal tropes into fresh and sturdy thought: “We went into marriage to fulfil our individual desires, but we found ourselves required to be fulfilled by what we found there. The marriage problem is the same as the hotel problem. I have second-guessed your desires, and those of others. I have made myself into a hotel.” She is under no illusion that thinking can provide resolution (indeed the benefits of thought are magnified when resolution is impossible or eschewed), aware that problems will remain problems (we may at best hope for them to be problems we to some extent understand): “Plot is good in books but bad in life. There is no plot in a hotel. When I am in a hotel, the bad thing in abeyance but it is waiting to happen outside the hotel nevertheless.”

March 2016
 

'Notes on Suicide' by Simon Critchley

Whether life is worth living or not is not something that can be philosophically contested, but, if it is not worth living, whether suicide is justifiable and well as understandable is perhaps open to examination. Critchley interrogates the standard arguments against suicide and finds them unsupportable (in this he is much aided by an afterword from the ever-luminescent David Hume). The general argument in justification of suicide (or, rather, against the proscription of suicide) is one of what I would call ‘possessive individualism’, the assertion of the absolute freedom to dispose of oneself as one chooses. This argument leaves unexamined the easy belief that the bundle of impulses, tendencies and glimmerings of consciousness that we think of as ourselves in fact belong to or ‘are’ us, rather than being mere nodes in a field of impulses, tendencies and glimmerings and indivisible from the other nodes therein. In fact, we find ourselves constantly constrained by the wider consequences of an act of freedom to the extent that this freedom is not free, and thus suicide can never be merely the sovereign removal of oneself from the hole into which one had been consigned. From the individualistic point of view, suicide is both an assertion of oneself as the sole subject of one’s life and the relinquishment of oneself as the subject, a determination to be relieved of an unbearable subjectivity, to stop experiencing the story from the point of view of a character, to become, for the instant that the story ends, the reader of that story, a reader who will perish, as all readers do, in the cessation of the story. Critchley considers Cioran’s assertion that suicide is the recourse of optimists: “Is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?”, and makes some concluding attempts to the effect that it is the fact that life is not worth living that makes life worth living. In this he strays near the philosophically unreachable consideration of suicide where it is not possible to make assertions without being at least judgemental if not insensitive. If there is an argument against suicide it is not that life is worth living, but, perhaps, a general one against the possessive individualism upon which our culture, and indeed modern consciousness, depends.

March 2016
    

'Something for the Pain: A memoir of the turf' by Gerald Murnane

Why would I, who have no interest in horse racing and who seldom reads a memoir or biography, read a book composed almost exclusively of one man’s recollections of the minutiae of horse racing in Victoria, Australia, from the 1940s to the present? Gerald Murnane has written some very interesting, layered and subtle fictions (see my reviews of Inland, Barley Patch and A Million Windows), which have formed in me an opinion of his craft with which he evidently concurs: “My sentences are the best-shaped of any sentences written by any writer of fiction in the English language during my lifetime”. If you are wanting intimations of the interior life of the Australian Proust, you will not find them in this book, largely because you have brought to your search what you must henceforth regard as unwarranted romantic notions. In fact, the mechanisms of Murnane’s literary thinking are all here: the obsessive arrangement and rearrangement of a narrow range of idiosyncratic elements; the interrogation of memory, not to arrive at factual truth as such but as an attempt to recapture the truth of subjective experience, which somehow springs into poignancy from the fine-milling of detail; an acknowledgement of the inescapability of life’s circumscriptions, which, for Murnane, act as subjective intensifiers, providing circumstance with significance beyond the quotidian. As always with Murnane, meaning and banality are separated by the thinnest of membranes, permeable in either direction. Why horse racing? “I find it peculiarly satisfying that the year when Bernborough became famous was the same year in which I began to read the Sporting Globe and to find in horse racing more than I would find in any religious or philosophical system.” And: “I got from horse racing in the first twenty-five years of my life more than I ever got from any friendship or courtship.” Like all religions (and, perhaps, all other fields of human activity), horse racing is irrelevant beyond its own parameters, but is also revealing of deep human needs and aspirations. I will probably never read another book on horse racing. I wonder what someone interested in horse racing would have made of it.

