China Miéville: Dial H

Miéville, China; Mateus Santolouco, Riccardo Burchielli et al. (2013), Dial H: Into You, DC Comics
ISBN 9-781401-237752

Wood, Dave; Jim Mooney et al. (2010), Showcase Presents: Dial H for Hero, DC Comics
ISBN 978-1-4012-2648-0

Pfeifer, Will; Kano et al. (2003), H-E-R-O: Powers and Abilities, DC Comics
ISBN 1-4012-0168-7

   So, while I am a fan of comic books and do read quite a few of them, I am still frequently overwhelmed by the incredible amount of characters and complicated back stories. DC Comics is especially infamous for not just having complicated stories, but even multiple realities and universes, which they then attempted to collapse in amazingly readable and fun but convoluted “events”. Then, suddenly, DC decided to do away with all the accrued history and complications by relaunching all of its titles in 2011, calling the new set of books “the new 52”. This reset the stories on all their major titles, giving them new origin stories, and new slants. It also turned the DC universe somewhat more male, due to the fact that female creators were vastly underrepresented among the slate of amazing writers and artists, and also due to the fact that a lot of female characters either completely vanished, like fan favorite Stephanie Brown, or were declared dead, like Renée Montoya. Other female characters were revived as weaker or “sexier” versions of their old selves. And it’s not just female characters. The first waves of comics to come out seemed to have a decidedly conservative slant in how they were positioned vis-a-vis recent character history. One example is Judd Winnick’s Catwoman run, as compared to the more recent history of the character in the hands of Ed Brubaker, Darwyn Cooke and others. However, DC also did something very interesting: they decided to use the bright lights of public attention in the wake of the relaunch in order to relaunch a bunch of much less well known characters, some of whom were pulled from DC’s more alternative imprints Vertigo and Wildstorm.

Frankenstein, for example, last seen in Grant Morrison’s book Seven Soldiers of Victory, was given his own title (written by the great, great Jeff Lemire), as were Animal Man and Swamp Thing, both of whom had iconic runs with Vertigo. The characters thus revived are not all equally well known. While Swamp Thing is probably one of the best known ‘alternative’ properties of DC, they also offered much less well known characters and titles a spot in the limelight. One of these characters/properties is Dial H for Hero, a decidedly odd kind of title, with a very inconsistent publishing history. His revival could have gone either way. DC, however, asked China Miéville to write this title, and the result is incredibly good. I have been reading quite a few comic books during the past year, and some extremely good ones among them (I’ll probably review some of them in the near future), but Miéville’s Dial H is easily one of the best, if not the best among this crop of really excellent comics that have been coming out. If you have been following Miéville’s career (as I have), this will likely not have come as a surprise to you. Miéville has established himself as one of the leading contemporary writers of science fiction, and probably one of the better novelists in the UK regardless of genre. Even considering the regrettable duds like Kraken, his bibliography is full of inventive, smart, extraordinarily well written novels. The news that he would be turning his attention to comic books in order to write a title of his own had me giddy and excited for a year. I spent part of that year reading up on the history of the character or characters that would be featured in Miéville’s book. And as I found out, that is a peculiar history.

Limited as I am to trade publications, I will focus on only two books centered on the “Dial H”-property. There were small instances of the title resurfacing in between, they were not, however, collected as trades. The first time comic book readers came upon the Dial H for Hero stories was in 1965, in the pages of “House of Mystery #165”. The stories featured a boy called Robby Reed who finds a strange apparatus that “looks like a dial…made of a peculiar alloy….with a strange inscription on it”. The “young genius” decipers the inscription running along the side of the apparatus and finds that it asks its user to “dial the letters h-e-r-o”. Intrepid young Robby Reed does just that and, lo and behold, he turns into a superhero. His whole physical appearance is transformed: he has become a giant, complete with a superhero uniform (that even has letters on the front) and somehow he knows that the hero he transformed into is called “Giantboy”. Using the powers of the character, he thwarts some evil villains, and returning home, dials o-r-e-h in order to transform back into his bespectacled mild mannered self. The boy turning into an adult superhero is highly reminiscent of DC’s Captain Marvel, which is a boy called Billy Bateson who turns into the superhero Captain Marvel by saying “Shazam!”. However, as far as I know, Captain Marvel (sometimes also just named “Shazam”) is always more or less the same guy. Robby Reed’s dial, however, turns him into a different superhero every time he gives his dial a spin. There is so much that is bad about this title, from the casual racism (at one point he turns into “an Indian super-hero – Chief Mighty Arrow” and is even issued a companion, “a winged injun pony”. When he is upset, he shouts “Holy Massacre” and wishes he could “scalp” a monster) to sexism (Robby’s love interest find the dial, dials “h-e-r-o-i-n-e” and turns into “Gem Girl” despite Robby’s warnings that the dial is not a toy, and he ends up forcing her to dial herself back into a girl “before she gets any more ideas”), and overall ridiculous writing. However, it’s some of the most incredibly inventive work I have ever seen.

Robby transforms into heroes that make sense, like Giantboy or The Human Bullet etc., but in one issue he transforms into geometric shapes with arms and legs, for example. Coming up with new heroes (although you can dial up old ones too, it’s basically a randomized selection out of a finite, but large pool) forced the writer of the books, Dave Wood, to dig deep. And Jim Mooney’s art perfectly realizes Wood’s wacky vision. It’s just so much ridiculous fun, and the Showcase volume is well worth your while. If you want an idea of the silly fun on offer, click here to see a selection of covers. After a while the Dial H for Hero stories petered out. There were various small scale revivals, including one in the 1980s by the great Marv Wolfman, also called Dial H for Hero, but since none of them have been published as trades, I can’t really comment on them. They introduced more characters spinning the dial and further enlarged the pool of super-heroes. I’ve had a look at the Wiki summary of Wolfman’s run and it seems delightfully insane, and it seems to have more of a coherent plot than the Wood/Mooney version, which is basically a gonzo one-off kind of thing in each issue.

Even more coherent (and initially at least considerably more down to earth) is the 2003 incarnation called H-E-R-O, written by Will Pfeifer and beautifully illustrated by Kano. That run went on for 22 issues, but for some reason, only issues 1-6 have been collected as a trade (called H-E-R-O: Powers and Abilities). Pfeifer’s run features different people finding the dial and examines what happens to their lives when you add the opportunity to transform into a superhero. There is a young adult mired in a mediocre life, “making sundaes at minimum wage”. In order to impress a girl, and more generally as an attempt to “be someone”, he uses the Dial to unimpressive and even disastrous effect. A business man finding the dial becomes obsessed with it. A girl uses it to become popular at her new school, etc. The book was a bit of a letdown, even though the writing and art was just so much better than the Wood/Mooney version. But Pfeifer got rid of the ridiculous fun and inventiveness and infused the whole book with a dour morality, mostly lectures about being content with who you are and knowing your limits and being nice and industrious within those limits. Much more than the original book, the dialing device becomes a metaphor for situations that we all face in our lives etc. etc. I’m boring myself just describing it. For all the good writing and wonderful art that went into this book, it’s hard to recommend, because Pfeifer so consistently underwhelms. The idea of the dial is one of the most liberating literary devices I have ever seen, and to see it used in this pedestrian, moral, middle-class way was disheartening. If that was the direction that the Dial H for Hero story was going, I was worried about Miéville’s run presenting more of the same. Silly me. China Miéville blows Pfeifer’s run clean out of the water.

Miéville renames the series Dial H, and provides a spin on it that is equal parts original and respectful to the Silver Age original. The protagonist of the first trade is called Nelson Jent, and he’s an obese unemployed middle aged man, who, one night, is almost beat up by a group of lowlifes and, attempting to call the police from a phone booth, transforms into Boy Chimney. From that moment the reader knows that this is something else than the other titles in the Dial H for Hero series. And it starts with small details: Mieville, like many writers, offers us the thoughts of the characters that he focuses on. And as Jent transforms into Boy Chimney, his thoughts seem to transform, as well. Strange fragments enter them, and as Boy Chimney proceeds to beat up that gang, he appears to have a dialog with the consciousness of Nelson Jent. Additionally, Boy Chimney is very clearly not a super hero, as all the previous titles imagined them. He is a strange creature that has uncommon strength and unusual powers and abilities, among them the ability to use and command smoke. But it’s only Jent’s consciousness that keeps Boy Chimney from outright killing the brutal assailants in the alley. It feels less like Jent is genuinely transforming into a super hero, and more like a kind of symbiosis. And there is another basic difference: Jent doesn’t have to transform back by dialing the letters in reverse. He automatically returns to his normal self, “into the worst identity of all”, after a certain, variable amount of time has passed. Apart from this, the book’s early parts seem to be fairly straightforward. There’s a villain with a secret plan and he and Jent’s super heroes keep meeting and fighting. And then, the book quickly goes off the rails into the most incredible insanity. The villain, it turns out, is a “nullomancer”, a kind of wizard of nothingness, able to conjure and control nothingness, and her plan involves channeling an ancient beast called the Abyss, a strange thing composed of nothingness, but at the same time, containing universes.

If this sounds absurd, I can assure you that Miéville makes it work on the page, and in his origin story, which closes out the trade, he offers a brilliant explanation for what the dial basically does. It’s hard to give you more details without spoiling the book, so I won’t, but the upshot of it all is that Miéville managed to tell a story that makes use of the incredible artistic liberties that the material has to offer, and yet it’s a book very determined to make sense, in multiple ways. What’s more, the art is not a let down. Would it have been a better book with JH Williams III at the helm? Possibly. But Mateus Santolouco, of whom I have never heard, does an excellent job. I was especially impressed by his work on the super-hero identities invoked by the dial. They are the most crucial visual element of the book, as they have to appear both plausible and iconical – and absurdly odd at the same time. As Boy Chimney leaps from the phone booth he is instantly alive on the page, as a scary, off the wall character. Almost as important are the colors, and Tanya and Richard Horie have done a simply magnificent job throughout the book. In my review of Brian Wood’s DMZ I have lamented the fact that the art seemed but a servant to Wood’s writing in the book, making for a less than great reading experience. That is not the case with Dial H. Even though Miéville is a famous award winning novelist, Santolouco brings a very distinct artistic vision to bear. The sketches in the back show how he worked on and tweaked the look of various superhero identities. Santolouco’s achievement is thrown into even starker relief by issue #0, which presents a kind of origin story, and is included at the back of the trade. Riccardo Burchielli valiantly tries to do justice to Miéville’s amazing script, but it’s an overall disappointing effort, compared to Santolouco’s work that came before.

The book has so many ideas, and one of them is an obsession with identity. With superheroes, we talk a lot about identities, secret and public ones, but that is usually a naming issue: what name do I use? What mask do I wear. Alternative takes on superhero narratives (cf. Millar’s Kick-Ass) suggest that wearing masks is liberating, but they don’t really discuss or problematize the core issue of identity. Miéville, as all his work so far has also shown, is very aware of how identity is tied up in physical forms and in cultural and social ties. The characters that Jent turns into appear to have their own memories, and while it turns out to be an issue more of colonialism and appropriation than of sociology and psychology, Miéville opens wide the doors for these discussions. In doing so, I think, he goes beyond even writers like Morrison, as he uses the iconicity and language of big publisher super-hero comics and examines it carefully. This is not another one of those books critical of ‘superhero myths’, and it doesn’t offer a grimy reality based taken on super heroes. There are enough of those around. No, Miéville embraces a lot of the central qualities of the genre and uses its language in order to interrogate it and tell an absorbing story at the same time. The best news? There is much more to come. For all the density of this book, it merely collects the first issues in an ongoing run. The next trade is due in January 2014. You should be reading this book.

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Linn Ullmann: Grace

Ullmann, Linn (2005), Grace, Picador
Translated by Barbara Haveland
ISBN 0-330-43431-4

Levé, Édouard (2009), Suicide, Folio
ISBN 978-2070398621

[English translation: Édouard Levé (2011), Suicide, Dalkey
Translated by Jan Steyn
ISBN 978-1-56478-628-9

This is the second part of a two part review of two short novels about dying. For the introduction and a review of the first book, Helen Garner's The Spare Room, click here. As I pointed out, Garner's novel is a moving and intense take on the ars moriendi, that leaves out the thoughts and emotions of the dying person, focusing instead on the friend giving her shelter. The opposite is true of Linn Ullmann's Grace.

Linn Ullmann is a Norwegian novelist, critic and actress. Grace, her third novel, was published in 2002, to instant acclaim. In Norway, it won “The Readers' Prize” and the translation was longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. In a way, it seems fitting that this book won an audience award since it feels much less complicated and skilled than Helen Garner's book did. For all the immediacy that Garner provided, she also offered a complex framework, buttressed by unusually controlled and clear writing. Ullmann's prose, in stark contrast to this, seems much less controlled. The book spans the whole period between the day the doctors announce the impending death of Johan Sletten, Ullmann's hapless and cancer-stricken protagonist, in “six months, maybe more, maybe less”, and his eventual death. Additionally, Johan uses that time to reflect on his past life. All of this happens in about 130 pages. Ullmann's technique involves examining individual episodes, and there is a genuine attempt to find original, significant, new ways to talk about someone dying of cancer. Her attempt to squeeze new life from old situations is most visible in some of her metaphors:

Mai's face was a sign. He caught himself searching Mai's face with something like suspicion, much as a passenger on a plane will search the flight attendant's face when the plane begins to shudder and the cabin lights go out. Is this it? Are we crashing now? Does she look worried? Will it be over soon?

On the other hand, it's hard not to see other situations as mere wistful riffs on established tropes, such as the moment that Johan's face grows a horribly disfiguring boil, signifying his illness and general descent into physical decrepitude. This is not necessarily negative, however. Using these tropes and situations, Ullmann aligns herself with a much older tradition, medieval and renaissance morality writing about death. Starting with the overtly religious title of the English book (I have no cultural context for the original Norwegian title, Nåde), and contining with set pieces like the boil. She is not the first writer to go down that road, and there's no getting around that fact that other authors in the genre, even contemporary ones, have a much more nimble hand at this kind of writing. Philip Roth (click here for more of my reviews of his work) comes to mind, and even though I find his Everyman the sad nadir of his late uninspired spike in productivity, his use of tradition as a point of reference in discussing the life of a 20th century man is absolutely masterful, whether the text in question is Dickens or the titular morality play.

Everyman, however, is also a good example of a kind of writing that Ullmann actively distances herself from: the vaguely masturbatory, self-congratulatory summing up of male experience. Even when writers like Roth examine mediocrity, there's always an element of pride, a swagger to it. Of course, with Roth, the source of that swagger more often than not is sexuality – and its enemy, physical decline. He has his protagonist say that "eluding death seemed to have become the central business of life and bodily decay his entire story." An anxiety about bodies, combined with sexual narratives that are often boastful even in less than stellar moments. Reading Grace, one feels that Ullmann is very aware of these contexts (while I focused on Everyman, there is an endless multitude of books doing the same thing). Her portrayal of mediocrity is harsh and thorough: Johan Sletten's life, as we learn quickly, has been one of failure and weakness. His first marriage was doomed, but while he wished to end it, he had not been capable of doing so, waiting until the situation resolved itself. His weakness shows in this assessment of his relief at his first wife's death

Johan often thought that if Alice had not, after twenty years of marriage, been run over and silenced at last by a black station wagon in downtown Oslo, he would have had to run her over himself.

Clearly, Johan, is an unsympathetic character. There is really nothing likable about him, and Johan himself is highly aware of that. He had a falling out with his only child but makes no real effort to repair that relationship. And it's not just his personal life: he was fired from his position at a newspaper after he plagiarized a review. There is no sense of this being an isolated, regrettable mistake. Instead, it is accepted as a consequence of the way Johan has been leading his life.

There seems to be more than a little of Iris Murdoch's George McCaffrey, one of the most masterfully realized literary mediocrities I can remember reading about, in the character of Johan. But the protagonist of The Philosopher's Pupil (a book that anyone reading this should read as soon as possible) fights his mediocrity, without being interested in changing its substance. George McCaffrey is smart enough to see that he is profoundly lacking; much of his actions, however, serve the purpose of trying to keep others from noticing it. As a result, George develops a great deal of resentment and aggression, impotent as much of it turns out to be. But for Johan, there is clearly no wish or attempt to do something about it one way or the other. Johan just lives on by virtue of his body continuing to function. Until, indeed, it stops. Which, fittingly, is the moment he starts to resent his decay. He starts to get into the old man complaints we know from so many other books. This is quite clever of Ullmann, as it allows her to tie this common literary phenomenon into the context of this mostly unpleasant man's cowardly musings, thus putting on a different coat of interpretative paint onto this/a well known surface. There is, however, something in his life that seems to somewhat redeem him: his second wife Mai. Mai is a physician, and she is considerably younger (17 years) than him, and more importantly: she loves him. Johan can't quite comprehend this love, and we can't quite, either. Given the small girth of the book, Ullman doesn't really have room to make Mai's love plausible, and so she doesn't really attempt it. This, however, leads to an interesting wrinkle in the structure of the book. There are many ways in which the book appears to suggest (and sometimes outright say) that Mai is Johan's redemption, a fresh breath, a new lease on life, but at the same time, she is presented as a bright, wonderful, empathetic character, and Johan, well he's still Johan.

While he is appropriately overwhelmed by her love and rightfully thankful for it, it enters his life at a time when he doesn't have the strength to really accommodate it. There is an odd sense of recriminations. Take this example: spurred by an almost-epiphany in the park, he decides he wants for them to adopt a dog, and, excited, puts this suggestion to Mai, but she declines. This, we are told, “ruined his breakfast.” He's upset he's not getting his way in this small aspect, and because he is incapable of contextualizing moments in his life with the larger ebb and flow of what happens (a skill he lacks but which might have helped him to reconsider the way he's let his life fall apart in the first place). As we find out, he lives his life inside his own head, with his observations and his decisions only related to his personal brand of whiny, cowardly logic. To take up Helen Garner's metaphor: he has no 'spare room' for Mai inside his head, he is too preoccupied with arranging the place for himself. The latter half of his life has consisted of letting himself go, and burdening others with the weight of his failing life. And as his cancer, the “beast”, gets worse, he imposes the ultimate burden on Mai: he asks her to assist him with dying, to euthanize him. In the intro to my review of The Spare Room, I said that Grace is a kind of ars moriendi: but in a way, it does this by showing us a bad example. Like Nicola, Johan doesn't really want to face his death head on; as with everything else in his life, he evades dealing with things directly. Unlike Nicola, he doesn't actually do something to fight death, he just moans and complains.

If that was all there was to the book, it would be quite the dour piece of writing, but it's not. The book is called Grace, after all, and indeed we see Johan transformed by the process of dying. It's not that he becomes a better man. He remains a petty and jealous and selfish mediocrity, but Linn Ullmann makes us see, from the outside, that the situation transforms him, as an object. So far, he's only been part of a failing life, a burden on the woman who loves him, a bad father, and a failed journalist, but in the waning of his life, something spectacular happens. Reading the book, we realize that Johan has been put through a series of events that have structural and symbolic power, and while they don't really have an effect on him, they make the book into a kind of place where changes happen. The moment when he eventually dies is one of the most powerful moments in the whole book. It is set up as a moment where the conventional imagery of a dying person waiting for the sun, waiting for the dawn is juxtaposed with the overpowering fact of the connection that two people can have, even two people as mismatched as Johan and Mai. When making a decision whether or not to help Johan with his death, Mai tells him: “I know you better than anybody else. [...] And we have a language all our own, you and I.” It’s a nighttime moment, and Johan is waiting for the light. The novel, carefully, artfully, replaces that distant light with the luminous love that Mai has for her dying man, and his dithering with the sudden decisiveness of his loving, intelligent wife. As Johan passes away, Mai offers a prayer, not for religious reasons, but because “it seemed like the right thing to do.”

In many Christian theologies, there is an active element in receiving grace, but Johan squirms and resists. But maybe his acceptance of grace (or lack thereof) is not the point. After all, he is not the narrator of the book. The narrator is a personal friend of Johan’s, who tells the story in limited third person point of view, letting us see everything through Johan’s eyes, see Johan’s thoughts and memories, except for a tiny handful of moments where he pulls away and lets us in on the wider picture. The way this works reminded me a lot of Édouard Levé’s Suicide, a pretty flawless little book addressed to someone who killed themselves, narrated by a personal friend. Levé’s narrator, while drawing up a picture of the trajectory of his friend’s life, keeps framing it in the context of his death: “ta mort a écrit ta vie.” His friend’s death has changed how his life is perceived, but also how his friends relate to their own lives: “ton suicide rend plus intense la vie de ceux qui t’ont survécu.” Levé manages magnificently to zoom in and out of knowable and unknowable facts about the dead friend, imagining his thoughts on the one hand, presenting public statements on the other. The whole book is basically a skillful interrogation of what death means to those who choose it freely and to those around them, how meanings changes in different contexts, and how we construct meanings for lives that eminently resist that. When I reviewed The Spare Room, I said that there’s a difference between preparing a space for one’s own death and preparing a space for someone else’s. In a way, Suicide, which doubles as a suicide note by Levé, who chose his death a mere three days after delivering the manuscript of the book to his editor, is just that kind of space. The room carved out is one in cultural narratives of how biographies work, and a more specific space within very precise cultural and geographical contexts.