March 2016
    

'The Inevitable Gift Shop' by Will Eaves

The Absent Therapist, which saw Will Eaves short-listed for the 2014 Goldsmiths Prize, is one of the most enjoyable books I have read in the past couple of years, and is a consummate piece of kaleidoscopic ventriloquism (read my review here). The Inevitable Gift Shop is not so much kaleidoscopic as autokleptomanic, not so much ventriloquistic as autoarchivistic. This book is an assemblage of prose fragments, poems, anecdotes, and observations on works of literature. It is unsuccessful as ‘a work’, but as a ‘non-work’ it is intimate and personable and frequently insightful, funny, or both; it is as if we are permitted to read Eaves’ journal, or to be with him as he has his thoughts. He makes some perceptive comments on the act and place of writing: “The work is an act of self-conscious creation that has the effect of cancelling self-consciousness”, and of the relation between our inner and outer lives: “The self-portrait is even more surprising than the objective portrait because, it turns out, we are not as we see ourselves, either”. And his humour is never far below the surface: “I eat fish with a clear conscience because they neglect their young”.

March 2016
    

'Pond' by Claire-Louise Bennett

“English, strictly speaking, is not my first language by the way. I haven’t yet discovered what my first language is so for the time being I use English words in order to say things.” Always hinting at experience just beyond the reach of language, Bennett's remarkable book is impelled by the rigours of noticing. Encounters with persons and with the infraordinary are treated with equivalence: acute, highly acute, overly acute, observations immediately plunge the narrator’s awareness into the depths of her response (“My head is turned by imagined elsewheres and hardly at all by present circumstances.”), far from the surface at which outward contact may be made, or may be being made, a process that is both deeply isolating, terrifying and protective. Bennett’s unsparingly acute observations of the usually unacknowledged or unacknowledgeable motivations, urges and responses that underlie human interaction and quotidian existence seem here induced by an acceptance or a resignation that is enabled by despair, or is indistinguishable from despair, both a resignation and a panic, perhaps, a panic on the edge of self-dissolution which is perhaps our last resistance to self-dissolution and therefore fundamental to individual existence: the anxiety which all human activity is designed to conceal. Bennett’s is a very individual voice (click here to hear her read a sample), resonating at times with other works of irredeemably isolated interiority, such David Markson’s superb  Wittgenstein’s Mistress or the suppressed hysteria of Thomas Bernhard’s narrators, but tracking entirely her own patterns of thought (I have perhaps made an error here of conflating the author with the narrator, but, if this is an error, it is one hard to avoid in the book in which style and content are inseparable) with an immediacy that precludes the artificially patterning, pseudo-assimilable explanation of a ‘story’. In one excellent section, ‘Control Knobs’, the narrator describes the gradual disintegration of the three knobs that control her cooker and speculates a coming time when the last interchangeable knob breaks and the cooker will become unusable. This reminds her of the counted matches in Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall (another novel of irredeemably isolated interiority), which mark the time to the point at which that narrator will no longer be able to light a fire to cook and warm herself. Following a discussion of Bennett’s narrator’s reading and misreading of that book, she returns to an account of the ultimate hopelessness of her attempts to procure new knobs for her cooker. “I feel at a loss for about ten minutes and it’s a sensation, I realise, not dissimilar to indifference. So, naturally, I handle it rather well.”

February 2016
 

'Playthings' by Alex Pheby

Freud’s consideration of the case of the judge Paul Schreber, and his book Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903), was instrumental in the formulation of the modern construct of paranoid schizophrenia, and Schreber’s experience, treatment and interpretation have been rigorously explored and debated by Deleuze, Guatarri, Canetti, Lacan, Calasso and others. Playthings, a novel by Alex Pheby, depicts, sometimes horrifically, sometimes with humour or beauty, sometimes ironically, Schreber’s descent into and experience of madness: his inability to achieve the culturally determined overarching perspective that enables us to function without being overwhelmed by minor details, observations and experiences (of course, none of us do this especially well; our ability to ‘function’ determines which side of the line of ‘madness’ we exist on); his inability to integrate his experiences into ‘useful’ concepts of time and causality; his inability to see others as persons or to interpret their intentions and actions in ways that fit with shared concepts of the patterns of intentions and actions, and his projection of suppressed psychological material onto such others (this dehumanisation of those seen as ‘other’ is a manifestation of the mechanisms by which socially inter-confirmed mass paranoia presented itself as fascism in Germany a few decades later). “It was nothing to him, because they were all nothing. Fleeting-improvised-wretched-plaything-human-beings. Puppets, soul-less automata, clicking and whirring and chirruping to each other on a flat street of false houses and dust blown by the perishing cold wind.” As Pheby zooms in and away from Schreber’s experience, playing always with the perspective that lies at the core of his illness, leaving us uncertain which side of the line between madness and sanity we are experiencing or what constitutes ‘reality’, we as readers become aware of ourselves as the author’s plaything. The key mechanisms of schizophrenia are the key mechanisms of literature; it is only our ability to close the book that keeps us sane.

February 2016
    

'Concrete' by Thomas Bernhard

In a single brilliant book-length hysterical paragraph, Rudolph, Bernhard’s narrator, a middle-aged invalid both incapacitated and sustained by his neuroses, obsessed with writing his great work on the composer Mendelssohn Bartholdy but of course incapable of even beginning to write, neurasthenically procrastinating and irritated, riven by every possible ambivalence, unable to write whilst his sister is visiting and unable to write unless she is present, hating his sister but dependent upon her, needing his home but stifled by it, rants about everything from making too many notes to the idiocy of keeping dogs. Bernhard’s delineation of an individual whose interiority and isolation has attained the highest degree is flawless, devastating and very funny. No sooner has Rudolph made a categorical assertion than he begins to move towards its opposite: after describing the cruelty of his sister towards him, we become increasingly aware of her concern for him and his mental state; no sooner does he attain the solitude of his grand Austrian country home (soon after the book opens he makes the categorical assertion, “We must be alone and free from all human contact if we wish to embark upon an intellectual task!”, a common fallacious predicate that one commonly inclines towards but which subverts one’s ends (he follows this swiftly with another self-defeating assertion: “I still don’t know how to word the first sentence, and before I know the wording of the first sentence I can’t begin any work.”)) than he is absolutely certain that he must travel to Palma if he is to write his book on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. Towards the end of the book, we learn that Rudolph did indeed go to Palma, where he is writing this account (instead of his work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy) after learning of the recent suicide of a young woman he had met there on a previous occasion following the death of her husband (who was discovered fallen onto concrete beneath their hotel balcony). Such was the isolation of Rudolph’s interiority that he was incapable of taking timely action to help the unfortunate young woman, though it was easily within his means to do so, incapable of making authentic human contact, stifled by his own ambivalences and self-obsession (the undeclared ironic tragedy being that he may possibly have returned to Palma in order to help the young woman but that he is of course too late, her suicide triggering the self-excoriation that comprises the book).

February 2016
    

'The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty' by Vendela Vida

This is an easy book to recommend as it is successful is a number of different ways: firstly, it is engaging and enjoyable to read, well-paced and with the protagonist’s back-story gradually emerging in synchronicity with the plot; secondly, it is thought-provoking in its examination of the phenomenon of identity, something that belongs more to the world that surrounds an individual than to the individual to whom the identity is applied, something that brings its expectations and defining history, both of which are slippery enough to be shrugged off and exchanged if circumstances demand or allow; thirdly, it is written throughout in the second person, an affect that is elsewhere rarely successful but here is perfectly natural and compelling, making the reader entirely complicit in the elusions and deceptions of protagonist.

February 2016
    

'The Art of the Publisher' by Roberto Calasso

Calasso, who, apart from being the author of a number of interesting and idiosyncratic books, is the publisher at Adelphi Edizioni, here makes a plea for publishing to be considered as a ‘form’ and for publishers to consider their list as a mutually enhancing set rather than a jumble of products, and to bring focus to the selection, design and placement of the works they publish in order to create a recognisable identity as a publisher. The book is a little repetitive as it is an assembly of essays and lectures from several decades, but the challenges it sets are pertinent to the current publishing environment, in which small, sharp publishing houses are finding spaces from which the less-focussed behemoths have withdrawn in pursuit of the ever-greater profits demanded by their shareholders.

February 2016
    

'The Visiting Privilege' by Joy Williams

I am moving through this retrospective collection of Williams’ tenderly misanthropic short stories. It seems impossible to read more than one at a sitting: too many perfect strikes on the same piece of cultural anatomy in quick succession start to hurt. Williams is a devastating observer of social vacuities, and yet manages to induce great sympathy for the ways in which her characters desperately attempt to shore up their dissolving realities.
>> Williams’s essay on writing, ‘Uncanny the Singing that Comes from Certain Husks’, has the same merciless sympathy as her stories. 