I think that Ullmann does implicitly (and with considerably less skill) what Levé does explicitly: her book is really focused around her unnamed narrator, who controls the presentation of events. Mai, Johan’s grace, is offered to us, and Johan’s dithering and small scale rejection of that grace is only underlining the significance of what is offered. Ullmann’s book is much more openly moral than Garner’s and fits the medieval mold more comfortably: in the shadow of Johan’s meager existence and pitiful death, we are told a much bigger story about how to die and how we hope for our lives to be graced by other people’s affections. Death, in Grace, is not a dark force. It is granted by the most generous person in the whole book.

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Helen Garner: The Spare Room

Garner, Helen (2008), The Spare Room, Henry Holt
ISBN 978-0-8050-8888-5

There are few topics that are as difficult to write about as death. At the same time, there are equally few topics that get as much exposure as this one either. It seems a go-to topic for writers intent on writing solemn/serious literature, ranging from mediocre writers and their books (cf. Paul Harding’s Tinkers), to excellent writers and their books (cf. Graham Swift’s Last Orders) and excellent writers and their mediocre books (cf. John Banville’s The Sea). I have to admit that as a reader, I tend to be a tad suspicious of such books (an offshoot of these are novels about the Shoah (see my review of HHhH)). I have, however, recently read two novels in the genre that I found very impressive. Like the best books focusing on the death of individuals, they deliver a take on the ars moriendi that is interesting and original. Interesting enough that I will devote two reviews to them, one for each. These two novels were published within just a few years of each other, in different corners of the world but they are both attempts to examine this vast, difficult topic within less than two hundred pages, and both use simple language, with short sentences and small observations in order to do it. In both books it is cancer that ends a life and throws the lives of those around the terminally ill protagonist into turmoil. I’ll be basically writing a double review in two parts, posted separately. Part one is on The Spare Room and part two is on Grace (you’ll find it here)

Helen Garner’s The Spare Room is told from the perspective of Helen, whose friend Nicola, weakened by cancer, comes to visit in order to undergo an ‘alternative’ treatment. The novel focuses on the weeks that Nicola stays with her friend and shows how what is effectively palliative care can take its toll on those looking after terminally ill people, and how anger, frustration and exhaustion can completely take over a household. Its language is extremely simple, but not flat, filled with quotidian observations, moving chronologically from day to day with careful, bitter languor. We don’t get a look inside the mind of the dying person: she is instead reflected by Helen’s reaction to her. Linn Ullmann’s Grace, by comparison, sweeps through the life of a man called Johan, who is terminally ill with cancer. We are mostly sharing his point of view, including his reflections of what appears to be a failed life. The book jumps back and forth, and it is told in similarly simple, but highly evocative language. Ullmann doesn’t much bother with day to day events as she chronicles both a bitter life and a bitter death. Garner’s novel has the weight and care of a novel fraught with experience and thoughtfulness, while Ullmann’s appears to be more reliant on melancholic set pieces. At the same time, Ullmann’s novel reaches further than Garner’s. I can recommend both books, with reservations.

Helen Garner is an Australian writer born in 1942, and The Spare Room is her first novel in 16 years. This novel feels lived-in; the protagonist, Helen, feels fully fleshed out and the book is extraordinarily well grounded as far as its setting is concerned. It’s set in Melbourne and while the writer doesn’t offer many details about the city, all the references feel on cue and natural. There’s a natural tendency to consider this book somehow autobiographical, not just because the writer and the protagonist share the same first name and live in the same city. It’s the writing itself that creates this feeling. Helen Garner does not attempt to go for a poetic, elegiac style. Instead her writing is simple, never attempting to buoy simple situations by presenting them on an elevated linguistic plate. We find things the way they are. When people “slouch in front of the TV”, then that is what we are told. But the simplicity is never flat. I have been increasingly frustrated by contemporary novelists who assume that simplicity in style does not require the same degree of deliberation and artfulness as would a more flowery kind of writing. Books like Blake Butler’s otherwise very intriguing There Is No Year seem to be very disinterested in aesthetics. Garner’s book does not dispense with musicality, and it does not completely ignore the option of elegiac phrasing where appropriate. Rather, what Garner’s appears to be doing is reaching for the word or phrase that is genuinely most appropriate to her given the situation and syntactic context, instead of reaching into the bag of phrases, as a lesser writer would. Given all this, I am not surprised that this is a writer that won’t be rushed from book to book.

And it’s not just the prose itself that is believable. Helen, the protagonist, and Nicola, her cancer-stricken friend, are also instantly plausible. To be fair, if they were not, the book would instantly crash and burn. Unlike Grace, which is couched in a sea of metaphors, small stories, big scenes etc., the simplicity of The Spare Room means that unless the main character is believable, the distress and struggle, the chaos and conflicts, the overall damage that death did to Helen’s life simply from passing through it for a short while, it would just seem like agitated but irrelevant noise. Garner does not let ‘big themes’ do the work. Her book works hard to convince us that these lives matter, that it matters what happens to them. And it feels like naming the protagonist ‘Helen’ is part of the author’s attempt to drive home the plausibility of the situation and the significance of the two lives that are entangled for a short time in Melbourne. The fact that all this works so well is especially impressive given that in many other way, the book is deliberately staging a scene, structured around the titular “spare room”. It would be a misreading to dismiss the book as simple, whether we read it as realistic or staged. Cindi Katz and Janice Monk have written very eloquently about the role of spaces and geography in the life course of women, and how fear-based discourse – and an isolation of homes – often limits the mobility of women in geographic spaces. The way Nicola is compelled to travel in order to defeat fear (and this also involves leaving the spare room Helen prepares for her), and the fact that her temporary home is inverted as an unsafe place, a place where she cannot possibly find healing, all this presents exciting angles for reading this book, which cannot be easily exhausted. Other complexities are introduced by various objects and people, who often feel symbolic, arranged on a stage.

Garner offers us, at the outset, an epigraph, a quote from fellow Australian novelist Elizabeth Jolley: “It is a privilege to prepare the place where someone else will sleep.” This could mean several things: from actual sleep to preparing a place for someone’s final rest. As we see quickly, what’s meant is something in between. Death just passes through, but the spare room becomes part of the process of dying. The aforementioned art of dying is examined by showing the reader someone who struggles with it, and in truly medieval fashion, they are struggling on a carefully circumscribed stage. This is the room, which is being prepared as we enter the novel, because the book starts before Helen’s friend Nicola arrives. Nicola has stage IV bowel cancer and travels to Melbourne in order to undertake a sketchy treatment at the Theodore clinic. Even though Nicola has not yet arrived at Helen’s home, she is already there in spirit. We are witness to Helen’s preparations for Nicola and as the reader will find out, preparing a place means more than just providing some clean sheets. Now, on some level we all understand that: most of us have at some point experienced the incredible kindness of having a space prepared for us in someone else’s house – and by extension, someone else’s life. But Helen’s situation is different.

She is careful about adapting the room for Nicola in two different ways. One of them is meant to reflect Nicola’s deteriorating physical state. Helen worries about the floor accommodating Nicola’s frailty, and the colors and shapes in the room making Nicola feel welcome. The other concern is expressed with much more levity, as Helen moves the bed “to align the sleeper with the planet’s positive energy flow, or something?” These two preparations are not equal and are not equally expressed. Helen is a rational, careful, caring adult. She has prepared a space in her mind, as well as in her house, but unlike the spare room, the space in her mind is an assortment of rational medical knowledge about Nicola’s cancer. This is where the novel’s main conflict arises. Nicola has no intention of getting medical treatment. The clinic she is visiting will provide a variety of dubious treatments, including stays in a sauna, cupping, and above all, Vitamin C. As it turns out, these treatments are not just dubious, but they also massively weaken Nicola, who, in addition to all this, steadfastly refuses pain medication and as a result, becomes more and more frail and irritable. While Helen knows to expect some of this, the brute force of Nicola’s irritation and anger is tough to deal with. What’s more, Helen is perfectly aware that what she is doing is basically humoring a dying person. Helen knows full well that what she is doing is giving palliative care. She is “watching” Nicola, but at the same time, she is her caretaker. The room she prepared for her friend, in her house, in her head and in her life has been stocked with provisions, stocked with help. When Dr. Theodore, the unpleasant and clearly untrustworthy head of the Theodore clinic, imposes too much of a strain on her friend, Helen intervenes.

All of this happens in the span of a slim book and Garner’s writing is perfect for this: as I mentioned earlier, it’s simple, but at the same time it’s precise: she enumerates the elements of her world, as she prepared it for Nicola, and as it evolves during her stay. Events are also stated with care, as are Helen’s thoughts. No matter how much chaos arises, no matter how bad the emotional turmoil is, the writing never slips. This makes for devastating reading, because, robbed of poeticisms, what we are left with is the stark reality of how death enters the life of these two women. The struggle within Nicola, a struggle to believe in the possibility of being healed, is repeated in Nicola and Helen’s interactions. Nicola is learning to die. The phases of her moods seem to roughly reflect the Kübler-Ross stages of grief. Helen’s love and patience allows Nicola to find a way to move on, find a way to accept death, or at least not fight it with the help of dangerous quacks. Helen Garner’s novel refuses typical narratives of cancer, and more importantly: it doesn’t offer a moral lecture on how to be a good cancer patient. We don’t get to see Nicola’s thoughts. We infer the challenges, the irritation, the conflicts from the effect she has on Helen and the things she says to her. But the truth about the pain and the approaching death, these things Garner withholds from us. Preparing a space for one’s own death is different from preparing a space wherein someone else’s death unfolds. Medieval ars moriendi tracts didn’t just instruct people on how to die well, they also instructed the family and friends of dying people on how to treat them, and in a way, this is an explication of such an idea: how to prepare a space for someone else to spend some time dying, not only as a spare room in a house, but also as a mental space in one’s head and life, to accommodate the rage, fear and sadness of a dying person.

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Laurent Binet: HHhH

Laurent Binet (2010), HHhH, Livre de Poche
ISBN 978-2-253-15734-2

[English translation: Laurent Binet (2012). HHhH. Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Translated by Sam Taylor
ISBN 978-0374169916

Georges Didi-Huberman (2011), Écorces, Editions de Minuit
ISBN 9782707322203

Listen, I don't think it's just me. There has been a surfeit of novels about the Second World War in recent years. It's always quite a popular topic, but the amount of high profile literature on the topic has been staggering. Three of the most well known novels are the recent new translations of Hans Fallada's Every Man Dies Alone (originally published as Jeder stirbt für sich allein in 1947, translated by Michael Hofmann in 2009), Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones (originally published as Les Bienveillantes in 2006, translated by Charlotte Mandell in 2009) and Steve Sem-Sandberg's The Emperor of Lies (Originally published in Sweden in 2009, translated by Sarah Death in 2011). And it's no surprise that this (admittedly short) list of very well received publications largely consists of translations. French literature especially keeps producing prize-winning work about the Shoah. Littell's novel, which won the prestigious Prix Goncourt upon publication, was followed by Frabrice Humbert's fascinating L'Origine de la violence, which won the Prix Renaudot in 2009, Yannick Haenel's Jan Karski, winner of the Prix Interallié in 2009 and finally Laurent Binet's HHhH, winner of the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman in 2010. If that list seems long and exhausting, well, that's because it is. There is no way one can keep up with high profile, prize-winning novels about the Shoah without going a little mad, I think. This enormous amount of literature also leads to writers exploring odd angles or experimenting with different techniques, trying to find something new to say about a topic that doesn't appear to offer new insights.

Then again, writing about this topic can come with great rewards, as even horrible books like John Boyne's The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (see my review here) are received well and sell indecent amounts of copies. The Shoah as a topic is so deeply ingrained in our perception of modern history, and is imbued with such a sense of tragedy that even halfway competent books can powerfully pull at our heartstrings. On the other hand, there's a certain fatigue now and we demand more and new pleasures from new entries in the genre. Les Bienveillantes attracted a lot of attention for being both well researched and madly readable. HHhH, Laurent Binet's debut novel, translated by Sam Taylor and published in April 2012, is both interesting as an attempt to do something new, and a bit dull as a novel. It's hard to recommend a book that bored me this much, but it is deeply fascinating on several levels, and if you are interested in the topic and endowed with more patience than me, go ahead and read it. And if you start reading, I suggest you keep reading. The book gets better and more interesting.

Since the last major publication by a French writer in English translation was Jonathan Littell's brick of a Shoah novel, it seems like the most relevant point of reference for Binet's book, especially given the fact that both writers are almost the same age (Littell was born in 1967, Binet in 1972), and both books have been published in English to great acclaim (Binet's novel was praised by writers like David Lodge, Martin Amis and Vargas-Llosa, and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award). Both have been written by authors who have not witnessed the atrocities of the Shoah themselves and both have a very unique, and very specific angle. This is all they share, however. The novels themselves couldn't be more dissimilar. The Kindly Ones is a mad look into hell. Self-consciously literary, it eschews the idea of the banality of evil, introducing a flamboyant character, who is perverted, mad and highly educated, following him through the horrors of the Second World War. Reviewers have pointed out that, while an accurate portrayal of a historical figure, it's hardly an accurate portrayal of the typical Nazi mindset, and that it's hardly helpful to support the idea that the Nazi mentality is a wild kind of hateful madness. As Robert Merle's classic La mort est mon métier stunningly demonstrated, the horror of a regular, orderly mind, coldly evaluating the practicality of mass murder is far more shocking, most Nazis being, as Merle termed it, “moraux à l’intérieur de l’immoralité, consciencieux sans conscience”. Littell decided to exchange that kind of horror for a more intense, bloody kind of horror. The excesses of his book owe much to the brilliant thesis of Klaus Theweleit on the role of male sexuality in the Third Reich (translated by Chris Turner and Stephen Conway as Male Fantasies, a book that everyone should read), and there is a kind of second-degree accuracy to the bath of blood and sperm that is Littell's novel. As a variety of stuck-up German reviews pointed out, Littell isn't very concerned with providing accurate details (the novel was heavily corrected between the original French publication and the 2010 paperback, see this review for an enumeration of incorrect terms and phrases), but reading it in conjunction with Susan Sontag's famous essay on Fetish and Theweleit's extraordinary book does provide a great reading experience. And this is possibly its main point: it's a wild ride. For a book that's 1400 pages in my edition, its pages just fly by. The fact that Littell uses an exaggerated caricature of a Nazi leader helps the book slip into a mad/delirious narrative that has more in common with the brilliant surreal frescoes of Edgar Hilsenrath than with Imre Kertesz's or Primo Levi's books. It also explains the amount of copies the book sold in France (it didn't sell well in English translation though, surprisingly). And while the exaggeration, and the reliance on theory rather than experience has led to some criticism, the novel's splatter-inspired realism owes much to the author's time spent in various war zones around the world. The depiction of Max Aue may lack a certain sincerity, but the book itself is driven by an obviously sincere distaste with the horrors that man unleashes upon man.

This sincerity can also be found in Laurent Binet's novel, but unlike The Kindly Ones, HHhH is more similar to great works of Shoah literature like Jorge Semprun's Le Grand Voyage, without attaining the same literary brilliance. HHhH is a novel about “Operation Anthropoid”, an assassination attempt on SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich. Here is the wiki page which I highly recommend reading. Binet's work is very well researched and his appetite for showing us every wrinkle of the operation is very impressive. Even if you know a lot about the period, you're bound to learn something new. The central character of the book is Heydrich, and Binet is adamant about presenting us a plausible psychological portrait of one of the most brutal and terrible men in modern history, a man central to the early Nazi atrocities. The low point of his gruesome career was when he chaired the Wannsee Konferenz, the infamous conference where the organized murder of up to 11 million Jews was conceived and implemented. 6 months later, through the actions of two brave Czech men (and multiple other brave supporters), Heydrich died. Those two men were Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš, and Binet offers us convincing portraits of them as well. While the book takes a bit to get off the ground, the author gets more and more caught up in the tumultuous events and with him, so do we, his readers. However, to get to that point, the author drags us through more than 400 pages of an amazingly self-indulgent monologue. The fact is that the book is as much a book about the process of writing this book, as it is about the historical events it purports to be focusing on. Every other chapter that deals with the historical facts is followed by a chapter (almost like a diary), discussing the dangers and pitfalls in what Binet just wrote. There are numerous chapters that involve his girlfriend commenting on the preceding chapter and Binet discussing (and defending), in great detail, the choices he made). There is no character that Binet lavishes as much attention on as he does on himself. At times, you feel as if you are at a dinner party and the person sitting next to you, on their fourth glass of wine, involves you in a narrative that is half complaint, half grandiose explanation of facts. We've all been to those parties, haven't we?

About 15 pages into the novel, he is still debating how to begin his narrative. There's a lot of “I could do this...but should I?” And this is, generally speaking, fine. Binet's self-reflexive discussion of precision has a long tradition in the genre, not least the aforementioned novel by Semprun. The danger of falsifying events you're discussing by imbuing them with imagination rather than facts is always present, especially with a topic like the Shoah, where witnesses are of such central importance. Writers like Semprun have opened a discourse about how reliable they are as witnesses and how representative their experiences are of the broader historical event. Semprun would go on to revise his memory in later books, driven by the urge to get the facts absolutely right. So Binet's obsession with being not just plausible, but absolutely accurate is something that makes immediate sense. There is an important literary tradition for it, and we can all understand why it would be important. Semprun's work engages an audience because he needs an interlocutor, he needs to talk to someone. In a similar vein, Binet discusses his work with us, but also with people in his life. The whole book is unstable. Chapters in the novel that discuss events in the past are followed by chapters discussing the use of metaphors in the very preceding chapter. Binet is obsessed with not describing anything that he can't verify or source. The main question is: can I know this? And just like that, Binet replaces the discussion about “unsayable” things, with a discussion about “unknowable” things, which is an interesting shift and certainly worth discussing, but at the same time, one can't help but think that the whole of HHhH is really not about the Shoah or Heydrich or Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš, but about Mr. Laurent Binet. Semprun had a character say, insistently, when offering a reason for offering testimony: “il faut que je parle au nom des choses qui sont arrivées pas au mon nom personnel”. This is, really, what we expect a good book on the topic to do, but Binet turns this around in what left more than just a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.

The important thing, for him, is to write a good book, and an original book, as well. There is a bit of Mean Girls attitude to Binet's continuous discussion of other books in the genre. He keeps reassuring himself. Reading the novel by Alan Burgess, Binet is relieved to discover that “il n'a pas écrit le livre que je veux écrire", reading a book by David Chacko, Binet declares him a “tricheur habile”, an able cheater, a title Chacko apparently earns for being a novelist. The strangest moment however is reserved for Jonathan Littel. Binet writes on Littel: “J'avoue que sa documentation est supérieure à la mienne. Mais si c'est du bluff, cela fragilise toute l'oeuvre.” So what is the “bluff” that fragilizes Littel's book? It's a statement about a historical character driving an Opel. Binet offers his question: can I know this? And without offering any kind of basis for his doubts or facts to the contrary, he goes on to declare this a bluff. This thing goes on for three pages, there is a whole (short) chapter devoted to the possibility of him being discouraged by the publication of Littel's book. Boo. This serves no purpose but to flatter Binet, who, near the end of the book, has the stones to offer, as a justification for writing his book, the fact that the assailants Gabčík and Kubiš were not able to convince themselves that their actions served a higher purpose: “J'écris peut-être ce livre pour leur fair comprendre qu'ils se trompent.” There is no “au nom de choses” here, no pretense even of caring about the facts. There are plenty of these odd tone deaf moments where Binet inserts himself in the moral framework of the novel as well as the narrative. Like one, roughly 80 pages into the book where he recounts troubling events from his personal life that involve him not being invited to a wedding and his girlfriend being pissed at him, you know, IMPORTANT STUFF, and muses whether this was how Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a Soviet general, felt when he was defeated by the Polish army in 1920.

„Je me demande s’il a cru qu’il était cuit, fini, lessivé, s’il a maudit le sort, l’adversité, ceux qui l’ont trahi, ou s’il s’est maudit lui-même. En tout cas, je sais qu’il a rebondi. C’est encourageant, même si c’était pour se faire écraser quinze ans plus tard par son pire ennemi. La roue tourne, c’est ce que je me dis. Natacha ne rappelle pas. Je suis en 1920, devant les murailles tremblantes de Varsovie, et à mes pieds s’écoule, indifférente, la Vistule.“

Mind you, Tukhachevsky was a brutal murderer and ended up being murdered by Stalin, but it's really not that different from your girlfriend giving you the stinkeye, right? Right?

There is an unpleasantly defensive three page excursus about how Binet can write well about Prague because he has no chip on his shoulder like exiled writers, so he's free to imagine whatever, like, in his case, Prague, the city „vers où tout mon être aspire“. The inspiration for this chapter is an interview by Marjane Satrapi who points out that for herself and for exiled writers like Kundera, home is the place that rings most true in their writing, and the parisian novelist Binet makes sure no-one would suspect him of being in any way indebted to the place he lives in and comes from even though half the book is about the author's work in the present tense (not clear, some link word is missing, I think). I'm sorry if I sound snarky or mean, but it's just so hard to discuss this book. The project is commendable, a lot of its concerns of it are, as well, and I do understand the difference between being a survivor and someone born many decades after the war. Binet is right to be uneasy about writing about things he did not experience and thus preferring to cling to the facts. But he ends up too defensive and too tone deaf and too self-congratulatory. The book as a whole is horribly bloated and undisciplined, which is not helped by the fact that the author is no master of prose.