Feb '16
 

'An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to one who saw it' by Jessie Greengrass

Greengrass’s carefully faceted little gems of stories will pass through your consciousness without causing any harm. The narrators are reflective, generally somewhat melancholy, moving not towards protagonism but towards a clearer delineation of the mechanisms of the stories they have found themselves helplessly or blindly part of but are unable to change (generally because the mechanisms of their pasts seem largely to have expended themselves before reaching their presents). It would be interesting to see what Greengrass could achieve with her indisputable verbal facility if pushed over the edge of her comfort.

February 2016
    

'Crucial Interventions: An illustrated treatise on the principles and practice of nineteenth-century surgery' by Richard Barnett

The surgery may have been performed on patients under anaesthetic but readers of this book have no such protection from discomfort. Beautifully executed chromolithographs of procedures and instruments abound. Fortunately there are fewer pictorial horrors on the text pages, which lack enables the reader to stay the long enough to read.  

Jan '16
    

'Between You and Me: Confessions of a comma queen' by Mary Norris

Mary Norris has been a copy editor, or something similar, at The New Yorker for over three decades, maintaining the magazine's reputation for grammatical correctness and style. In this memoir-cum-grammar-guide, she is relentlessly chatty and companionable, which is not my sort of thing, so, as I am reading, I am out to pick a fight with her whenever I can (generally on matters of style (grammar's wrestling ring (I think wrestling is done in a ring (grammar certainly is (also, note my use of New Yorkerian commas (the nested brackets being a predilection (affectation)of my own))))).

January 2016
    

'The Body Where I Was Born' by Guadalupe Nettel

This novel describes the childhood and adolescence of the author (evidently), who was born with a birthmark covering her right cornea into a Mexican family of uncompromising personalities. Evoked (remembered or ‘remembered’) with great precision, both boldly and delicately, this is an incisive portrait of a girl striving to feel at home in her own self, to overcome her feelings of being a social and familial misfit (she describes herself as a “cockroach” or a “trilobite”) without compromising her individuality. The device of having the story related to a psychiatrist (who makes no contribution (good practice for a psychiatrist)) introduces an interesting tension upon the narrative, a pressure retrospectively applied to childhood by later (here unrelated) experiences.

January 2016
   
    

'Grief is the Thing with Feathers' by Max Porter

An immensely poignant portrayal of the impact of a woman’s sudden death on her sons and husband (a Ted Hughes scholar), and of their visit by Crow, all beak, flint eye and feathers, who stays with them through their mourning (grief being its own cure). An eloquent exploration of the liminal zones opened up by loss, awkward where awkwardness subverts cliché, poetic, dark, playful (the passages narrated by Crow are infused with the personality of this corvid psychopomp), unflinching and, ultimately, hopeful.

January 2016

   >> You can hear Max Porter (BTW he was Eleanor Catton's editor for The Luminaries; I was impressed by his thoughtfulness when he spoke with her at the Readers & Writers festival in Wellington a couple of years ago) read from Grief in the Thing with Feathers here.  

'Nocilla Dream' by Augustin Fernandez Mallo

This novel, from the exciting Fitzcarraldo Editions, is comprised of 113 entries: strands of stories, pieces of fact, characters’ perspectives, extracts from other authors; all these strands twisted or knotted together make a spare, melancholy, elusive work, as spare, melancholy and elusive as the piece of desert in Nevada where it is (largely) set. Innovative in form, the novel is also ‘about’ the writing of a novel (or the impossibility of writing a novel (or the reformulation of the concept of a novel)). 

January 2016
    

'Dogma' by Lars Iyer

As the Age of Gold was followed by the Age of Silver, then by the Age of Bronze and the Age of Iron, so now we are now, according to Lars's friend W, entering the Age of Shit, where, according to W, Lars (who appears in the book only through the eyes of W.) will come into his own: "That's where I will wear my great grin, says W. ... That's where I'll perform my cosmic dance, like a strutting, overfed chicken". One of the memorable comic literary duos of the last decade, these bolted academics (c.f. bolted lettuces) first appeared in Spurious. There is no substantative difference between the books, so you might as well read my review of the first one here. This book contains more of Lars's and W.'s efforts to grease the slopes of philosophy. The first book has the advantage of being better; this one has the advantage of being more once you've read the first. 

    January 2016