I want to close this review by recommending a third book that touches on the topic: it's Écorces by Georges Didi-Huberman. Didi-Huberman's books are books about observing the world, about making sense of smaller parts of it aesthetically and morally. He wrote an utterly amazing book about ballet, and several books that touch on the Shoah. Écorces is a series of observations centered on objects that he himself photographed on a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 2011. It's a short book, but I feel that Didi-Huberman managed to succeed where Binet failed: writing persuasively and selflessly about being so far removed from the events he is attempting to write about yet attempting to still write about them. What's more, Didi-Huberman is a fantastic writer of lean, precise, luminous prose. Yes, Écorces is about the person Didi-Huberman who walked through what's left of that horrible place, but he clearly talks to us about – to use the earlier Semprun quote – „au nom des choses qui sont arrivées”. Didi-Huberman values the silence that allows us to remember. To quote Shoshana Felman: „the Holocaust [is] the very figure of a silence [...] which our very efforts at remembering [...] only reenact and keep repeating, but which a certain silent mode of testimony can translate and thus make us remember”. Of the three books that this review has discussed, only Écorces really offers the space and thoughfulness for remembrance, the opportunity to let history and our moral understanding of it fill the darkness of memory. Littel’s loudness is just as shocking as Binet’s effete ponderousness is annoying, but Didi-Huberman finds the right notes to make history sing. His project, however, is also much, much smaller in scope, and there is someting to be said for loud, powerful statements as well. The mere fact that all three books are vocal and upfront about the problems inherent in writing about atrocity is encouraging. And all three books are well worth reading, though for different reasons.

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Osamu Tezuka: Ayako

Osamu Tezuka (2010), Ayako, Vertical
ISBN 978-1934287514
[Translated by Mari Morimoto]

So, it turns out just because you like a book very much, that does not necessarily make it particularly easy to talk about. Most recently, for me, this was the case with Osamu Tezuka’s fantastic comic Ayako, which was published in one massive gorgeous volume in Mari Morimoto’s translation by Vertical. Over the course of 800 dense black-and-white pages, it tells a disturbing and suspenseful story set in postwar Japan and it manages to be several kinds of books at once: a sharp narrative of how the defeat in the Second World War affected Japan on a social, political and cultural level, a dark horror tale of a village committing a terrible, prolonged crime, a revelatory take on actual political/criminal mysteries of the day and the biography of a young woman, who comes to represent both the promise of the coming modern age, and the darkness lurking within. All of this written and drawn by perhaps the foremost manga artist/writer, several of whose books have become permanent fixtures in the evolving canon of Japanese comics culture. He has written comic books for both children and adults. Ayako is written in the Seinen manga genre, mangas targeted at a 18-30 year old audience. Have I possibly overstated the magnificence of the book? That might well be true, but I still recommend this book highly to anyone even remotely interested in reading comics. I just lack a certain vocabulary and context to discuss the book properly, not being very well versed in either postwar Japanese society & culture or Japanese comics in particular, although I have read a few (and even reviewed one or two here). So overall I am not 100% sure how to explain to you that this is a fantastic book, but if you trust my opinion on comics at all, go get this one. Ayako feels significant historically, but mostly it is a tumultuous, engrossing read that spans decades, and contains so many lives, so many ideas and appeals to my love for both historical narratives and a certain, slow burning kind of sense of terror.

   The book, initially set in 1949, starts out as a kind of seedy postwar narrative that reminded me so much of Carol Reed’s masterpiece The Third Man that I suspect it was an influence on the book somehow. The man this part of the book focuses on is called Jiro Tenge, who returns from the war and he is shown to be enmeshed in a web of espionage that survived the end of the war and left him indebted to several unpleasant figures. If we compare his story with the movie, somehow he ends up being both Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles. He is this book’s most complicated character, battling various moralities and his eventual demise is foreshadowed by the noir structure of his storyline. Tezuka makes sure we see little of what is happening, he insists on literally not giving us the whole picture, telling the beginning of Jiro’s postwar spy career in fragments: we see feet and shadows and eyes, and fleeting fragments of dialog. The major motivation for Jiro’s actions, his spying for the United States in the war, basically committing treason, is hinted at, but there is no flashback, no explanation for how he came to be a spy, we just know he is now, and he can’t turn his back on the network that survived the war and quickly became enmeshed with the mob. As in Italy, the immediate postwar period and American occupation was an immense boon to the local mafia, which thrived on the enforced secrecy and black markets. In this way, Tezuka transcends narratives like The Third Man by showing us how closely crime and politics were interlaced, and not in a simple way either. It’s not just corrupt politicians, it’s a country being forced at gunpoint to enter a different kind of modernity, a country forced to accept the dictates of another and individuals within that country torn between different loyalties. Think Wolfgang Koeppen’s Pigeons on the Grass (which, by the way, if you haven’t read yet, you should, along with everything else by Koeppen that has been translated into your language. The English translation of Pigeons on the Grass has been done by David Ward and published by Holmes & Meier), atmospherically, if that makes sense to you. Jiro re-enters society burdened by feelings of guilt and by the silence enforced upon him. This is the moral thread from which his whole moral fabric eventually unravels. And here is one of the difficulties in reading this book for me. I am a German reading it in 2013. It was written in the 1970s for a Japanese audience. For me, someone turning on the murderous Japanese emperor is “a good guy”. But for 1970s Japan, that was not as simple. His moral ambivalence, his guilt had to have been palpable to the book’s original audience, and while to me it is a tale of a good man going bad, for a Japanese audience Jiro had to have been at least ambivalent to begin with.

As for the other main characters, Tezuka offers no such ambivalence. They are either clearly good, or clearly evil. But in a way this is because they live in a different setting. Jiro comes home to a rural household. His dealings with the agencies and later the mob take place in Tokyo, but his family lives in the countryside. The Tengo family, moreover, is rich and owns a large farm and holds sway over the whole village. Through Jiro’s eyes, we get to know that deeply dysfunctional family and the estate. The father is a violent, sexually abusive man, who treats everybody like shit. The rest of the family is composed of the lickspittle older brother and various younger siblings, as well as the older brother’s wife, who has just given birth to a girl called Ayako. As it turns out, Ayako has really been fathered by the head of the family, and the older brother just acquiesced, hoping to curry favors and power from his father. Jiro is the only one not bowing to every insane whim of his father’s, the rest of the family is suffering in silence. What happens next is too complicated and disturbing to recount in detail, but eventually, Ayako is thrown in a windowless room in the cellar, with only a trapdoor bringing in light and food. In that windowless room she grows up into a beautiful young woman. And there is a sense of safety for her in there, even though the sexual abuse rampant on the Tengo estate does not spare her in her hidden place either. Officially she is declared dead. A few hundred pages later, the death of the head of the household precipitates another series of events that lead to an unexpectedly dark ending. Having read a few other books by Tezuka, including the splendidly imaginative Dororo, the relentlessness of Ayako is stunning. The author offers us no compromise, there are no copouts and there is really very little respite in this story of one huge downward spiral.

Ayako, the girl/woman, is the only light in the darkness, but her character is strange, odd (there is a footnote in the beginning of the book,, pointing out that her name in Japanese is written with the character for “odd”), she almost seems fantastic. In a story of unrelenting realism, where consequences have to be faced and suffering can at best be delayed, she adds an almost supernatural element. I am not spoiling the ending for you (and you can see I tried my best not to tell too much of the story), but throughout the book and especially in the last panel that we see her in, she reminded me so much of Junji Ito’s work. Now, Ito is a younger writer/artist, so he was not an influence on this book, but I guess I am using the comparison to try and explain how the girl, Ayako, feels to me as a reader. Junji Ito is a writer of horror manga and the only writer in the genre of comic book horror who has genuinely terrified me with his work. I recommend, nay, urge you, to read his work. Here is a blog post that might get you started. Ito writes horror that is metaphysical as well as intensely physical. Bodies decay, are warped, torn apart and transformed in his work, but the same happens to people’s souls. And while Ayako’s body remains unblemished, one can’t help but feel the horror of a whole lifetime of abuse coiling up inside this innocent mind. The last panel we see her in, she looks at us and we are terrified, even though she is the most unequivocally ‘good’ character of the whole book. She seems to have contained the horror of that whole Tengo family, all their guilt and violence and suffering and sadness and abuse, without even losing a bit of her innocence. There is a purity to her that nothing can diminish and this is deeply fantastic, deeply unrealistic, as the book itself keeps reminding us by showing us all the bruises on all the other characters. She is a wonder, and terror, at the same time.

It is hard not to see the family, and its eventual breakdown, as somewhat analogous to the state of Japanese society, which went from a monarchy to a democracy. I said earlier that it is never explained what happened to Jiro in the war, but some things that happen to some characters in the book can be read as explaining the spirit – if not the substance of what happened. And there is another element that ties the personal stories to the actual events in Japan that are verifiably true. The story of Jiro is a relatively straightforward crime narrative that gets tangled up in the mess that is the Tengo family. At its heart is a murder mystery. Now, that is a mystery to the characters in the novel, and further murders and deceptions follow from it on the level of the fictional Tengo family. But at the same time, the murder of a political figure called Shimokawa is, according to a very helpful footnote, modeled on the murder of a real life politician called Shimoyama, whose death is one of the enduring historical mysteries in Japan and is described as the “Shimoyama incident”. 1970s Japan was an audience that was sure to recognize the massive similarities, and Tezuka offers us a revelation of the way the murder took place and the reasons for it that is less Dan Brown and more James Ellroy in Black Dahlia. What it also does is tie the Tengo family to an urgent strain of Japanese postwar history. The historical murder is mirrored and repeated by intra-family murders, strengthening the idea that the Tengo family is analogous to Japanese society. And Ayoko, the milky skinned young woman might well be read as the soul of the Japanese nation, in the way that Romanticism has invented ‘national’ essences, a notion that many modern nationalisms have built upon.

However, we are left with a bit of a stale taste: the girl who has been used by her family all her life, is being exploited by the author as well. There is an uncomfortable amount of female nudity in the book, and while I would like to think that part of the discomfort is intentional, and that it does intentionally reference exploitation, the fact remains that the book visits terrible abuse on its female characters to make a narrative and a political point, and one can’t help but be reminded of the “women in refrigerators” trope that was so well described by Gail Simone and others in her wake: the tendency of comics to kill or abuse women to make a plot point, or to motivate the male superhero into action. The case here is not as simple as that, thanks to the incredibly layered nature of the book, but a distinctive unease remains, especially since the Seinen manga genre is primarily targeted at a male audience.

A note on the translation: the book reads very fluently and the occasional footnotes are very helpful, but there is one big weird flaw: the rural populace speaks a ‘hick’ dialect and Mari Morimoto attempts to approximate it in English, yet the result is frequently awkward. And as I close this review, I have barely mentioned Tezuka’s art. The reason for that is that by now, any panel drawn by him is instantly recognizable: his mixture of realism and Disney-fied cuteness has been a defining influence on manga artists. I find it hard to describe without also describing so much of what was to follow him. Suffice to say that this is a complex and masterful tale, and the art doesn’t just accompany it – it makes much of it possible. So much of the strangeness is conveyed in images rather than in words: it is a story of secrets, silences and looks. And Tezuka’s art is always in complete control of the story. Ayako is a masterful book by one of the greatest comic book writers/artists of his or any time. I can only repeat what I said earlier: if you are at all tempted by comic books, give this one a whirl.

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Jeff Smith: RASL: Romance at the Speed of Light

Smith, Jeff (2011). Rasl: Romance at the Speed of Light. Cartoon Books.
ISBN 978-1-888963-33-5

This is going to be a short review, because it’s a review of the third volume of a series that you shouldn’t start in the middle. You should start at the beginning. If you click here you can find my review of the first volume, as well as general comments on Jeff Smith’s remarkable work, and if you click here, you can find a review of the second volume. If you need a summary of all my reviews, here it is: RASL is one of the best creator-owned comics we currently have, and if you haven’t yet, you should start reading it as soon as possible. Jeff Smith is one of the best graphic novelists of our time. Read him now. The whole RASL project has been, from the start, a fascinating undertaking. In its mixture of myth and science fiction, it resembled Terry Moore’s extraordinary (recently finished) Echo (see here my review of the first Echo trade), but with a much darker and twisted core. Readers coming to find a second Bone will be disappointed. This is no warm, full, engaging fantastical tale. The richness of Bone’s woods, mountains and ravines is in stark contrast with the desolate stretches of desert we’re offered in the RASL books. It’s really hard to believe that the same writer who gave us the gorgeously detailed rat monsters and fantasy foliage in Bone is the same that creates vast expanses of white emptiness in RASL. While I’m obviously commenting on a work in progress, it seems clear that there is less consolation in Smith’s most recent work than in his most famous books. The warm heart of Bone was palpable in its protagonists, the cartoonish Bones, and the lovably odd villagers. Even the monsters threatening to destroy the idyllic life are drawn with a playful love for furs and twinkles and the humorous moments of epic adventuring. True, there was much drama as the story of Bone unfolded, and a serious tragedy at the center of it, but it was all part of a much brighter, more colorful whole. RASL, on the other hand, starts off on a bleak note in volume one and maintains that mood throughout the second and this one, the third volume. Even the glimpses of love and sexual relations are shrouded in the anticipation and memory of loss and impending doom. By the third volume, sex is presented less like a loving act, and more like a desperate way to be less broken, less alone, less adrift in a multitude of worlds.

RASL: Romance at the Speed of Light is the best installment so far, as expected. It is the first time the plot and its characters really come together. I admired the way Smith took his time with the plot, without offering his readers easy satisfaction. The first volume, RASL: The Drift, is full of mysteries, full of beginnings and ideas, and it’s not an easy book to figure out. There was never any doubt that the end result would be magnificent, but the exact direction was unclear, as we readers were left impatient asking for more. And just as the first volume was full of beginnings, so the second volume, RASL: The Fire of St. George, was clearly transitory. Instead of whispered hints and intriguing settings, we were offered more muscular developments and a great deal of information was injected into the book. It seemed as if Smith tried to make up for the vagueness of the first by being extremely specific in the second volume. As a read it was much different, but every bit as brilliant. In it, Smith treats us to the (by now well known) story of Nicola Tesla and fleshes out most of the principal characters and their relationships with one another. Additionally, we are offered more background on the protagonist, and how he came to be this disturbed traveler between worlds, haunted by guilt, and driven by something dark lodged deep inside. Finally, we are introduced to the book’s MacGuffin, Tesla’s journals, which contain some powerful, brilliant secret that Rasl, as the books’ protagonist is called, endeavors to hide from his friends and the government. Tesla’s brilliant ideas have often served as pivotal elements in science fiction or steam punk culture. One of the most recent examples is Christopher Nolan’s movie The Prestige, where Tesla’s near-magical science provides the mechanics of one magician’s attempt to reproduce another magician’s magic trick (which, as it turns out, was achieved in a much more profane and simple (though not easy) way).

Indeed, The Prestige is a fitting reference because of how the RASL books are perched at the divide between magic and science. In fact, we might be reminded of Arthur C. Clarke’s famous third law, stating that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. In Smith’s work, magic is replaced by religion and myth, but the basic question remains: if something extraordinary happens, is it a scientific success or a miracle in a religious sense? The third volume puts considerable emphasis on this part of the book. As our memories of Tesla’s historical experiments slowly recede, we fall back into the protagonist’s attempts to fully make sense of what’s happening in his rapidly expanding world. Government agents are added, and questions of self and reality are invoked again, but most importantly. Smith evaded providing a faux-scientific explanation for the dimension-jumping. Instead, he confronts his readers with the bleakness of a man lost between multiple copies of the woman he loves and the multiple worlds that woman lives on. Rasl has no great plans: when he jumped into another dimension, he did so impulsively, and ever since, his actions have been less driven by careful deliberation than by impulsive acts. The first of the (so far) three books gave off a strong noir vibe, which is more expounded upon in this volume that affords more space to Smith’s protagonist. Like a character straight from Hammett’s pages, Rasl drinks in order to deal with the labyrinthine world around him (although in Smith’s work, the effect the world has on Rasl is a palpable, violent one as dimension-hopping exerts a heavy price on the person doing the hopping), he is quick to threaten and execute violence on other men, and his sexuality doesn’t lead to happiness or peace, au contraire, it’s as desperate and violent as everything else in his new life.

Like all extraordinary works of science fiction, Jeff Smith’s RASL books use the freedom afforded by the added and changed vocabulary in order to tell a story about the world that discusses issues on the fringe of knowable and expressible facts. Tesla’s scientific work proves to be a red herring, as it is his journals, which contain a secret discovery that makes sense of the scientific and metaphysical puzzles of the books, journals which are treated just like sacred texts. In Smith’s art, we are also presented with technically advanced objects that look like mythical or ritual artifacts. With every new issue, Smith continues to put the screws on what we feel can be easily said. He works within the languages of masculinity and violence, but at his hands, they blossom into possibility. Jeff Smith is a very good writer who, so far, had written two vastly different masterpieces, Bone and Shazam! The Monster Society of Evil. RASL, still a work in progress, is ready to join their ranks. When it’s finished it might well be his finest achievement yet.

A short personal note (January 2013). As I am trying to finish two manuscripts and getting back into reviewing books, I have a hospital bill to pay off, which means all kinds of issues for me. If you have a buck or two to spare, I would be more than thankful. There is a paypal button on the right hand side of this page. That’s just in case you feel charitable. As it is, I am happy enough about every single one of my readers. There are more of you than I ever expected, even through the dry months in the past year, and I am thoroughly humbled. Thank you all.

William Attaway: Blood on the Forge

Attaway, William. Blood on the Forge, NYRB
ISBN 9781590171349

Blood on the Forge, originally published in 1941, is an interesting read. Its author, African-American novelist William Attaway, is perhaps best know today as co-writer of Harry Belafonte’s “Bananaboat Song“. His only two novels have deeply sunk into the obscure chasm of American literary history, much less successful than those by contemporaries like African-American novelist Richard Wright. Lucky for us, Blood on the Forge was rescued from oblivion by the invaluable NYRB Classics imprint. It’s not a perfect book by any means: for a short novel, it has quite a few dull stretches, and oftentimes, its author seems more interested in the story he’s telling and its political and historical contexts than in the telling itself, which is never a good sign. Despite all this, it’s a novel well worth reading, because Attaway crams it full of ideas and tangents and fragments. As a novel, there is a lot wrong with it, but as an overall reading experience, it’s a trip worth taking. When it was published, Attaway was all of 30 years old, and upon finishing it, his desire to create long-form prose narrative seems to have been finished with it. The rest of his career was spent by writing song-books, songs, and screenplays. Blood on the Forge, like Wright’s and fellow realist novelist Upton Sinclair’s work, is very much of its time, and aesthetically it’s hit-and-miss, but the fact is, it’s a damn remarkable book to end one’s career on, and fittingly, it contains enough details, energy and conviction for several more novels. I’ve never read a novel quite like it, and it feels more knotty and interesting than many more highly praised and well known novels of its era, which is enough reason to recommend it. Read it, dammit, and maybe NYRB can be persuaded to publish Attaway’s debut novel, as well.

Meanwhile, this is how Blood on the Forge begins: “He never had a craving in him that he couldn’t slick away on his guitar. You have to be native to the red clay hills of Kentucky to understand that.” We as readers are plunged straight in the middle of a heartbreaking tale of poverty and hunger. A family of African-American farm-workers, consisting of three brothers (called Big Mat, Melody and Chinatown), their mother, and Hattie, a strong and opinionated woman married to the oldest brother, is struck by tragedy as the mother dies while plowing the fields. In a fit of rage, Big Mat kills the mule pulling that plow. Now, however, the family, poor to begin with, finds itself completely unable to pay its debts, let alone pay for food or seeds or a new mule. As the desperate foursome attempts to somehow salvage the situation, events spiral out of control and the three brothers end up having to flee their home. It’s quite remarkable how well and densely woven this initial situation is. The novel never really looks back on “the red clay hills of Kentucky”, telling a story of steel mills in the North, but like so much of Attaway’s book, the setting and scene are incredibly rich with meaning, resonance and context. As Big Mat kills a white overseer in a fit of rage, we might forget what century we’re in. It’s like a tale straight from the late Middle Ages, where a peasant fights back against his lord and ends up having to flee the place he’s from. The contrast to the industrialized setting of the bulk of the novel is striking. The steel mill tell us: this is modernity, greasy, violent, dirty modernity, but the three brothers come from a world closer to the Middle Ages in social structure and outlook than to the 20th century.

This is significant, because the period the book is set in is a very specific historical period, the so-called Great Migration (1910-1930), and there are multiple stories of the Great Migration, two of the most well known (apart from Blood on the Forge) being Black Boy, Richard Wright’s absolutely extraordinary autobiography (originally published in 1945), and Thomas and Beulah, Rita Dove’s Pulitzer-winning 1986 collection of poems about her grandparents who came to the North during that same period (a book that seems to be inspired in part by Attaway’s novel, by the way, Thomas and Melody sharing significant similarities). Attaway’s medieval brutality and feudal structure isn’t found in either of these books, and it seems to make a very specific and pertinent point about the society that Big Mat, Melody and Chinatown escaped from by making us aware how many degrees of civilized development co-existed within the same country in the 20th century. The man Big Mat killed might as well have been their liege lord for all the difference it would have made in this tale. But there is even more to this short early section of the book. We are, within the first three pages, made aware of the horrific misogyny of that society. It’s not just the fact that women, throughout the book, seem one-dimensional vessels to be used by the men, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses. It’s also the absurd hatefulness with which all the book’s men seem to treat all the book’s women. As Hattie makes a cogent point, albeit in simple language: “We jes niggers, makin’ the white man crop for him. Leave him makin’ his own crop, then we don’t end up owin’ him money every season”, the novel imparts on us Melody’s perception of the situation, describing it this way: “Hattie kept at Big Mat, driving him crazy with her talk, blaming him for everything.”

This ‘hysterical screaming woman’ stereotype is used fairly often in Blood on the Forge and one would be tempted to see this as reflective of the author’s or at least the novel’s bigoted attitude towards women. It’s the densely packed beginning of the novel, however, that tells us this is not the case. Very clearly, the author shares Hattie’s disdain for wanting to obey the basic social and economic structures in place. Hattie, like other women later in the book, is a sensible character in an impossible situation. It’s interesting that Attaway seems highly aware of the fact that African-American women are oppressed in at least two different ways, both as African Americans and as women. The novel, largely channeled through Melody’s perception as it is, repeatedly offers us male misreadings of situations. As the novel hurtles towards its end, it’s the ravaged and desperate female characters that stood out most for me, although eventually, all women tend to fall by the wayside in this tale of three brothers. Their masculinity is not an asset, although at times it may seem like it. The novel contrasts Hattie’s sensible observation with this grandiose assertion of Big Mat, who (having murdered a man, and hopelessly in debt and with no way to pay for food) is in the process of convincing himself that leaving Kentucky is a good idea:

Ain’t nothing make me leave the land, if it good land. The hills bigger’n any white man, I reckon. Take more ‘n jest trouble to run me off the hills. I been in trouble. I been born in trouble. Shareworked these hills from the bad land clean to the mines at Madison. Now the land done got tired. (…) The land has jest give up and I guess it’s good for things to come out like this. Now us got to give up too.

Compared to Hattie, Big Mat is a silly sentimental fool who arrives at the correct conclusion by way of a strange and archaic process of reasoning. This, too, will be repeated in the rest of the book in various guises. There is no sympathy with Big Mat, whose obsessive but dispassionate relationship to a prostitute later in the novel is described like this:

Big Mat had slapped her around. He had made love to her tired body. It had not responded to either. He had gone to work twice and come home twice. Everything remained the same.

You can spent ages unpacking just this beginning of the novel, which isn’t more than a prelude, and introduction to the characters before putting them on a train north. At the same time, Attaway states most of the book’s concerns in an incredibly precise and concise although not always aesthetically pleasing way.

The rest of the novel develops and examines concerns that are already embedded in the early sections. The three brothers move north, and find work in a steel mill. Various disasters happen to them, and not all of the three will make it out of the ensuing tumults and turmoils. Big Mat meets and falls for the aforementioned prostitute. He is accepted by the Irish workers because of his strength (to quote one of his co-workers “He’s got some Irish in him somewhere […]. Lots of Black fellas have got Irish guts.”), but accidents, fights, depression and their fellow men wear all three brothers down in a book that always feels oppressive and dark. You’re not surprised by any bad turns because you sort of expected them to come. All this is not as simple as it sounds. The whole novel is as densely packed as the beginning and offers a multitude of ideas to work with. These things alone make it a novel worth reading. But there’s more.

It’s a novel about the Great Migration that turns into a book about industrialized oppression and the evils of exploitative capitalism; true, novels by more famous writers on the same subject, like Upton Sinclair’s 1906 masterpiece The Jungle are still in print, and are reprinted in multiple classic editions. But Blood on the Forge offers a vital antidote to the racism prevalent in many of these books. Sinclair and many of his contemporaries depict strikebreakers in labor conflicts as being black, which wouldn’t be so bad, if strikebreakers were not usually described as a villainous mass of people. In The Jungle, Sinclair speaks of “a throng of stupid black Negroes”, and feels obliged to offer this assessment of this group of people he just demonized in a few brushstrokes:

The ancestors of these black people had been savages in Africa; and since then they had been chattel slaves, or had been held down by a community ruled by the traditions of slavery. Now for the first time they were free,–free to gratify every passion, free to wreck themselves.

William Attaway’s novel offers us the other side of the story. When he has someone tell us early on: “[People] always hate new niggers round here [because] the company bring them in when there strike talk. Keep the old men in line.”, it is an obvious reference to the long history of radical American prose with black strikebreakers playing the role of henchmen to the company bosses. This is remarkable in and of itself, but what’s more striking (no pun intended) is the fact that he doesn’t sacrifice a more general awareness in the process, which elevates his novel beyond those of writers with less generous empathies and more narrow awarenesses. And there’s so much more. I haven’t even touched on the two other brothers and their (significant) roles in the book, including most prominently, Melody’s music and Chinatown’s limitations, I haven’t begun to touch on the nature/culture rift discussed by the novel. You could write books and books about this novel. And this is its biggest weakness. With all the stories and ideas, there’s not much room for the slow business of literary perspicacity. But the riches the book offers more than make up for any of its shortcomings. Read this book.

A short personal note (January 2013). As I am trying to finish two manuscripts and getting back into reviewing books, I have a hospital bill to pay off, which means all kinds of issues for me. If you have a buck or two to spare, I would be more than thankful. There is a paypal button on the right hand side of this page. That’s just in case you feel charitable. As it is, I am happy enough about every single one of my readers. There are more of you than I ever expected, even through the dry months in the past year, and I am thoroughly humbled. Thank you all.

David Peace: The Damned United

Peace, David, The Damned United, Faber and Faber
ISBN 978-0-571-24955-8

As a reader of American novels, you’ll likely have read at least one excellent novel about baseball or American football by one of America’s best novelists. Among the excellent novelists who have written a novel about Baseball or wherein baseball is featured prominently are Philip Roth (The Great American Novel), Don DeLillo (Underworld), Robert Coover (The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.), Bernard Malamud (The Natural) and Michael Chabon (Summerland). American football plays a role in novels by fine writers like Don DeLillo (End Zone) and Howard Nemerov (The Homecoming Game); not to mention countless excellent novels making heavy use of sports culture in some way, like Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes or Richard Ford’s Sportswriter. Soccer, or as we Europeans call it: football, has not had the fortune of inspiring such extraordinary art. To be honest, I would be hard pressed to remember any novel of note or even a truly excellent work of journalism. The best, and most famous, book that football culture has produced, is Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, Hornby’s memoirs of being an Arsenal supporter. The quality and reflective powers of Fever Pitch are well summarized by the way its author describes becoming a football fan, telling us he “fell in love with football as I was later to fall in love with women: suddenly, inexplicably, uncritically, giving no thought to the pain or disruption it would bring with it.” So, no, this is not a good book. It does work well for readers who are football fans themselves, I suppose, at least it worked well for me, because it vividly evokes being young, male, and enamored with football. If I hadn’t fallen into all three categories when I read it as an impressionable teenager, I doubt I would have liked it as much. It is a sad state of affairs that until David Peace’s novel The Damned United was published in 2006, Hornby’s sentimental piffle was the best literary achievement to have come out of football culture. I suspect that many of the accolades heaped on Peace’s book are due to a public starved for some decent literature about football to emerge.

Well, there’s no denying the fact: The Damned United is a reasonably good book. Nothing more, but also nothing less. There is much in it that can annoy readers, but David Peace, judging from this book, is a writer with passion and an excellent ear for the rhythms of other people’s passion. His book looks into the life of a football legend, and paints him as an angry, fearful, impassioned football professional who falls prey to his oversized personality, not able to restrain himself, not able to control his impulses, his desire to be loved and admired, and his hatred of those who would oppose him and the novel traces his downfall in minute detail. Peace’s nonfiction novel could well be called a tragedy in the sense that we are made to witness the demise of a man, and we understand what his harmatia, his character defect is, which leads to the inevitable end. The football legend in question is Brian Clough, and the novel tells us about his ill-fated stint managing Leeds United in 1974, starting with his first day at that “hateful, hateful place; spiteful, spiteful place”. This quote, by the way, is from that first day, it demonstrates Clough’s enmity towards his new team. He doesn’t welcome his new job, much as his new team doesn’t welcome him. From the first day, Clough, and Leeds United, are at odds. Peace’s book has 44 chapters, one for every day that Clough is employed by Leeds United, and the chapters are all narrated by Clough, and written in present tense. Peace emphasizes the dramatic nature of Clough’s soliloquies in multiple ways: some quotes, some intense thoughts and comments are written in italics, but Peace is also a fan of line breaks after a particularly expressive thought, and quite a few sections end on short, dramatic sentences. Not all the sections are about Clough’s time at Leeds, however. About half the sections are about Clough’s career up to his Leeds engagement. It starts with Clough’s last day as an active footballer, brought low by a horrific injury in the winter of 1962 and traces his career from his first assignment as manager of Hartlepools United, a small fourth division club, to his successful years of managing Derby County and finally accepting the appointment at Leeds United.

The italics in the sections dealing with Clough’s past have a several effects, the most important of which is the most simple one: they provide a stark visual contrast to the Leeds narrative, which allows Peace to treat both narratives the same way. Both narratives are written in the present tense, both make use of the same dramatic voice with short, self-obsessed sentences showing us the inside of Clough’s strangely wired mind. And while they at first seem to be contrasting stories, one the story of a doomed assignment to an unpleasant team, and the other the story of the meteoric rise of a young football manager, as the novel progresses, we are more and more treated to two stories of certain doom, as Clough fights with players, administrative staff and the press both in his career with Derby County and his time with Leeds United, and are made to understand what it is that connects both these stories: Brian Clough’s mind. Although his novel is about a football manager, Peace barely gives us details of games or managing strategies. Instead we are hooked up to his protagonist’s strange mind from the very first line, and are never allowed to leave. Like a maelstrom, Peace’s prose, simple, repetitive, expressive, pushes us through 44 days in the life of a strangely damaged, but also greatly talented man, and barely gives us time to breathe. A sign of his accomplishment is the fact that the book reads like a thriller although we all know the historical facts about Clough’s career. Brian Clough’s fear of failure so dominates his every thought that we start to expect him to fail. Even if we didn’t know the history of what happened at Derby County and Leeds United, Peace would manage to make us expect the worst. Peace traps us in the obsessed mind of a great football manager, thoroughly gripping us in the process.

Well, at least I was gripped. Like Fever Pitch many years ago, there’s a good chance that this book appealed to me because I am a fan of the sport, and am acquainted with its history and with the weight and importance of various events happening in it. You don’t have to be a baseball fan (I’m not) to appreciate the excellency of Malamud’s or DeLillo’s novels, but I’m not sure the same is true for The Damned United. This is one of the drawbacks of Peace’s reduced prose, his utter lack of context or framing devices that would help our understanding. The tragedy of Clough’s obsessions is obvious to any reader, but the book is too long and too detailed to maintain the attention of readers not interested in the sport. What’s more, it’s incredibly repetitive. I’ve said it before but it’s really one of the cornerstone’s of Peace’s prose in this book: it seems as if he built the book from a small assortment of pieces, arranging and re-arranging them every time Clough runs into another wall. Even in his triumphs, Clough is never just happy, he’s spitefully triumphant, a slave to his hate and demons in his best as well as in his worst moments. There is a strange power to the repetitiousness. The writing, both the phrases used, and the overuse of dramatic line breaks, is very close to cliché sentimentalism, but the repetition elevates the prose to an extent. It’s like a strange, misanthropic chant in many ways. And it does something else: as we all know, football is a culture very devoted to masculinity and chauvinism, so much indeed that it has proved to be a hotbed of homophobia and racism. And in The Damned United, Brian Clough’s struggle with success and his own torments are consistently framed with issues of masculinity and power. As in the phrases used, Peace has a penchant for cliché here, as well.

Thus, we are repeatedly treated to Clough’s concept of managers being fathers or father figures to their players, and his arch nemesis, Don Revie, the Leeds United manager he’s succeeding at the beginning of the book (and who, it turns out, vociferously opposed Clough’s appointment) clearly fills an oedipal role for Clough. Trying to take over and win with Leeds is frequently described as destroying Don Revie or his legacy. But Peace, while certainly not a subtle writer, is less dull than this made it seem. He cleverly sees and describes the 1970s as a period of change both in football as well as in British society at large. Clough is a thorn in the side of the administrative boards of his clubs because he embraces TV and newspaper journalism. He is outspoken, nimble and surprisingly popular. Don Revie, by contrast, represents an older kind of thinking. In his time at Leeds, Peace stresses, Revie embraced a rough, foul-centered play, and time and again we hear about Revie’s reliance on superstition. As we read the book, we start to see through the screeds and rants, we see the pattern and see beyond the mundane business of managing a football team, and as we do so, Peace catches up with us and injects overt politics into the book, as Clough, temporarily out of a job, between his time at Derby and his stint at Leeds, supports a Labor candidate for parliament. He calls himself, standing in the rain, campaigning for his candidate, a “pied piper”. This is a significant term, because here, Peace ties together all the strands in his hand. Again, not in a subtle way, but vastly effective. The book starts with a lament on British politics, titled “The Argument”, cobbled together from various sources, quoting and paraphrasing an array of writers. There is a bathetic urgency to it, and the novel bears out this urgency. Clough may fail because his character is weak, but in his failures and successes, Peace mirrors developments in British public life.

Clough is not a likable everyman, he’s a hateful little man; it’s certainly true he’s driven, and as his years in Derby, and later years at Nottingham Forest show, a more than capable manager. But for us readers, we are left with someone whose main motivation isn’t ambition as much as a strange, twisting poison in his soul. For a novel with a strong moral bent to it, I find it to be morally ambiguous, but I don’t have an intimate enough knowledge of British politics of the 1970s and 1980s to really understand some of its argument. For all the obvious effects, and all the blatant drums and fanfares Peace employs, he ultimately relies on a sense of recognition in his readers, a recognition of a time and a place, and of a game that has few literary champions. Judging from this book, he’s a writer who demands a certain amount of patience from his readers, and quite a bit of collaboration. In a postscript to the book, Peace mentions that in 1979, Margaret Thatcher’s election, arguably a low point in British politics, and Brian Clough’s greatest success as manager (he won the European cup with Nottingham Forest) coincided. For me as a reader, there are enough obscure spots and twists in David Peace’s tapestry to make the book an intriguing read, and I was convinced to see the muscular repetitiveness as a good thing, rather than focusing on the surfeit of banal phrases and dramatic posturing. There are a few more clever things Peace does (reader address is one of them, and the use of fact, fiction and research in his nonfiction novel is another) that I couldn’t work into this review, so there is certainly a lot to recommend the book. I’m not, however, sure, it’s enough. I liked it, is all I can say. And it’s very clearly the best novel on football I ever read, and quite possibly the best novel on football ever written. Which is a bit sad, if we’re honest.

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Inka Parei: The Shadow-Boxing Woman

Parei, Inka (2011), The Shadow-Boxing Woman, Seagull Books
Translated by Katy Derbyshire
ISBN 9781906497958

Parei, Inka (2011), Die Schattenboxerin, Fischer
ISBN 3-596-14869-3

Last week, at a conference I spoke at, I spent two days with two roomfuls of translators and of people academically and privately interested in translation. It reminded me of the fact of how embattled a field the arena of literary translation is. Translators get paid terribly little, and they often get less respect. At the conference, half of them were German, and in Germany, at least we have an enormous amount of translations coming out each month. In the US, only three percent (an almost proverbial number, by now) of overall publications are translations. What’s worse, for every Every Man Dies Alone, i.e. translations that sell reasonably well, and are read and reviewed seemingly everywhere, there appear to be ten worthy novels that are translated only to vanish again into obscurity. Although it’s quite tragic when it happens to fantastic masterpieces like Beautiful Days by Franz Innerhofer, which was translated by Anselm Hollo and seems to have disappeared almost instantly. The same happened to Katharina Hacker’s The Have-Nots (see my review here), translated by Helen Atkins, which appears to be in print, yet has not been broadly reviewed, not has it sold particularly well, and this despite the fact that Hacker is indisputably one of the major German novelists. It’s tragic when it happens to the heavyweights, but it’s worse when it happens to a younger writer. Innerhofer is bound to be picked up again, if only by NYRB’s excellent imprint, Hacker might well win a major prize again. But yloung writers might fall into a hole and never crawl out. So let’s hope Inka Parei’s debut novel The Shadow-Boxing Woman, originally published in 2000, does well. The translation has been undertaken by Katy Derbyshire, translator and blogger at Love German Books, and it was published by the University of Chicago Press this February and Seagull Press this May. The Shadow-Boxing Woman, called Die Schattenboxerin in German, is an excellent debut. It may suffer from small flaws typical of debuts, but overall, it’s a marvelously executed novel about a young woman in 1990s Berlin, who is trying to get her bearings in a disintegrating, malevolent city. The book tells a harsh story, yet it is never downright depressing, a balance which is due to Parei’s clever structure and to the distinctive voice of her wary protagonist, the Shadow-Boxing Woman of the title. In its imagery and use of the cityscape, the book draws on a tradition that includes Alfred Döblin’s Berlin novels and Gottfried Benn’s early poetry. It is firmly placed in a thorough sense of history as it’s ingrained in the everyday lives of Berlin’s inhabitants. It also draws on the rhythms and anxieties of crime writing, producing a novel that is suspenseful, dark, funny and bleakly elegant. If you can get your hands on this book, read it. Parei, who’s currently writing her third novel, is surely one of the better writers of her generation. A German critic called this book a “promise” and what a beautiful promise it is. It is also a damn good novel, and thanks to Katy Derbyshire, you can all read it now. So please do. You will find one of the better books published this past decade, a book that won’t leave you cold. Here is the amazon link.

Initially, the book appears to be a mystery with noir stylings. Hell, as the the book’s protagonist is called, notices that her neighbor has gone missing, and takes it upon herself to investigate. Before the book is over, we’ll have found out that it is in fact, a mystery, and that, in fact, a crime has occurred, but the crime and the victim are different ones than we thought. With a wondrous sleight of hand, Parei manages to tell a story that is both tightly knit, and mysteriously loose and baggy. At exactly the right points in the story she manages to hold on to details and events so much that we feel the gray soil and the gray bricks of Berlin and the gray breath of her characters as we ourselves had found ourself stranded in the same dirty streets and among the same hard-up characters. At other points, she steps away from events, not attempting to explain, to fill us in or her heroine. I think that it’s this rhythm of clarity and nightmarish obscurity that makes the whole novel work, because this rhythm is tied directly to the disorderly mind of Hell. Small objects cause Hell to remember episodes from her past, with a sharp, hurtful clarity that is not the clarity of Proust’s mémoire involontaire, but the clarity and sharpness of trauma. The change between present-day reality and past memories can be disorienting at first, because the whole novel is narrated in the present tense, no matter what period of Hell’s life the episodes are set in. The more we read on, the more we notice that the memories, like the present-day events, follow one particular story, but the two stories are differently structured. The present-day story starts to develop according to the genre rules of mystery. We learn that someone has vanished, and then we start accumulating clues. We find a mysterious stranger in the missing person’s apartment, and he tags along in our attempt to make sense of it all. It is not until late in the story that it all unravels, as first improbable things happen and events as diverse as a mysterious fire and a bank robbery start cluttering a heretofore clear and clean storyline. The story starts to go completely off the rails as the past, remembered in short intense flashes, starts to bleed into the present.

The remembered story works exactly the opposite way. The first few times the past intrudes on the present-day story, we are slightly confused, because the past events do not fit precisely; they are small shards of a larger mosaic, although they are largely arranged in chronological order. While the present-day story works its way towards a climax, the cataclysmic events in the past, the ones that traumatized the hell out of Hell, they come pretty early in the sequence of memories. Her memories, arranged chronologically, are nevertheless broken into small bits, and the most destructive, central event is the most horribly broken part. Something has been broken, and in a way, these memories are like an attempt to mend that which has been so thoughtlessly, so awfully carelessly destroyed, but like a beautiful vase that has been thrown from a high place, there are still bits and pieces missing, no matter how much care you invest towards making the vase whole again. And there is another thing we notice. The more we read on, the clearer we see that her whole life after what happened in the past is an attempt to deal with that past, or at least all of her current life that we are told about. After all, we can’t forget that it’s the narrator framing the story, telling us of both past and present events and creating a narrative link between them. And as the book draws to a close, both story lines run into one another and we see how skilfully we were led there. The Shadow-Boxing Woman is a small book, both in terms of size and in terms of scope, but at the end, after the climax, after the whole novel’s structure has collapsed, the book suddenly opens up as its heroine takes a deep breath, allowing us to breathe, as well. Paradoxically, in the one moment when darkness literally and figuratively enters the frame again, the novel feels most replete with light and relief. If I seemed to repeat myself these past few lines, it’s because the book is very adept at using its structure to be both very exact and very imprecise. The moment, where the book’s events make the most sense, the moment where we see how everything, past and present, fits, is also the moment when we most realize how unreliable the narrator is, when we see to what extent this book is a literary artifact, a literary creation. This is something that both the constant use of the present tense, as well as the naturalistic-seeming descriptions of the environment have suggested to us.

The novel is full of an obvious and a less obvious symbolism. The obvious symbolism is so direct and upfront that it paradoxically does not detract from the naturalistic impression. In fact, this obvious brand of symbolism, which Parei seems to have an attachment to, is probably the novel’s biggest flaw, and it is one we are apprised of early on. I’ll be honest, I almost stopped reading the book, because I was slightly annoyed by it, as by the book’s other flaw, Parei’s handling of the present tense, but I am glad I didn’t, and I suggest you persevere, as well, should you feel a slight irritation at the way the novel is written or at the book’s intense use of a set of very transparent-seeming symbols and allegorical scenes. It is part of the book’s excellency that, upon finishing it, we are considerably less sure we can see through the novel’s oh so obvious signifying. This begins with naming things. The book’s protagonist is called, as I said, “Hell”, which is German for “light” and her neighbor, the one who goes missing, is called “Dunkel”, i.e. ‘dark’. Mind you, the allocation of properties to symbolically named person is not straightforward, in fact, Parei is rather clever in her use of two sets of morals, one complex and intractable, the other strong and more or less Manichean. Impressive, too, is how insistently everything in Parei’s book is rooted in the embodied reality of Berlin and her protagonist. We are not asked to believe in or subscribe to something based on abstract ideas. Parei grounds everything in a set of experiences, some of them incredibly painful. On the other hand, the web of symbolic references is undeniable. As I said in my first paragraph, there is a strong tradition in Berlin for this kind of writing. The novel’s closest literary relatives are the 19th century plays by Gerhart Hauptmann and the 20th century novels by Alfred Döblin. Hauptmann’s relationship to this book is largely established through his plays Vor Sonnenaufgang (1889) and Die Ratten (1911) dark, naturalistic portraits of a society both coming together, growing into a new century, a new millennium, into modernity, and at the same time, these part portraits of society falling apart at the hands of its greedy, poor, desperate individuals. There are few manifestations of literary realism as densely accomplished as these plays by Gerhart Hauptmann, a towering writer who is surely among the most deserving winners in the 111 year history of the Nobel prize.

In German literature, it’s mainly Hauptmann who has taught us how menacing and desolate Berlin can be, and how the city can visit horrors on its inhabitants wholly absentmindedly. Within his best plays, there is no moral instance, no salvation, no hope. Things just happen, people are just allowed to be themselves, as we look on in helpless terror. Döblin added something else. Coming from the tradition of modernist surrealism, his most famous novel Berlin Alexanderplatz shows us a human being falling through the gaps, seemingly abandoned by the Moloch Berlin like Hauptmann’s unbearable pitiful protagonists, but the book is at the same time a whirlwind of insanity, of strange events, prayers and otherworldly experiences. Döblin’s mistreated protagonist Franz Biberkopf is briefly saved by his fellow human beings again and again, but tragedy (and his own odd head) keeps dragging him into the maelstrom of life, murdering him on the spokes of modernity. I am very insistent on the debts owed to these writers and books, but the similarities are not as obvious as all that. The texture of the atmosphere, the apartment building and the way Parei paints her characters, all this is highly reminiscent of Hauptmann-style naturalism, and on the other hand, the stranger, less straightforwardly realistic moments that veer off into trauma and an odd kind of distortion, these reminded me personally of Döblin. All of this is held together by the place, dirty, scruffy, lovable, horrendous Berlin. Parei has set her novel in a decaying Berlin, a Berlin falling apart. If you look at the cover of the German edition, you can see the facade of a house that looks empty and abandoned, windows smashed, walls crumbling. Mysterious Hell takes it upon herself to live, well, almost squat in such a house, creating a no-man’s land of sorts for herself, as the other tenants do. Far from the bourgeois chic that Auster evokes in a similar scenario in his most recent novel, in Parei’s book the decrepitude of the house, the outsider status of the squatters in the house and the helpless souls of its inhabitants complement one another. If I have to repeat myself, I’ll do so gladly. This is an absolutely stunning and original book, well made, well crafted, well imagined. And the book is so much better than I have made it sound, additionally to all the things I mentioned, the book is set in the period directly after the wall came down, and one could write at least as long an essay as this review about the historical dimensions and intricacies of this fantastic novel. There’s just not enough time and space.

Finally, a few words on the translation. As I read German books in German, I am not usually able to comment on the translation. In this case, I am, because seagull books published an excerpt from the book on its site. I was very nervous reading the translation, because Parei’s style, however simple it appears to be, can’t be easy to translate. Parei opts for a simple syntax, and simple descriptions, and yet every other sentence contains an interesting word or turn of phrase. It’s a constantly intriguing delight to read this book, without ever becoming challenging. It’s both absorbing, and drafted with a calculating pen. From the excerpt, the translation manages to recreate the a very similar impression, while managing to sound more elegant and readable than Parei, who seems awkward sometimes. The present tense is not always easy to maintain in a novel, and Parei sometimes struggles a bit. From what I’ve seen of the translation, this cannot be said for Katy Derbyshire’s excellent translation. I’m intrigued to find out how she solved the Hell/Dunkel names thing, though. Readers, buy this book, and then run and tell me.

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Hunter S. Thompson: Hell’s Angels

Thompson, Hunter S. (2009), Hell’s Angels, Penguin
ISBN 978-0-141-04187-2

Hell’s Angels, originally published in 1966, holds up remarkably well these days. It’s a wonderfully readable piece of journalism, exhibiting a singular literary voice finding its bearings and its author, Hunter S. Thompson, stands today as one of the most astonishing American literary figures of this past century. His vast work is yet to be collected and properly editorially assessed, but at least it’s out there, in many great editions, and almost annually something new is added. The most recent publication was a selection of his interviews, published as Ancient Gonzo Wisdom (highly recommended), and in 2012 the third and last volume of his letters, which has been delayed for a few years now, will hopefully be published. His work is political, it is both loud and tender, the work of a sensitive literary talent driven to the brink by a disintegrating country and the oppressive forces of the ‘silent majority’. Within less than ten years after seriously taking up journalism Thompson exploded onto the literary scene and evolved more and more into the brash, whiskey-swilling, gun-toting madman known the world over. Thompson traveled through his own and other countries, trying to assess the madness, the violence and hate that seemed to crop up everywhere; as a reaction to that he developed his signature style, ‘Gonzo Journalism’, or, as he called it “Total Subjectivity, as opposed to the bogus demand of Objectivity”. He is often carelessly lumped in with Mailer, Wolfe and Talese and the rest of the reactionary ‘New Journalism’ pack, when, in fact, his brand of genius is completely, unmistakably different. Thompson belongs to distinct literary tradition that includes writers like those of 19th century German romanticism. He does it, however, with an added strong dose of resentment and, well, loathing. Additionally, Thompson was, at least for a sizable portion of his literary career, an incredibly sharp and sober observer of the world around him, and a valuable commentator on culture and politics.

His best books are probably Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72. In these two books he honed both his observations and his mastery of language and registers to a fine point. These are extraordinary achievements, among the finest achievements in journalistic writing in the 20th century, written with urgency, clarity and fantastic stylistic instincts. However, Thompson’s madcap persona with all its idiosyncrasies (immortalized as Uncle Duke by Garry Trudeau), the drugs, girls, and the later pressure of having to be the oddball, drinking whiskey, shooting his dozens of guns and making mad statements, all this fell back on his work and harmed its precision and even the urgent tone of much of it. The rest of his work, although it contains standout masterpieces like The Curse of Lono (1983) and Kingdom of Fear (2003), is less consistent, less overall fantastic. It really is those ten years between 1965 and 1975 that Thompson was at the top of his game, producing work that has entered the American literary canon long since. Hell’s Angels, his first book in that decade, is clearly the work of a writer still learning to use his voice, but it’s still a hell of a read, worth reading and rereading, worth thinking about and discussing. There’s a reason why this book keeps being reprinted in dozens of editions, and it’s not (or not only) its sensationalist subject matter. The book finds Thompson mingling with the infamous motorcycle gang, accompanying them on runs, following them to one of Ken Kesey’s legendary parties, hanging with them at bars. The central epiphanies, the turning points of the book are all buttressed or informed or even prompted by events witnessed by Thompson, although he has not participated in most described events in a book that is as more a history of the Hell’s Angels as it is a first hand account of their dealings. That said, Thompson’s use of his own experience is strategically placed to provide a sound, personal foundation to a slightly meandering narrative.

Hell’s Angels consists of four chapters and a postscript. The first chapter and the postscript are introductions and conclusions to the story of Thompson’s encounter with the gang. Technically speaking, the first chapter in particular is wonderfully done, conveying at once a general impression of the men on their bikes, their particular impression on Thompson and in his life, and a sense of cultural context. This first, short chapter, titled “Roll em, boys” contains in nuce much of the structural complexities and themes of the book to come; it feels like a finished, painstakingly crafted text. This, incidentally, is true for the entire book. It wasn’t until around 1972 that Thompson abandoned his careful drafting. This book is amazingly well wrought, merging disparate elements like newspaper articles, experiences and historical excurses into a rollicking, coherent narrative. If you come to this book looking for the slightly mad Thompson of his later work, you’re not going to find him here. The author of this work is a thoughtful, ambitious and thoroughly talented young man walking a thin line between outrageous experiences and sober research. There is no element here that feels accidental, nothing out of place; every description and every phrase is purposeful and effective. There is something excessive about Thompson’s post-1972 work, which is part of an attempt to provide a non-reductive view of the world, a reporting that contains all the chaos within the limits of an essay or a whole book. That is not yet the case in this book. The author of Hell’s Angels clearly worked from the assumption that you can impose a frame and a narrative on something like “[t]he Menace, […], like Genghis Khan on an iron horse, a monster steed with fiery anus”. The language is impassioned, literary and sober, depending on the section or chapter. Except for the postscript, every chapter is a mixture of lived events and cultural and historical criticism. The two-page postscript describes the event that put an end to Thompson’s close association with the gang (this is expounded upon in this unforgettable TV interview). The longest of the chapters in between first chapter and postscript, “The Hoodlum Circus and The Statutory Rape of Bass Lake” is the most impressive and has remained the most controversial section of the whole book.

It’s the most impressive because, 100 pages into the book, this is the first extended description of Thompson’s year with the biker gang. At its center is the annual 4th of July run, a “run” being a mass outing of one or more motorcycle gang on a particular weekend of boozing, playing and fighting. The impression of a horde of bearded, black-clad motorcycle enthusiasts descending on some small Midwest town is fearsome, and in 1964, when the 4th of July run takes place that Thompson took part in, the locals in Bass Lake, where that year’s destination was, are forewarned, and were armed to the teeth. The run allows Thompson to explain the group mechanisms active in the Hell’s Angels and also to show how at that time regular people, cops and the gang members interacted. As everywhere else in the book, this chapter is only roughly linear, jumping to different events that happened before and after the run, explaining cultural backgrounds and specific prejudice. One of those explanations, and probably the most extensive one, as well as the one that made the book controversial, is centered on the topic of sex and rape. The Hell’s Angels are portrayed as insatiable purveyors of sex in various forms. They are casually sexual in contact with one another, but what’s an issue is that they regularly gang rape women. It is uncomfortable to read through a long, repeated account of abuse directed at women, and to have to listen to the Angels’ ridiculous self-important defensive explanations. What’s worse is that in many cases, Thompson appears to be standing close by, his tape recorder turned on, his journalist’s ears twitching, doing nothing. The book itself also contains no condemnation of this sexual practice. All this is difficult to read, but it is, critics often assure us, somewhat cushioned by the general air of disapproval that swathes the whole book. Thompson makes it clear that he does not agree with the vaguely right wing, misogynist, violent attitude that defines much of what the Hell’s Angels stand for. But he doesn’t condemn them except in some strategic instances, because they are not the (only) enemy in his sights. This trade-off of ‘real’ enemies vs. actually observed victims is itself violently misogynist in structure and makes this book, like many other instances in Thompson’s work, deeply disturbing to the reader.

Unlike a lot of his later work, and despite the impression that the past two paragraphs might have conveyed, the participation of the author in the events described in the book is actually much less central. At its heart, Hell’s Angels is arguably less about the havoc wrought by the bearded, carelessly violent gang members, than it is about the narrative, the evolving legend of the Hell’s Angels, engineered by lazy and bigoted journalists and lazy and bigoted local politicians. This is not to say that Thompson approves of the methods of the gang he observes. He does not. But the intellectual focus of the book is still on the distortion created by the national and local press, and the effect this has on local communities and the Hell’s Angels themselves. At one point, late in the book, he writes

I was not surprised that the eight articles gave eight different viewpoints on the riot, because no reporter can be on every scene and they get their information from different people. But it would have been reassuring to find a majority agreement on something as basic as the number of arrests; it would have made the rest of the information easier to live with.

This passage, and others like it, displays a disappointment with his colleagues that provided fertile grounds for the journalistic cynicism that completely pervades his book about the 1972 presidential campaign, wherein he gleefully recounts facts and rumors he made up and spread through the newsroom. By contrast, Hell’s Angels is conscientious in its use of facts and numbers, and frequently compares public and journalistic rhetoric with the facts on file, a concern that was front and center in his work as early as 1965, when he published a newspaper article in The Nation (read part of it here) about the gang and their alleged exploits. In his book, Thompson quotes Kierkegaard, who said that “[t]he daily press is the evil principle of the modern world“, and yet the book itself is a masterpiece of journalism; this is not a contradiction. The attack on the ‘daily press’ is of course not an attack on all journalistic endeavors, but an attack on the outrage machinery that is fueled by politicians and journalists alike, a machine that enforces a strict (and sometimes irrational) moral code on everyone by steering public opinion in the right direction. Thompson shows how politicians and journalists support each other in building a narrative that has surprisingly little connection to the world of facts and figures. This is impressive, and always well done. But he doesn’t stop there.

It’s the peculiar nature of the Hell’s Angels that allows him to show how these narratives then influence the world outside, not just by turning the population against the invading motorcyclists. They also affect the Hell’s Angels themselves. In an early chapter, Thompson points out to what extent the Hell’s Angels were a product both of scaremongering journalism and of popular culture. Apart from the influence that films like Howard Hughes’ Hell’s Angels had, a veteran gang member is quoted as saying “We were all Marlon Brando”, describing the effect of the 1953 film The Wild One on early 1950s motorcycle groups. That film itself is based on the so-called Hollister riots, a 1947 motorcycle rally that got out of control. The Hollister riots were greatly exaggerated by the press, in particular Life magazine, and were thus turned into material befitting a sensationalist movie. But here is where Thompson’s definition of his own work and of journalism enters the picture. Journalists like the ones working for Life, who pretend to present a sober account of the facts, can and should be held up to these standards. After all, there’s a whole poetics of journalism writing based around the use of tenses and phrases that create just that impression of objectivity. Thompson’s take on this has two aspects. On the one hand he points out how so much of mainstream journalism supports political narratives, pursuing a narrow agenda, instead of being ‘objective’. On the other hand, he rejects the basic idea of journalistic objectivity e vestigio and instead pursues a very subjective kind of journalism, one that is open and honest about the place of the writer within his narrative and the wider framework of truth and objectivity. Something that he would manage more seamlessly in his later work is still a very obvious affair in this book: he takes pains showing us not just where he was in events he describes. He also turns the use of sources into a narrative, discussing his tapes, his research and talks with outlaws. There is no information in this book that isn’t accounted for and completely tied to its author. There is no pretense of an objectivity beyond what limits the author has.

And yet, this is no weakness. The example of The Wild One is instrumental here. In the same section that I just mentioned, he closes by saying that the movie,

despite an admittedly fictional treatment, was an inspired piece of film journalism. Instead of institutionalizing common knowledge (…), it told a story that was only beginning to happen and which was inevitably influenced by the film.

In all of Thompson’s written output, there is really no better summary of his poetics than this. It well describes what he was to focus on from then on: telling a story that is bigger than the event actually described, a story that tells a larger truth, and a story that does not just repeat the same old mendacious narratives. The exaggeration that he often uses is not a deviation from truth, but it serves to put what’s really true into sharp focus, which probably reminds most of us of Adorno’s claims in his classic “Kulturindustrie” essay. Within the searing pages of Hell’s Angels, Hunter S. Thompson isn’t yet the genius writer that he would turn into a few years later, but he’s damn close. The book is a fantastic read of course, written and constructed by one of the biggest and smartest literary talents of his time. But it also shows the direction that his and others’ work would be taking soon. It contains the beginning of an age in its beautiful and clear pages. There are so many reasons to read this book. Pick one. Read it.

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Cormac McCarthy: No Country for Old Men

McCarthy, Cormac (2005), No Country for Old Men, Picador
ISBN 0-330-44030-6

This is just it: a novelist who has produced several incontestable masterpieces, who is generally regarded as being one of the foremost artists of his craft and his generation, that novelist is bound to be subjected to a less forgiving critical glare than the overall mediocre writer. Cormac McCarthy is one of the former, a writer regularly named in discussions of possible Nobel Prize candidates, a writer who, in Blood Meridian and Suttree, has produced two of the best novels of his age. After his last major achievement, the “Border” trilogy, which ended with the beautifully elegiac Cities of the Plain (1998), he waited for almost a decade before publishing his ninth novel, No Country for Old Men, which is so dull and mediocre that it almost seems a different writer’s pale imitation of McCarthy’s celebrated style and tone. Less like an inspired and inspiring work of art, this genre hybrid is more of a routine exercise in a style that McCarthy can pull off by now with comparable ease. As in the somewhat operatic late novels of other old novelists like Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, Günter Grass or John Updike, this novel leaves us sure of the author’s competence, his basic ability to fuse knowledge and insight into a reasonably original prose artifact; as in those cases, we leave the book largely unmoved, witnesses to an author’s languid self-examination. But however little I liked books like Exit Ghost or Indignation, they still shone with stylistic polish, written in the dazzling prose that these writers have become famous for. There’s precious little of that in No Country for Old Men. On the contrary, the novel makes painfully clear on every single page why McCarthy’s great novels are as great as they are: because everything fits perfectly. In his books, the writing doesn’t enhance the structure or characters or the plot, it is inextricably connected to these elements, and in his ninth novel we realize almost instantly that as soon as something is out of place in McCarthy’s wondrous literary architecture, the whole building collapses into a malformed heap. This is not to say that No Country for Old Men is a bad novel. It’s not. For most other writers, it would certainly be regarded as a great success. The finicky complexities of structure and ideas, the ambiguous moral landscape, and the nimble way he fuses several genres and modes of writing would be admirable in many other writers, but his name on the cover of the book mostly highlights the flaws of his (so far) penultimate novel. As a reader, I can’t help but see these flaws on its every page, so it’s hard for me to recommend it. Nevertheless, whatever its deficiencies, No Country for Old Men is, at the very least, an entertaining romp through a modern day western, part reality, part allegory. If you enjoy humorous, well-paced and atmospheric crime novels, you’re likely to enjoy it. Just try to forget that this is the same man who brought us Blood Meridian and Suttree.

No Country for Old Men is a crime novel/western hybrid, set in modern day Texas. It consists of three different kinds of short chapters. The first kind of chapter (and the first chapter of the book) is reserved for Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, who is the most dominant of the book’s three protagonists. His chapters are printed in italics and are narrated by Bell himself, in the first person. Thus, the very first sentence of the novel we hear is one spoken by Bell: “I sent one boy to the gaschamber at Huntsville” and the last sentence is also his: “And then I woke up.” One would assume that he is, in fact, the narrator of the story, but he’s not, or anyway not in any obvious way. He does, however, frame the story in several ways. His chapters (or section if you like) are both part of the story and outside of it. As a man involved in the action, we can follow him through the story and learn more about what happens. On the other hand, as a grizzled old sheriff, with decades of experience at this game, he infuses his sections with two kinds of outside commentary. One is his memory of his years and years of work. Through Bell’s voice, we see the unfolding events in a historical context, and we quickly get a good idea of how the cultural landscape is connected to the violent and desperate individuals playing a game of cat and mouse in it. McCarthy’s sense of history is always very strong in his prose, but this time it’s more heavy-handed as we listen to Sheriff Ed Tom Bell ramble about the past and the present. Although ‘ramble’ may be too negative: the choice of words, the phrasing, syntax, everything in Bell’s chapters is endowed with the cadences of the wise old storyteller. McCarthy places accentual deviations from grammatical rules judiciously. As with the other factors, too, this is done in as heavy-handed a manner as possible. This is not oral speech taken down, thus lacking the refinements of writing, despite the dropped ‘g’s in gerunds and participles. Instead it is speech carefully crafted to resemble oral speech, most obviously by the fact that the apostrophe in words like ‘won’t’ and ‘didn’t’ is usually left out. Now, this deviation cannot be heard, it’s nothing but a signal to the reader: listen up, this is traditional storytelling. I go on about this at length because for whatever reason, McCarthy, in this late period of his work, starts to rely on crutches overmuch. The dropped apostrophes are one aspect. Many more follow in the pages to come (The Road, only marginally better than No Country for Old Men, is similarly full of them). McCarthy needs these sections to be clearly identifiable as oral, however, since he expects the reader to extend the local historical tradition that Bell outlines and read the whole book in connection with a local literary tradition, the tale told in the evening at the campfire or on the back porch.

As I pointed out in this review, the oral storyteller often has a moral and epistemological authority, and it is this authority that the novel wants, no, needs to invoke here. As the novel progresses, so do Sheriff Bell’s culturally and historically based pessimistic murmurings. This is the other kind of outside commentary, and it’s worth distinguishing it from the first one; in part certainly because one is backwards oriented (assessing the past, establishing a historical landscape wherein the novel’s events can be situated) whereas the other is looking forward, in the sense that Yeats’ poem “Sailing to Byzantium” is, which lent McCarthy’s novel its title. Both poem and novel end on a vision, but while Yeats’ poem ends on a phantasmagorical vision of “the holy city of Byzantium”, McCarthy’s ends on a symbol of the past that has slipped away, a past that has been replaced by shootouts and drug deals in the desert. In this sense, the novel isn’t, as I claimed earlier, a crime novel/western hybrid. It’s a Western that’s been taken over by the mechanized, brutal reality of our time. The basic elements, given enough abstraction, are still there, the landscape is still the same, and the Texan drawl of Sheriff Bell that frames the whole thing is also still there. Within all that, however, a new story takes place, and we are to feel the loss that it represents to the world Bell used to know. Now, the novel’s grasp of reality and of a dependable moral compass is a bit tenuous since Bell’s sections are so clearly marked as objects. There is no inherent support for these sections within the novel; on the contrary, the very first sentence of the novel could be said to undermine Bell’s sections completely, since according to Jim Willett, the director of the Texas Prison Museum, the state of Texas has never executed anyone in a gas chamber. This inaccuracy, placed prominently at the very beginning of the story, is an important sign post if we look for instructions as to how to read Sheriff Bell’s chapters. The other two kinds of chapters are written from the (third person) perspective of two other central characters, most frequently from that of Llewelyn Moss, Vietnam veteran, and professional welder. It is he who kicks off the novel’s plot when he comes across what’s left of a shootout in the desert: three vehicles, filled with dead (and almost dead) men, as well as several million dollars in cash. After a brief deliberation, he decides to take the money, since, after all, no-one appears to be still alive to lay claim to this particular pot of gold. This is where things get a bit dicey. The money has owners, who send killers in to get it, but more dangerous is a freelance killer, who’s also the third protagonist. Of these three characters, Moss is the most accessible one, he’s an everyman, caught in the crosshairs of bad luck, trying to first save the money and later on just his life, from the relentless pursuit of the professionals in hot pursuit of him.

Moss is unlucky, but he’s also remarkably stupid, making a few crucial mistakes that lead to his having to flee across the Mexican border and back. We become so invested in his story (although he’s only a cardboard character, really) that after a while, we may consider him the protagonist, but the last third of the novel quickly disabuses us of such illusions, if we ever held them. In fact, as it turns out, Moss is merely the human interest meat in an allegory sandwich, although he and his chapters do take up more space within the novel than the other two. Of the two, I already discussed Sheriff Bell, a stand-in for the history of the landscape, for the oral storyteller and an ambiguous moral authority. The other one is the aforementioned freelance killer, Anton Chigurh (which adventurous surname is pronounced similar to ‘sugar’). Chigurh’s chapters take up the least amount of space and yet his importance in the overall structure of the novel is equal to that of Bell. Where Bell provides a framework and perspective, Chigurh is the evil ghost in the machine. He is a cold-hearted murderer, but like Bell, he likes order, and his killings can be seen as a way to restore order. Like Bell, he has a rigid moral and ethical code that governs his actions. In many ways, he is the modern day counterpart of McCarthy’s earlier creation Judge Holden, the main villain of Blood Meridian and one of the best and most harrowing villains in recent literary history. To readers of that earlier book, it’s probably clear that Holden is representative of a more archaic, ancient evil. He isn’t merely a wrongdoer or a bad person, he’s evil, in the full sense of that word. The same, almost otherworldly, impression is left by Anton Chigurh, but while Judge Holden, a historical figure, was anchored to his time and place, this isn’t quite true for Chigurh, except in one sense: technology. McCarthy’s use of weapons in No Country for Old Men is close to fetish, the way he caresses names and processes, the way he offers to us a precise and accurate idea of every weapon used, and of the uses of these weapons. In many ways, I believe one could read Chigurh and the use of violence and weapons as a warped, disjointed, patriarchal take on theories like Donna Haraway’s concept of the cyborg. The book never qualifies this take on technology, it doesn’t offer a position on the progress of modernity outside of the flawed stances of its protagonists. But the fact that the sections that seem most normative are undercut by Chigurh and by the author himself leaves the novel as a whole in a state of uncertainty. McCarthy, as in his good and best books, reaches towards myth and tradition, but the novel itself collapses at the end. There is unfinished business in No Country for Old Men but McCarthy is no longer able or willing to take care of it. It is this twilight of two modern narratives that is the most brilliant thing about McCarthy’s overall unsatisfactory novel. But too much of this is obnvious, too much of this is presented in broad daylight, as an empty gesture to an empty stage. What’s left is murder and suspense, and a taciturn narrative about violence and modernity that could have been worse. It could have been better though.

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Siri Hustvedt: The Summer Without Men

Hustvedt, Siri (2011), The Summer Without Men, Picador
ISBN 978-0-312-57060-6

Here is something that is said far too rarely: Siri Hustvedt is undoubtedly one of the best novelists of her generation. In the past decade she has slowly built a body of work that has become more impressive with each new novel. Her fourth novel, The Sorrow of an American, may be a her crowning achievement so far, a perfectly sculpted examination of loss and memory, of identity and history. In less than 400 pages, Hustvedt offered us an intellectual novel that was considered, careful and driven by the urgency of the born novelist. It felt necessary, it was moving, and thanks to Hustvedt’s stunningly nimble pen, it was written with a precise and effective yet poetic style. Although she writes intellectual prose, her work does not resemble the ones of the likes of Paul Auster, Michael Cunningham, Haruki Murakami or Richard Powers, and not only because of her superior style. No, it’s the fact that Hustvedt’s work always seems necessary, well-rounded and complete. The point is especially obvious if we compare The Sorrow of an American with any novel by Richard Powers, for example The Echo Maker. Powers, a writer of gaps, of jumps and associations, has always put ideas before style; in his work, this has often meant relying on cliché plots and simple characters, reaching for a simple emotionality that is at odds with the sophisticated nature of the scientific and philosophical background of his work. Even his prose betrays his preferences, by slipping by turns into stock phrases and a slouching writerly gait on the one hand (as in The Echo Maker), or into a style marked by a sophisticated vocabulary crammed into a simple (sometimes even awkward) syntax, which makes for an unpleasantly bloated style (as in novels like The Goldbug Variations). However, there is a visionary air to the best of his books, and a highly insistent handling of the subject matter that keeps us reading, and that is responsible for the lavish critical praise he’s received over the past decades.

Hustvedt’s books are ostensibly more private, small-scale affairs, but no less visionary and a great deal more accomplished as literary works of art. She writes small dramas, employing her considerable insights into philosophy and science only as and when they are necessary for the story at hand. That, and the incredibly readable style of her novels might have obscured the fact of how extraordinary a writer she’s become, besting many of the male writers frequently regarded as ‘major’ writers of our age. There is bound to be a certain frustration with these matters, with this critical glass ceiling that many excellent female writers face who do not (or nor predominantly) write about the plight of their female characters. Most of Hustvedt’s characters are male, and her novels lack the shrill cry of canonical importance. As if we needed any further example, it was recently pointed out that Jonathan Franzen,yon bright beacon of self-satisfied canonized mediocrity, is reaping laurels writing the kind of domestic drama that female writers were always marginalized for doing. As I said, this state of matters is bound to create a certain degree of frustration, and I think that part of the astonishing energy driving Hustvedt’s slender, but magnificently dense new novel The Summer without Men is due to just that kind of frustration.

Of course, it’s easy for me to claim this since the book contains a plethora of rants and bitter and hilarious exhortations that touch on just these kinds of subjects. Indeed, The Summer without Men contains surprisingly little in the way of plot or characterization, especially when compared to Hustvedt’s other novels. The book takes off when Hustvedt’s protagonist, Mia Fredrickson, rents an apartment near where her mother lives after her husband Boris has left her for a French woman “with limp but shiny hair” and she suffers from a temporary psychological breakdown, which leads to a short hospitalization. The book doesn’t dwell much on the temporary insanity that gripped Mia, and dwells even less on her husband’s decision to call it quits after 30 years of marriage (although the novel does contain memories of happier times in their marriage). The rental she moves into is at the edge of town, and although there is no reason why it couldn’t be crawling with men, we perceive the area as a kind of female community, since those are the people that Mia keeps in touch with, both privately and professionally. Privately, she gets to know her mother’s circle of friends, a group of women who have made both happy and unhappy experiences in the company of men, and have drawn different lessons from it. The focal point of the group for Mia is the ninety-four year old Abigail, who has lived a life hiding in the embroidered folds of propriety. Literally. In her vast repertoire of embroidered objects, she has hidden images that would have clashed with the idea of what was proper for a woman of her time. Gleefully, she unveils her secrets one object at a time to a rapt Mia, who, talking to Abigail, her mother and the other older women, regains a firm sense of self. Her professional contacts mainly include a class of girls she starts to teach.

That class of girls starts to pick on one of their own, making her an outsider, a process that eventually leads to bloody tissue on the teacher’s desk, tears in the class room, and an extended exercise in writing intended to raise the self-awareness of everyone concerned. Even if we the readers had not been told of the extensive similarities that connects this group of girls with the group of girls surrounding Mia when she was their age, we would see that this is the obvious literary function of this part of the plot. In Mia, the old women and the mean girls in class, Hustvedt presents us with three generations of female experience. This is complemented by essayistic elements that discuss art, culture and science in almost acidic tones; this is done plainly, clearly and obviously. No attempt has been made to assimilate the various the plot strands, rants, comments, reminiscences and poems. They cohere only when we look at the whole of the novel as a long, coherent work. This is strikingly different from her earlier work which was always written in one voice, aperçus, remarks and various plot elements smoothed into one story. While her other novels are frequently novels of idea clothed in the sheep’s wool of a rich and engaging story, her most recent work is a much more obvious affair. Its story is more an excuse to develop a series of ideas about science, gender and relationships, and the author doesn’t attempt to hide the fact.

Although The Summer without Men is written from the perspective of her distraught and temporarily confused protagonist, the novel always keeps us at a remove from her by introducing a shelf-bending amount of other writers and thinkers by way of references and explicit quotes. Discussions of Emily Dickinson, behavioral psychologists and gender issues are woven into what is basically a long stream of thought that contains outside events as well as the the slow gestation of thoughts in the protagonist’s mind. Mind you, The Summer without Men is not a nonfiction essay merged with a novel, although the essayist fragments that swirl around in it are frequently brilliant. The book it most closely resembles is Nicholson Baker’s recent masterpiece The Anthologist, a meandering essay on modern poetry as channeled through the mind of its third rate poet/critic protagonist. Baker’s book is obsessed with its protagonist, molding the comments on poetic form and poetic tradition to fit his slightly unhinged mind. The effect would have been claustrophobic, if not for Baker’s light style; a book turned inward, its logic starting and ending with the limits and limitations of the eponymous assembler of anthologies. There is a similar web of connections that spans from Hustvedt’s protagonist to her elaborate musings on art and culture and finally even to characters and events that turn up in the novel. The effect is not at all claustrophobic, however, since Hustvedt’s novel looks outward, scans the ridges and valleys of culture and presents a woman protagonist who suffers both from a specific, individual fate, as well as from being part of a society that still fosters misogynist myths and stories.

This seems to be a somewhat common kind of narrative, but unlike canonical works of feminist literature (like Margaret Atwood’s scintillating, similarly slim masterpiece Surfacing), Hustvedt eschews essentialist symbolism. Her focus is not on the body and symbolism, or on locating ‘the feminine’ within loci and narratives thought of as male. Instead she hands us a story that could have been written by one of many mediocre postmodern novelists, but infused with a self-reflective awareness of how her protagonist is held and changed by her place in various discourses of power. It serves as a corrective mechanism to an American literary canon, where male narratives like Baker’s are perceived and read as universal. Books like Hustvedt’s point out how many things within such novels change if the gender of the protagonist, and the attendant contexts, change. If her earlier novel has easily bested those of Richard Powers at their own game, then this one takes on, and makes mince meat of, a different canon. This canon is led by writers like Paul Auster, whose work increasingly resembles that of the aging Philip Roth in that both contain sentimental plots that are garnished with a reasonably erudite discussion of literary and cultural contexts, all of which come to bear, in one way or another, on the sentimental education of his/their (male) protagonists. Women jump in and out of the books, mere foils for the protagonists to project their desires on. The sad climax of this development can be found in the lesbian fantasies in Roth’s The Humbling (2008, cf. my review here) and the pedophiliac fantasies in Auster’s Sunset Park (2010, cf. my review for details).

Hustvedt counters these stories with a doubting heroine, an angry, questioning woman stranded on what might as well be a planet without men, where women discuss and exhibit the problems incurred by living in a world where casual (and not so casual) sexism pervades science, criticism and everyday relationships. But her main hobby horse is literature. And it’s not just some odd obsession of Mia’s. One only needs to read one of the many put-downs of NYT book critic Michiko Kakutani’s writing; the tone and vocabulary of most of these petty criticisms (regardless of their overall accuracy) is frighteningly revealing as to the degree of misogyny of the writer of the negative assessment in question. One also might want to follow discussions of Jane Austen’s work, or read reviews of female poets. Whereas male poets are often just ‘poets’, female poets are ‘female poets’, more likely to be compared to other female poets, however close they may be to their male contemporaries. Mia Fredrickson is a poet and a teacher of literature, and acutely aware of these kinds of biases; what’s more, she’s aware of them in other areas, as well, pointing out again and again that the cultural and social center of gravity is predominantly male. So much so that, in fact, the “summer without men” is really a summer that contains a lot of men in absentia. Despite the female community and the female protagonist and the feminist topics, Hustvedt’s heroine doesn’t try to reclaim (as Atwood tried) a strong, separate female identity. These have, like all vaguely essentialist theories, weak points, reproducing identical biases, with the positions merely reversed.

In her brilliantly precise story, Hustvedt tells a story of a female experience that’s female not because of inherent biological factors, but because this sort of experience is forced on Mia and some of the women of her circle by the way society around them works. Lacking her exquisite precision, I find it difficult to pinpoint how fine a point Hustvedt and Mia put on this. In a discussion towards the end of the book, Mia argues for the primacy of experience over theory, but the whole of the novel is governed by a very clear view of the philosophical and theoretical foundations upon which the novel’s structure, from the individual events that happen, to the way the novel is assembled, is founded. There is none of the murky slough of despond like the one that takes center stage in the novels of the aforementioned aging Americans. Instead, Hustvedt’s book is driven by an almost crystalline clarity, which could also be seen as its main weakness. To some readers it may seem emotionally remote, an effect that derives from the fact that the novel depicts a mind thinking. Mia’s mind is working its way through various sets of knowledge; sets of things she knows and cares about: poems, lists of writers, stray memories. In the process of making sense of a radically changed emotional environment, even other people and events have to fulfill the role of objects about to be cataloged. The overall effect is mesmerizing, and The Summer without Men, while not Hustvedt’s best, is a powerful achievement. One hopes that she’s eventually accorded the place in the canon of major contemporary American novelists she deserves.

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Taiyo Matsumoto: Tekkonkinkreet

Matsumoto, Taiyo (2007), Tekkonkinkreet, Viz Media
[translated into English by Lillian Olsen]
ISBN 978-1-4215-1867-1

Taiyo Matsumoto’s graphic novel Tekkonkinkreet, originally published in 1994 as 鉄コン筋クリート in three volumes (after having been published in small increments from 1993 to 1994), is a deeply impressive, powerful hunk of a comic book, the translated version of which (translated by Lillian Olsen) deservedly won the prestigious Eisner award. It’s a 614 page story about two brothers and a modern Japanese city in the process of changing, a book that is as moving as it’s ingeniously constructed and brilliantly drawn. Tekkonkinkreet describes a world that is about to dissolve, about to disappear beneath the inevitable onslaught of change, and we feel this loss like the tragedy that it is, because within the pages of this book, the world is completely, fully, palpably realized. You enter Matsumoto’s world on his own terms and while you’re always conscious of this being the case, you are always sorry to leave. This book contains multitudes; depending on your sensibilities it could make you laugh, it could make you cry, in short, Tekkonkinkreet is a book that could break your heart if you let it. At the same time, there is no actual sentimentality in this book because it is so tightly wound, and so efficiently narrated and illustrated. It is without a doubt the best graphic novel I’ve read in at least two years, if only for the fact that it contains several different kinds of books within one cover, all of which are completely successful (although some writers may have done a better job in individual registers). In case this feels repetitive, it’s certainly worth pointing out how completely this book manages to master very different registers and genres without ever showing us the seams between the transitions. It contains low humor and witty, sophisticated jokes. Its plot is captivating whether we look at it from a sociocultural, spiritual or plain entertaining angle. And, finally, its art can be painstakingly, brutally exact and vividly vague at the same time. Taiyo Matsumoto is one of the best artists of his genre, and this extraordinary book provides ample proof of that.

One cannot, however, unreservedly recommend this book to all kinds of readers, mostly because it’s pretty violent. My copy even bears a Parental Advisory Explicit Content sticker, so as not to run the danger of seducing parents into unwittingly buying this book with its color- and cheerful cover for their innocent kids. I am not convinced that this is necessary. Nevertheless, it’s undeniably true that especially the first half of Tekkonkinkreet contains quite a bit of graphic violence as a child uses an iron rod to break skulls, knees and sundry wayward bones in the bodies of various gangsters. Infrequently, people are shot, as well. As far as contemporary comics go, it’s not particularly horrendous and if not for the neat sticker on the front I might not have mentioned it at all, but there you go. Perhaps this is not for kids, but adults, unless they are unreasonably squeamish, have nothing to worry about, especially since the shootings, beatings and other displays of violence never feel gratuitous. Violence, generally speaking, is important to the overall build of the novel because its most central obsession is with bodies, and the way that they connect to the world without, and to other bodies. In every panel of his book, Matsumoto ties the bodies of his characters into a stiff corset of signs and signification, and the whole book keeps providing examples of how its characters and their bodies are all connected to the world and other people’s bodies through language and other means of signification. Its focus on our bodies and their capricious behavior (and misbehavior) is further pronounced, paradoxically, by the unnatural details of some of its characters’ bodily prowess. There are people who can fly (or jump very highly), other people’s injuries heal unnaturally fast or do not incapacitate the injured person in the least, and one person’s visions can impact what happens to people in real life. All this may sound mad, but ultimately, it reinforces the basic parameters of the human body, projecting this story within the limits of these parameters.

While principally, the body takes center stage, another important element of Tekkonkinkreet (and one which will eventually be subsumed by the focus on the bodily aspect of its characters) is the city the book is set in. The sleeve of my copy tells us that the book’s title “is a play on Japanese words meaning ‘a concrete structure with an iron frame’” and the city presented to us is indeed a contemporary city, with elaborate structures constructed from steel reinforced concrete, its forms both highly recognizable for any modern-day city dweller, and pleasurably strange. This strangeness stems from the fact that the city reacts to Matsumoto’s characters frolicking around in it, it bends and strains under their impact, often curving around them, an effect which is partly due to Matsumoto’s drawing technique, which prefers ellipses and circles to straight lines and boxes. Everything seems to be a bit out of bent, more off, even malleable. Sometimes the effect is that of a children’s book, not in the sense of a book for children, but a book by children, conveying a certain levity and looseness. Bodily proportions correspond less to anatomical exactness and more to the action taking place in the panels in question. In fight sequences feet and hands are often somewhat enlarged, both because they are the focus of the action in these panels and because they are ‘in focus’, being closer to the reader. In this way, the book, more than many other well drawn graphic novels I’ve recently read, works a lot like a movie, in each of its panels. This is a distinction that I think is worth making: between artists who have mastered graphic, movie-like action sequences by stacking several panels with small bits of motion, letting the reader follow the movement as they turn the pages. Long-time Millar collaborator Steve McNiven (cf. my review of Old Man Logan (and my other Millar reviews)) is one of those artists, and the effect is tremendous, as it is in the dumbfoundingly fantastic Jimmy Corrigan by Chris Ware.

Matsumoto’s game is different: in his book, actions are rarely prolonged beyond individual panels. Indeed, it seems to me something that would be fairly unusual for a mangaka to do. Unlike other artists of his genre, however, Matsumoto doesn’t rely overmuch on visual stresses like exclamation marks and the like to show actions and their result within the borders of only one or two panels. Instead, he works with perspective, as I outlined before, with an exaggerated enlargement of objects or parts of the body that are closer to the viewer. In a sense, I think what Matsumoto’s art does is the equivalent of what in a film would be a narrow depth of field. And when Matsumoto does spread an action sequence over several panels, the effect is tremendous, allowing him to zoom in on as many as three actions at the same time without losing momentum or focus. I’m dwelling on this so much because the novel might seem less sophisticated than books drawn, say, by J.G. Jones, Chris Ware or David Mazzucchelli, but Matsumoto’s deceptively simple art hides a complex graphic vision; that vision is the reason why each page, each panel seems to be highly essential, highly labored over and the reason why the whole book appears to be as dense as it does. And it’s not just a narrowed depth of field in action sequences that draws our eyes to hands, feet and iron rods. Its paucity of detail is not unlike that of other manga books (in other words, that aspect is quite typical), but the intense sense of emotion and movement that seems to be quivering in each drawn line of Tekkonkinkreet is something you don’t find that easily. Fear, joy and anger each seem to leave their imprint on the panels in question, especially if one of the two protagonists is somewhere in that panel (they don’t need to be front and center of a specific panel to bend its art around them). This is because when objects that dole out violence are not in focus, the book centers its attention on faces.

Faces, eyes and mouths seem to be several times as large as they need to be because clearly Matsumoto’s interest is in people rather than events. Whether we have mouths that are shouting, laughing, gritting teeth or grinning, the art tends to focus on that. Eyes, as well, but not to the same extent as mouths. The reason for that is the web of signification I mentioned earlier. The city exists because the people in it exist, and things happen because people make them happen. Everything in Tekkonkinkreet is part of a relationship (a very Foucauldian view of things, by the way), power and violence are not accorded presence outside of active human relationships. Nothing just is, except for individual human beings. Everything else is created, shaped and changed by people, for better or worse. This is why it’s perfectly true to say that the whole book is about the invented city Treasure Town and about Black and White, Matsumoto’s protagonists. These are not two different thematic elements: one is contained within the other. Without Black and White gallivanting all over town, the town itself, we feel, would not exist. But it’s not just these two. The story of Tekkonkinkreet is about a new gangster conglomerate moving into Treasure Town to take over, starting a gang war that ends in many gangsters dying or leaving town, and the identity of the ‘old’ Treasure Town is shown to be linked to the people living in it, and their departure (and the arrival of others) signaling changes in the architecture of the city. These new gangsters are opposed by Black and White, two boys who grew up in the seamy back alleys of Treasure Town, and who have earned themselves the respect of the gangster community through a curious mixture of ruthlessness and friendliness. It is in Matsumoto’s depiction of these two boys that the absolute importance of relationships (rather than individual persons or objects) contains some worthwhile ambiguities.

These two boys are antitheses. White is a free spirit, by no means innocent, yet naïve, happy and bursting with creative life. Black on the other hand, with a scar around his left eye, anything but naïve. Of the two, it’s usually him who doles out punishment and violence, it’s him who makes plans, and it’s him who decides to defend Treasure Town against the intruding (and interfering) Yakuza. As the book’s events unfold, Black moves more and more into the foreground, and the events become as much a fight for Black’s soul as they are a fight for the soul of Treasure Town. At the same time, White slips into the background, in several ways. Early on, we are told that Black is “the soul of this city”, and that White is “completely untouched by this sewer of a city”. More and more, as Black fights his adversaries tooth and nail, White steps away from these events, re-creating them with crayons from afar. White is the metaphysical element, independent not just of the city, but also of the maze of relationships that constitute the city and force events and actions on its residents. He does as he pleases, whatever happens to the city and its residents. He would be able to leave altogether, if not for Black. This is the book’s central ambiguity: White, who in almost every way negates the basic givens of the city, whose mouth is the most expressive the most open, who seems to represent the creator of the book itself in his aloof independence, this White is firmly tied to Black who is the city. Thus, on a metaphysical level, through the unbreaking and unbreakable relationship of Black and White, the smaller interdependency on the more gritty level of the city streets and the brutal events unfolding there is reflected and (in a way) confirmed. But this reading is one that is likely to change with further re-readings, since Tekkonkinkreet is a very rich stew of a book, the taste of which is highly addictive and which keeps surprising its readers when they stir around in its steamy depths. There is so much more to this book than I could ever tell, even in a review that had twice the length of this one. Read Tekkonkinkreet, goddamn.

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Werner Bräunig: Rummelplatz

Bräunig, Werner (2007), Rummelplatz, Aufbau Verlag
ISBN 978-3-7466-2460-0

Generally, I’m fond of complaining about fine German books that have not been translated into English yet, especially those that have been out and available for a while. It’s somewhat different with Rummelplatz, Werner Bräunig’s famous novel, written 1965. True enough, Rummelplatz is a fine piece of work, one of the best books to come out of the tumultuous environment that was the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the 1960s; although Bräunig himself can scarcely be called one of the best writers of the period. Written in different voices, with varying degrees of success, this 600 page novel seems to be carved from a wealth of raw material, barely ordered and refined. To the unsuspecting reader, Rummelplatz can seem like a heavy freight train, full of impressions and ideas, full of precise observations and broad essayistic reflections, its characters flawed archetypes, ripped roughly from the thread of German literary tradition rather than sympathetically drawn and vivid literary creations. The whole of Rummelplatz seems to cohere only because of the immense will of its author. It is Bräunig’s vision that holds it all together, the whole vibrant, violent, passionate, amazing mess that is Rummelplatz, Bräunig’s first and only novel. Its achievement is all the more stunning, given how small, quiet, unimpressive Bräunig’s short stories are. Although their flaws are present in the novel as well, it succeeds on account of the energy and power that pulses through it. So why has it not been translated yet? Largely, one would have to say, because it has not been published until 2007. Excerpts circulated, rumors abounded, and in discussions of early GDR literature, Bräunig’s work always had pride of place because of the central role he played in the development of the so-called Bitterfelder Weg. Due to politically nocent developments, Bräunig’s manuscript for Rummelplatz had been suppressed in 1965, and subsequently swept under the rug, a lost, unpublished masterpiece. Until, that is, Angela Drescher and the East German publisher Aufbau Verlag decided to resurrect the book, edit and publish it prominently. The author never found out about the renaissance of his critical and popular reputation: he died in 1976 of a disease related to his alcoholism.

In the end, Bräunig fell victim to policies that he himself helped create, an aesthetic that is clearly instrumental in the way Rummelplatz was written. These policies are, as I just mentioned, commonly referred to as the Bitterfelder Weg, i.e. the ‘Bitterfelder way’, so named after a writer’s conference in Bitterfeld, a drab and dreary industrial town in Saxony-Anhalt (an eerily fitting place). The Bitterfelder Weg, a set of official directives, was a complex of ideas that sought to bridge the apparent gap between writers and workers. This was coupled with an appeal, which Bräunig was instrumental in writing, called “Greif zur Feder, Kumpel”, which could be translated as “Miners, take up the pens!”. In accordance with the tenets of the Bitterfelder Weg, dozens of writers went to work (or were made to work) in factories and in mines, in order to better understand the workers’ reality. The basic idea was that too many writers writing ‘what they know’ (to echo the old writing advice) led to a literature concerned with upper-class concerns, drawing-room intrigues, and elite discussions, in short, a body of work that workers could not relate to. The best way to amend this, officials thought, was for writers to get to know real workers, to understand how hands-on work was done (Ayn Rand’s odd phantasmagorias are a gruesome example of not understanding what modern day industrial work looks like on the factory floor). This generally sound idea was undermined by two things. First, the fact that it was often implemented by force, and second, the fact that instead of merely enlarging the ‘what they know” part of the formula (and thus encouraging writers to include everyday work experience in a meaningful and correct way in their prose), officials soon rather emphasized the ‘what’ part. The Bitterfelder Weg turned into the GDR version what has been known as socialist realism since the 1930s, an aesthetic that demanded of writers to only (or at least predominantly) write realistically (although that term isn’t defined as you’d think it’d be) and about everyday life. It was buttressed by the directives that were encouraging workers to write (which is the “Miners, take up the pens!” part of the whole construction). Within a few years, every sizable company had a writing collective and writing workshops.

These workshops were often held by some of the leading writers of the time, and could, sometimes, produce intriguing results. Traces of that interaction can be found in all kinds of works, but perhaps most noticeably in Brigitte Reimann’s brilliant novels (also, sadly, inexcusably, untranslated, including her masterpiece Franziska Linkerhand). The Bräunig-penned appeal was published in 1959, and on the plus side it led to a plethora of art from unexpected places. Details and descriptions connected to the everyday reality of workers came up in novels, stories and plays of the period. Quickly, however, the negative aspects of the doctrine were felt, especially two of them. One was the rising amount of indoctrinated literature. Workers in their writing workshops were gently guided in how to properly write, how to talk about workers, power and the bourgeoisie, how to talk about the party, and which theories to use, implement and cite. That was because those workshops that were not held by genuine writers, were held by people loyal to the socialist party, and they had a very definite idea of what kind of literature was worth writing (and reading) and which wasn’t. As a result of these indoctrinated workshops, professional writers were suddenly asked to also do as the workers did. After all, in the GDR, workers and peasants were, in theory, on moral high ground. They did the right thing because they were workers. Of course, this theory had little to do with actual workers, but party officials were often blissfully unaware of contradictions like that. In time, these contradictions and the ideological pressure on what kind of content was considered appropriate for literary production led to a very difficult situation. While officials said that they wanted writers to pursue a brand of realism, this realism did not in fact include intransigently negative depictions of everyday life on the factory floor. Literature, it was officially maintained, needed to teach people something, and help them understand their life, their country and most of all the revolutionary process better, but most of all, it was educational, supposed to make everyone involved into a better, more useful citizen. Being a communist was a good thing only if it meant you were uncritically useful. Books like Rummelplatz, with its searing (but fundamentally communist) criticism of the status quo, were deemed corruptive.

In the West, we like to read opposition against socialist regimes along anti-communist lines, which explains in part the perennial popularity of a royalist like Solzhenitsyn. But the sad truth was that the GDR government targeted passionate communists as well as the anti-communist opposition. Passionate communists like Heiner Müller, Christa Wolf or Werner Bräunig decried what they saw as perversions of a noble and magnificent ideal, and they were punished accordingly. One of the best examples of the line between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ communism is the difference between the novel Spur der Steine (~ Traces of Stones) and its film version. The novel, written by Erik Neutsch is a long, and ultimately dull affair. It starts off well, telling the story of an outsider and his adventures, but ends in a long coda of basically educational remarks. In the end, Neutsch’s protagonist sees the error of his ways and becomes a useful cog in the GDR machine. This doesn’t happen in Frank Beyer’s fantastic film version, also entitled Spur der Steine. The film is a stronger work of art because it’s more coherent and more loyal towards its protagonist. It was however this realism unsupported by an educational finish that earned the movie the ire of GDR officials, so that it was eventually banned, a ban that in the end included Neutsch’s novel. Both Neutsch and Beyer were passionate and outspoken communists and supporters of the German Democratic Republic, yet they failed what GDR officials saw as the main function of literature. If you look at the process that eventually led to such bans, you are likely to be surprised by the almost random nature of it. Sometimes writers appeared to be equally surprised or even blindsided by the sudden onslaught of official criticism and the subtle and not-so-subtle ways of repression that ensued. Writers like Bräunig did not write oppositional literature against a dictatorial regime. In 1965, before the erection of the Berlin Wall, many writers believed the party line which proclaimed that debate was integral to the young socialist republic. What they forgot was that the other party line was “the Party’s always right” (there’s actually an official hymn, the refrain of which is “the Party, the Party, the Party’s always right.” click here to listen and cringe) and highlighting mistakes impudently suggested that the Party may not, in fact, always be right.

This is a rather long introduction that leads us to Werner Bräunig’s excellent book, large portions of which take place among miners and in a paper factory. in the years leading up to 1953 Bräunig was not himself a miner or a paper factory worker by profession, but he did work as a miner for a year, and in a paper factory for two more years. Although he had embarked on a career in literature and academia when the Bitterfelder Weg directives were given out, Rummelplatz closely reflects the ideals that were behind the cultural policies decided in Bitterfeld. It is a story about the everyday reality of miners in the Wismut AG in Saxony and of paper factory workers in Chemnitz, and it’s painstakingly accurate about all kinds of details. My grandfather had worked in mines for most of his adult life, two years of which were spent with the Wismut AG, and he corroborates even small details of everyday life in the Wismut mines. The Wismut mines were uranium mines, and thus of central strategic importance not just to the GDR officials, but also to the Soviet occupying forces. Daily life in Wismut meant having a Russian military officer as a boss, and seeing Soviet soldiers everywhere. Every miner leaving the mines at the end of the day was closely controlled and information about the mines operated by the Wismut AG, was slow in coming. On the other hand, of all the mining work in the GDR, the Wismut mines offered the best wages by far, and thus attracted workers from all over the Republic. A 1958 movie by Konrad Wolf, Sonnensucher (unreleased until 1972) is enlightening if you want to understand the heated atmosphere in the uranium mines where all kinds of people came to work. Bräunig’s potent mixture of characters is less a feat of imaginative invention than a reflection of the torrid reality of the uranium mine work. In his book, he assembles, among many other colorful characters, a brawler and misfit, a Party official, an alcoholic Soviet engineer, and a young man who works in the mines in order to ‘make up’ for his non-working-class background and be allowed to study at a university later on.

The central image of the Rummelplatz (~ fairground) is the place where the miners meet with the community around them; it is also the place where rules carry less weight, and people behave differently. The fairground acts as the outlet for all the trouble and annoyance and pain that accumulates during work. People drink, fight, fuck and socialize on the fairground. In essence, within the novel, the role of the Rummelplatz is similar to the role that Bakhtin attributed to the carnivalesque. The sobriety, accuracy and somber nature of the main narrative dissolves into a sensual, desperate frenzy on the fairground. This is also true for Bräunig’s writing. Mostly, Bräunig’s style is indebted to the Neue Sachlichkeit, a style current in 1920s Germany. Unlike the great new writers of his age, i.e. Uwe Johnson, Irmtraud Morgner, Günter Grass, Wolfgang Koeppen or Christa Wolf, Bräunig cannot escape the shackles of the style that dominated German literature up until the end of WWII. The moments of madness, of the carnivalesque, are the only instances of Bräunig giving his language freer rein, touching on something bigger; but even this loose, jacked-up language lacks originality: at his best, Bräunig (infrequently) manages to sound a bit like the Döblin of Berlin Alexanderplatz (which is of course high praise). On the other hand, since the whole novel is a mix of registers and voices, the style, which vacillates between Johannes Pinneberg, Hans Fallada’s hapless hero, and Franz Biberkopf, Döblin’s, does fit the overall structure of the novel very well. It is split up into smaller bits of story, each of which follows one particular character in his odyssey through post-war socialism. Some characters have two pages of text, others turn up all the time. This makes for a very fragmented, lively and exiting read. As the editor, disingenuously, explains in the afterword, the manuscript was actually even more fragmented, because it wasn’t arranged chronologically. Assuming this to be a mistake the editor re-arranged the chapters (only one of many questionable editorial decisions). But it’s not just the characters that alternate, it’s also the places. The three main places of action are the Wismut mines near Chemnitz, the paper factory in Chemnitz, and a paper factory in West Germany.

The part of the narrative that takes place in the Wismut mines especially follows the fates of three particular characters. There is Peter Loose, a disaffected, confused, but capable miner who likes girls, alcohol and bar fights. Eventually, his carefree ways will get him into conflict with the law, until his imprisonment for politically motivated reasons in the last third of the novel. There’s, Christian, the aforementioned young man who wants to study. He comes to mining wholly innocently, and his first weeks in the mine almost break his back, but through hard and conscientious work he eventually becomes a fine miner, earning more money than most older or established miners. The third is Fischer, an old Party official, who’d been imprisoned by the National Socialists during WWII, and who’s a thoroughly likable character, a ‘good’ communist, who believes that Marxism is supposed to serve the people rather than the other way around. His tragedy is that his reading of Marxism is on the way out, while mindless bureaucracy is in. His daughter is the main character in those sections that focus on the nearby paper factory. This factory lacks workers, because every able-bodied man on the factory floor is trying to get a job in the mines, and early in the book, she suggests that they could let women operate the machines as well. Eventually, she’s allowed on the factory floor and despite several struggles, she prevails, and earns the respect of her fellow workers. There are two noteworthy aspects about these stories. One is the absolutely soapy quality of these story lines. If the background had been drawn less urgently, and if the overall vision and coherence had been even just a tad less powerful, these stories would have sunken like stones into the muck of literary irrelevance. The other aspect is that all of these story lines can be used to extrapolate harsh criticism of the GDR. There are repressive bureaucrats, there is rampant sexism, and discrimination against white collar children. But it would be a mistake to jump from this criticism to an indictment of communism. As one character says:

[J]a freilich, das ist bei Marx nicht vorgesehen. Es ist vom Kommunismus das genaue Gegenteil. Aber leider sehen wir ja immer mal wieder, was einer in Marx’ Namen aus Marx machen kann, sofern er nur rechthaberisch und unfähig genug ist.

(~ Of course, this has not been intended by Marx. This is the exact opposite of Communism. But regrettably we keep seeing what people can make out Marx in Marx’ name if they are dogmatic and inept enough)

It’s quite important to remember that socialist writers in the 1960 were faced with a disintegrating dream, as communism was slowly subverted, dismantled and destroyed by brutal, dull and single-minded officials.

Although Christa Wolf’s spectacular literary work (see my review) is probably the best literary indictment of this change in German literature, Rummelplatz shows us what Bräunig might have achieved, as well, had he finished his work. Rummelplatz is the first book of a two-part work, and the most cogent remarks about communism crop up in the later sections of the book; one assumes the second volume would have explored that direction further, especially given Bräunig’s remarks about West Germany and its role in the predicament of the GDR after the Soviet occupation. Throughout much of the book, Bräunig’s imprecise with his criticism, preferring to explore individual stories and what they have to say about the relationship of individuals vs. society. The only exception, except for the portions about communism near the end, is his treatment of West Germany. Both in the way he describes events in West Germany as well as in the way he mentions it, we are witnessing a no-holds-barred approach to the topic. Big corporations, we hear, left the GDR and tried to entice capable talents of moving into the West, as well. He makes clear that people with Nazi pasts saw West Germany as a safe haven and tried to pool their funds into that country where they could continue to cohabitate with fellow Nazis. We might want to remember that, however problematic, negligent and complex the Nazi purges were in the GDR after the 1950s, West Germany had Nazi governors, chancellors and judges. In fact, as we learned late last year, the ‘Butcher of Lyon’, Klaus Barbie, hiding in Bolivia, had been on the payroll of the German government in the 1960s. Also, as if he’s been prescient, Bräunig has a reply to all those who today claim that socialist economics are bound to fail, using the GDR economy as an example (and comparing it with the West German one):

Nun, nach fünfundvierzig habe es in Westdeutschland 120 Hochöfen gegeben, auf dem Gebiet der DDR aber [...] nur fünf. Und mit anderen Dingen sei es ähnlich. [...] “Wissen Sie, sagte Bauerfeld, “bis fünfundvierzig war dieses Ostdeutschland nichts weiter als ein großes Kartoffelfeld.”

(~ Well, after forty-five, West Germany had 120 blast furnaces, but the GDR only five. With other issues, it was similarly. “You know”, Bauerfeld said, “until forty-five East Germany had been nothing but one big potato field.”)

That said, Bräunig cannot be read as an apologist for the status quo. He’s well aware of the problems. The bureaucracy, inherited from the Third Reich, and a country full of Germans, who clung to old stereotypes, old prejudices, old kinds of hate and resentment. At one point he has a character say: this country is bound to fail unless we pull together, unless we change, unless we move forward.

It would not be surprising if it had been this kind of criticism that caused the book to be banned. Alas, that was not the case. Bräunig found himself at the center of a large campaign against ‘wrong’ kinds of books, after an excerpt from his novel-in-progress was published that contained fairly little such criticism. It was one of his carnivalesque scenes. In it, he wrote about the hunger and despair of these early years, he wrote about sexual appetites, about small fry violence and large scale binge drinking. These scenes are among those that ring most true in the whole book, but despite asking for realism in the Bitterfelder Weg doctrines, this is not the kind of realism that was demanded. These workers were not brilliant noble creatures, they were flawed, sweaty, horny men and women. Ultimately, this was unacceptable; what made it worse was the fact that Bräunig wrote about the hallowed uranium mines, which were quite generally a thorny subject. The above-mentioned Sonnensucher had also been banned immediately. It was released later in the brief period of artistic liberalization between 1972 and 1976, but by then Bräunig had fallen apart as writer and man. He published an ok collection of stories in 1969 and worked on another novel, but according to his editor, there wasn’t much to be excited about in these drafts. The tragedy of Bräunig’s squandered talent is brutal. My grandfather, who worked in various mines in the area that Rummelplatz is set in remembers a time of excitement, of hopes, of possibilities. Workers often felt empowered, and skill was often more respected than seniority or clout. This is the time that Bräunig portrays and this is the energy that suffuses this incredible book. There are countless flaws, inconsistencies etc. in it, but it’s only a draft, after all, never readied for publication. Bräunig’s not one of the great writers of his time. But he could have been. Translate this book! I provided but a very poor summary of the book that crawls with ideas and teems with life. Rummelplatz has similarities to books by writers like Anna Seghers and is historically fascinating, but above all, it’s a feast of a book. Read it, translate it, buy it. Translation rights are listed here.

Update (Feb 25, 2011): Apparently, the book’s rights have been sold and it’s being translated as we speak. How’s that for great news?

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Charles Stross: Halting State

Stross, Charles (2008), Halting State, Penguin
ISBN 978-0-441-01607-5

These past years, I have recommended Philip K. Dick’s impressive novel Ubik to a number of serious readers of literature interested in Dick and/or Science Fiction literature in general. It’s the perfect introduction to Dick’s work, because it’s both straightforward and pleasantly odd. But there’s more. Several readers have written back to me to complain about how little sense the book supposedly made, how Dick made gross errors in narrative logic etc. This is more than the usual philistine hurry to blame the author for one’s own careless reading. I ‘d suggest that it points to something that is quite typical of the genre of Science Fiction. Dick isn’t the only writer who’s used to infusing a narrative that seems straightforward enough with a dose of the odd or strange. There’s something angular, uncomfortable about many good books of the genre, a sort of basic difficulty, almost independent of the literary skills of the writer in question. Science Fiction demands, like no other genre, that its readers take each book on its own terms. It’s always dangerous to interpret difference as erroneous writing, but with regard to SF, this assumption is more likely to be incorrect. There is no other genre I know of that constantly mixes the tools of experimental fiction with the storytelling of an action movie to produce all kinds of inventive yet readable results. Given the prolificacy of many prominent SF novelists, it’s also astonishing that a great deal of them are greatly attentive not just to matters of literary structure and the like, but also pay extraordinarily close attention to the words they use, to the way they connect to the ideas put forth in the novel. Form is always connected to content in SF, and more often than not, it’s germane to any significant understanding of the book in question. All this means that any work of SF is likely to be less encumbered by conventional expectations of narrative logic, and it’s why Science Fiction is such a worthwhile genre to read. Even so-so works like Tobias S. Buckell’s Ragamuffin contain a daunting intellectual structure; apparent mistakes in narrative logic (as the aforementioned readers thought to find in Ubik) are usually more than that. They are part of a sophisticated, passionate, elaborate literary undertaking that has languished for far too long on the grubby shelves of ‘genre literature’ while the Franzens, Austers and Mitchells of this world reaped critical success and broad public appreciation. This tension between quality and lack of critical success has, on the other hand, led to a tradition in SF that tried to make the genre palatable, relatable, clean, acceptable, slowly draining the genre of everything that made it as powerful as it was. Charles Stross’ 2007 novel Halting State represents a kind of end point for this development. It would be silly and facetious to compare it to accomplished works of science fiction. In fact, the author it most resembles is not strictly speaking a SF writer, it’s Michael Crichton.*

Make no mistake, Halting State is a very good read, a real page turner of a novel; it’s both efficiently written and smartly constructed. Charles Stross is clearly a highly competent novelist, and Halting State is a well-nigh flawlessly executed thriller: in it, Stross displays an uncanny knack for timing, for example. Characters, plot elements, surprises and moments of shock and breathless action are released at just the right moment, a skill that should not be underrated. The book’s sleek efficiency is also visible in the way the characters are fleshed out in just the right amount. There is enough depth to care about the things that happen to Stross’ characters, worry about them, and cheer them on when they fall in love or have an arduous fight to endure, yet not so much as to make readers stumble over potential ambiguities and complexities. To sum up: if you like thrillers and/or Michael Crichton’s work, you’ll love Stross. Another similarity with Crichton’s post-Sphere work is the gentle way that Stross introduces his futuristic technology. Halting State is set in the near future and its technologies are rather similar to ours; the same is true for the kind of social and political structure we encounter. The changes are so slight, so carefully wrought, that they allow any reader to catch up with the author and quickly relate to the events without having to think or re-contextualize. The contexts stay, broadly speaking, the same; additionally, Stross presents a near future with completely believable and utterly dull developments. Nothing is surprising in any way, every single technology in the book is rooted in something that we already use and, in some cases, he uses ‘new’ technology that is already in development. One of the fundamental conceits of Halting State, about the interconnection of private entertainment and the grander world of global espionage, is so banal and unsurprising that it’s been taken up in various guises in pop culture, most recently in an episode of Nathan Fillion’s comedy-drama TV show Castle. Well, I have to admit: this is not necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, what it means is that Stross has utterly professionalized his genre. He has moved away from visions and conceptual difficulties into the realm of professional thriller writers whose books are based on easy emotive access and, ultimately, fear. A fear of that which is still somewhat alien to us, a term which usually means foreigners and technology, i.e. things and people we can’t really understand. That’s why easy relatability is so important – only in a sequence of knowns can the unknown stick out as it does in the work of Crichton. This kind of discourse is of course buttressed by a defense or acceptance of the status quo, of things as they are, of ruling hierarchies and exploitative mechanisms. That this sort of thing, hitherto mainly typical of thrillers, crops up in SF as much as it does these days is sad, but true. Stross is only one of many examples: Cory Doctorow (cf. my review of Little Brother) is another, though less problematic one.

Thus, with a cleaned up language, efficient plot and relatable discussions of future technologies, only one potential stumbling block for readers remains, and it’s one of the few concessions Stross makes towards his genre: he toys a bit with pronouns. The book has three distinct protagonists, each of whom narrates their own chapter. However, the book does not use the first or third person singular, but the second person singular. This trick, which has no further consequences for the way the story is told, does not extend to difficulties of speech and perception, barely engages questions of identity or anything else. Stross could have removed this from the manuscript by copy & paste without damaging the rest of the text except in negligible ways. It’s a nod to his genre, no more than that. Since the novel is concerned with virtual realities, and the ways that our world interacts with the virtual, the use of the second person singular allows Stross to mirror virtual relationships as well as relations that we engage in in dealing with one another (and us ourselves) through online media. As as I mentioned before, using form in order to reflect on content is a commonly used tool in science fiction prose and this appears to be Stross’ main difference to Crichton et al. In most other ways, he follows the mainstream thriller guidelines almost exactly. The similarities to Crichton in particular are both general structural similarities, as well as more specific resemblances. Among the closer ties is an eery similarity to Crichton’s famously racist 1992 novel Rising Sun, which painted the ascendancy of the Japanese economy as a threat to Americans in several garish colors. The apprehension towards dominant Japanese companies had already produced books like Tom Peters’ fun but ridiculous In Search for Excellence (1982), but for Crichton, exalting American values or Americans in general was not enough. His novel contains murderous Japanese businessmen, scheming Japanese officials and two Americans caught in the middle of an intricate intercultural intrigue. Something somewhat similar happens in Halting State. A robbery and a murder have been committed and a police officer, an insurance investigator and a software geek are trying to get to the bottom of an affair that keeps getting more and more complicated. As in Rising Sun, inquiries are quelled or at least hampered by political interference, by executives’ and politicians’ schemes and manipulations. In Stross’ 2007 novel, the Japanese are no longer the bad guys as they were in Crichton’s and other novels of the late 1980s and early 1990s, it’s (as can be expected) Chinese hackers on the payroll of the evil Chinese government that are the enemy now. Actual people of Chinese descent barely make an appearance in the book, but that’s largely unimportant, since, as any racist will be able to tell you, it’s not the specific individual that attracts their rage, it’s the general idea of the foreign culture/race. ‘They’ are different, and ‘they’ are a threat. That’s the name of the game Charles Stross is more than happy to play.

Like Crichton, Stross leaves, of course, ample room for a denunciation of corporate greed. For both writers, this is an important element, because readers are just as likely to reject executives as grossly incompetent, stupid or gluttonous, as they are to reject foreigners as scheming, lazy or destructive, and both writers are engaged in an attempt to build an alliance with their readers built on shared prejudice. Stross even does Crichton one better. Unless I misremember, there is nothing in Crichton’s post-Sphere work that corresponds to what I like to call Stross’ trinity of identification. Stross’ three protagonists are Elaine Barnaby, a woman, who is drawn in a mildly clichéd but not aggressively sexist way, a smart and quirky closet geek. There is Jack Reed, the software engineer, who is the most knowledgeable of the three, constantly explaining facts about the technological background, a nerd who likes to drink, is shy around women, and incredibly smart. The third narrator and protagonist is Sue Smith, a police officer, and representative of a whole strain of elements that crop up all over the book. Thing is, Halting State, a book about the global world of hackers, espionage and online gaming, is rooted in a weird sort of patriotism tinged with localism. It’s set in Edinburgh, and reflects its Scottish background in multiple ways. For starters, there’s Sue, who speaks/writes a mild sort of Scots-inflected English, which stands out among the verbal offerings of the other characters. It is Sue’s point of view that foregrounds most a contrast between locals and foreigners, because in Halting State, only Scottish citizens are truly locals, and Jack and Elaine, the two English geeks, are always slightly out of place. The book crawls with comments about how little the streets and facades of Edinburgh have changed; this is accompanied by comments about the specific/unique relationship that this Scottish metropolis has with the modern world outside. In a way, Stross reproduces the larger discursive concerns that power books like Crichton’s and includes a miniature model of them, localized in terms of references and language. And it’s all so incredibly well made! Halting State is a stunningly crafted thriller, but a mediocre, fifth rate work of science fiction. If the genre did not also contain writers like Gwyneth Jones, China Miéville, Adam Roberts or Vernor Vinge (who, by the way, praises Halting State), I might be worried. There is much to admire in this book, and compared to other, let’s say, thrillers, it would stand out. In its own genre, however, it’s its deficiencies that stand out starkly. If you want a quick, good read by a writer with a good grasp of current technology and excellent command of a certain kind of narrative, this book is highly recommended. If you want something more, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

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*A lot of Crichton’s books can of course be categorized as science fiction, among them probably Sphere or Jurassic Park (incl. sequels). I’d argue, and in a way that is what I’m doing in this review, that Crichton’s main influence and the genre he mainly belongs to is the thriller genre. He may use a SF tool now and then, but they are just props. Crichton’s intentions and visions are those of a mainstream thriller writer, and his approach is the same in Jurassic Park, Next, Rising Sun or any other of his best known works. Finally this: what I take to be the core of the Science Fiction genre I laid out in my first paragraph. It’s a different kind of approach to seeing the world. Iris Murdoch wrote in The Book and the Brotherhood about Marxism: “The only good Marxist is a mad Marxist. It’s not enough to be a revisionist, you’ve got to be a bit mad too – to be able to see the present world, to imagine the magnitude of what’s happening.” I think this madness is necessary for good science fiction, as well, this imagination of possibilities and impossibilities. This is true for space operas, hard sf, cyberpunk, steampunk or the straight madness of Dick’s later novels. The best test for good SF is this: if you take away the odd objects, and the unfamiliar settings, are the texts in front of you still different from mainstream fiction? In my review’s first paragraph I suggest they should be, and any of the authors I mentioned appraisingly in this review have produced works for which that is indeed the case. It is not true for Halting State which is powered by the same visionary black hole that brought forth Michael Crichton’s works. A reader on a literature forum suggested that part of the book were a straight yet awkward pastiche of Ian Rankin‘s books. I would not be surprised to find that to be the case, although I haven’t been able to sample Mr. Rankin’s work yet.

Paul West: Rat Man of Paris

West, Paul (1993), Rat Man of Paris, Tusk/Overlook
ISBN 0-87951-502-3

Paul West is one of the least well known of major American postmodern novelists. Born in 1930, and still at it, West has written an incredible amount of fiction, nonfiction and poetry, none of which I noticed until Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello. And I don’t seem to be alone in that. A quick jstor search for mentions of this novel, which, after all, is one of West’s most well known books, came up almost empty. Whenever he is mentioned, the tone is reverent and adulating, but the dearth of academical studies on West appears to me to be quite symptomatic of the shroud of oblivion that has sunken over Paul West’s vast literary endeavors. And, as so very often, this is completely and totally undeserved. Rat Man of Paris, originally published in 1986, is my first West novel and it’s an extraordinary literary success. To say it’s a well-written novel would be an unfair understatement, it’s a book that thrives on style, without ever being offputtingly obvious about it. At the same time, Rat Man of Paris is a moving and disturbing novel about a survivor of the horrors of the Second World War, and a book that is intelligent enough not to get lost in feigned gestures of witnessing and authenticity. West writes extremely well about the vagaries of an unbalanced mind trying to come to terms with a horrendous past and a confusing present. In this endeavor, West’s protagonist mirrors the European society he lives in, a society that is also still trying to come to terms with the terrible events of 20th century’s murderous first half. In order to make this work, West presents numerous tropes of talk, speech and memory, seamlessly integrated into a quick-moving (and frequently extraordinarily funny) narrative that contains sex, attempted murder and Nazi regalia. Paul West’s Rat Man of Paris may not be for everyone, but I can’t but recommend this powerful, very well written work of art. It’s a quick enough read which invites numerous re-reads, a book by a writer who, from the evidence of this, deserves to be much more famous than he is now.

The book’s maudlin protagonist is Etienne Poulsifer, roughly middle-aged, who wanders the cobbled streets of Paris shocking tourists for a living. He has a whole act, he’s the titular Rat Man of Paris, it’s his brand and has become his identity. There are vast variations in the way Poulsifer (or Poussif, in short) performs his act, although its basic rules stay the same: it is a highly formalized demonstration. He sidles up to a group of tourists, in a café or elsewhere, steps up closely and then reveals an object, a rat usually. Sometimes, especially as the novel’s events develop, he exchanges the rat for something else, a fox fur, for example. The means of presentation often change, but they always revolve around the moment of shock. Shock, that is, that is then tempered by recognition and humor. I’m dwelling on this a bit because it’s central to the way West structures his book. He uses the Rat Man’s act as a miniature model of themes and structures central to the rest of the book. Poussif doesn’t always actually shock people on the street. When the book opens, he is famous enough that people know that they are supposed to be shocked. He’s going through the motions of shocking people, in a very elaborate manner. And a formally strict one: we are told that Poussif has a very precise idea of how his act should be performed. The steps involved have to be followed exactly, and any changes are deliberated heavily and slowly. When you see the Rat Man of Paris, you know what to expect. There is certainly, even from those who know him well, a kind of pleasant frisson, encountering the sudden display of rat, but on the whole it’s a grotesque of sorts, an entertainment, removed from historical context or more conventional frames of reference. It’s an oddity, unexplained and unexplainable. A rat: c’est tout. Yet that rat, and his presentation of it, is not a job, it’s an integral part of his identity. This is what the book opens with, Poulsifer and his act. And as we read on, his future and his past start to unfold before us.

His future, that’s his relationship with a woman called Sharli, a geography teacher who gets involved with Poussif for somewhat unclear reasons.

Something in him appeals to her. [...] Affectopath, she sometimes calls herself; she hungers for affection, hungers to give it, and he has sensed this, as well as the tang and glint of her.

It is not entirely plausible that this would be enough to get involved with a freak like Etienne Poulsifer, but the book doesn’t care whether we think it’s believable. She falls in love with him, and their relationship proves sturdy enough, surviving several of Poussif’s manic episodes, his rapidly disintegrating mental sanity, a gun shot and slowly transforms into something even more durable and complex. We don’t get a lot of characterization as far as Sharli is concerned; from a certain point on, she’s just present, offering comfort and lodgings to the Rat Man. On the other hand, Poulsifer isn’t drawn in great detail either. We know him through his acts, through the things he says and the manner in which he behaves: towards other people, towards his own past, and with his own person. There are many things about this book that show the careful reader what an extraordinary master Paul West is, but one of the most obvious ones is the way he presents his characters through their actions. There are a few thoughts now and then, but they are, at best, thoughts in preparation of deeds, or thoughts functioning as actions. People are not described as much as they are displayed by the things they do. West’s characters are like the Rat Man’s rats, and his art as a novelist is the art

[h]ow to expose the snout, how to make it seem to move, how to tuck it out of sight and have to wrestle with it under one or two layers of clothing.

Exposing the rat does not, as we remember, mean describing the rat, it’s showing it in an elaborate way. In writing novels, arguably. description does not directly correspond to ‘showing’. West’s characterization through action, though, does. This is not new, by all means, nor is it rare. What is, however, is the fact that West manages to combine what in many writers engenders a simpler style, with an almost feverish language. West changes rhythms like trains, from sentences front-loaded with participial constructions, to longer, more supple sentences and truly simple short phrases. Sentences can stiffen or loosen up within a single paragraph, becoming more or less formal, for example. None of this ever seems chaotic, which is also why none of this happens at the expense of readability. West is in control of his style which marries narrative economy with syntactical gluttony.

I should admit at this point that my enthusiasm for West may stem from the fact that this is the first book I read of his, but that does not make his achievement less of an achievement. Thus, while it may be sensible to subtract some hyperbole from what I say, the core point, West’s fundamental excellence, should remain untouched. And while style and literary finesse is the most obvious sign of that excellence, his treatment of the dark subject at the heart of the book is another, arguably more important one. The book’s cover in my edition, a collage by Ellen Weinstein, shows part of a photograph of the infamous Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie, ‘the Butcher of Lyon’. The novel’s time-frame falls straight into the period when Barbie was incarcerated after having been extradited to France from Bolivia in 1984; Rat Man of Paris was published just before Barbie’s trial began in 1987. In the novel, it’s Barbie’s face in the Parisian newspapers that awakens Poulsifer’s madness. As it turns out, he is a survivor of a village massacre by German troops in WWII, a catastrophe that has shaped his whole adult life. He seems to have managed, however, to sublimate the fears, anger and the horrific memories; there’s no doubt that the formal exigencies of his rat act helped him to achieve this. If at all, he remembers his past empty in “dribs, drabs”. He has, one might say, struck an uneasy détente with his past, forgetting just enough to stay reasonably sane. When the pictures of Barbie turn up in the newspapers, memories rush back at him. Although Barbie was probably not present at the village massacre (the book isn’t completely clear on this), seeing this SS-Hauptsturmführer seems to force him to remember his childhood trauma, however spottily. He remembers all the central SS officers present at the massacre, except for the commanding officer, who forms a hollow, unnamed hole at the heart of his memories.

This hole Poussif fills with the images of Klaus Barbie. Entering a downward spiral of rage and obsession, he starts dressing in a Nazi uniform as part of his old act. He never abandons his formal rules, doing everything according to his own code, which, as I mentioned, even includes rules for how to adapt and change his act. Thus his act constantly evolves, getting stranger and stranger, and losing the element of shock, becoming more historically charged. At the same time, he becomes more famous by the day, plastering Paris with posters advertising his act and accusing Barbie of heinous crimes he committed and of many he did not commit, maintaining that guilt of collectively committed crimes of such magnitude falls on each individual. Thus, he enlists a variety of media to tell his story. Additionally, he is followed around by a mysterious Spanish novelist, intent on telling the Rat Man’s story. There is, in the way West portrays Poussif’s changing acts, a very clear comment on the empty, ritualistic nature of public remembrances today. Just as people gather patiently around the uniform-clad Poussif to enjoy his droll act for the few minutes that it takes, thus we also gather around our places of remembrance for the rituals of remembering. Poussif doesn’t aim for entertainment anymore. He rages against the conventional limits of street entertainment, attempting to actually shock people, incite them to action against Barbie and all the other nameless and faceless Nazis he represents. West is not actually trying to provide testimony, or to fake it. On the other hand, he does not go down the road of books like John Boyne’s unbearably sanitized Boy in the Striped Pajamas (cf. my review of that book) either. Of course, individual testimony matters. Of course accuracy matters. However, in Rat Man of Paris, we also see the need for public remembrance, public outrage, a public sense of history. Paul West takes on a difficult territory and he doesn’t cut corners. He knows the limits that separate the things he can say about history and those he can’t. Plus. there is almost no gore, no violent, shocking imagery in his book; instead, his readers are upset finding that someone has scrawled “Forget” on a sign that originally said “Remember”. Rat Man of Paris is an attempt to sort out issues of guilt and memory in a masterful way.

By displaying such care and precision in matters of history, Paul West’s harrowing little novel is an example of a postmodern novel powered by an intelligent conscience as well as style. Of course, if we look at the means employed by West, we can immediately see that he makes use of ye olde postmodern toolbox. We encounter, for example, all kinds of narrative media in the book. Television interview, newspaper articles, we find reporters, Poussif himself, and a mysterious novelist, all helping to reflect and mirror Poulsifer’s rage and indignation. The book offers to its readers a protagonist who enlists a whole city as a canvas on which to tell his story of 20th century horrors. All this is naturally part of a toolbox which has been used by all kinds of writers far inferior to West. The most egregious case is probably Paul Auster, who has reaped success for presenting a diluted, anodyne version of powerful novelists like Paul West. In West’s work, we are always aware of the weight of words and actions; in it, playacting is more than just a smart literary version of Find The Lady. Acting is a reflection of everyday acts, and is rooted in the quotidian. On every page of Rat Man of Paris, a deep affection shines through, for his characters and the possibilities inherent in them and in their language. Paul West is a humane writer, an intelligent writer and a deeply gifted stylist. Read this book.

Clemens J. Setz: Soehne und Planeten

Setz, Clemens J. (2007), Söhne und Planeten, btb
ISBN 978-3-442-73902-8

This is why I read books, this is why I follow contemporary literature. Söhne und Planeten, Clemens J. Setz’ debut novel is stunning in its accomplishments, announcing the presence of a writer whom we will not hesitate to call ‘great’ one day. In 2009, Setz published his sophomore novel Die Frequenzen, a quirky, smart, engrossing read of a book, some 700 pages of writing that was both accessible and assuredly literary; it was also a long book overflowing with stuff that was maybe a tad less disciplined than one could have wished it to be, continuing an intriguing trend in contemporary German-language literature. If his second novel was indulgent and effusive, his debut novel is strict and dark. Although, as a whole, it merits being called a “novel”, it consists of four shorter novellas, each of which is taut and cunningly crafted. The novel is emotionally moving, yet almost blindingly clever in its structure and slyly original. It has not been translated, so far, despite what Conversational Reading‘s Scott Esposito sees as a good time for translation, and despite a series of mediocre German writers already translated. This is one of the best debuts published in German in the past decade, and Setz is shaping up to be the finest novelist of his generation, and one of the best novelists of these past years in German in general, with fellow Austrian genius Thomas Stangl (also untranslated into English, so far, see here my review of Stangl’s shockingly great third novel) and the German prose wizards Hartmut Lange and Marcel Beyer (Beyer at least has been, partly, translated. Don’t miss out on his work). Although Clemens J. Setz’ second novel is flashier and maybe even livelier, his first novel is a much better candidate for translation and maybe the better novel, as well.

Steeped in German and American literature, Söhne und Planeten is a largely realist chamber play, set in the reasonably well off middle class, and is based on the tensions inherent in many father-son relationships, something that connects Setz to readers everywhere, regardless of language and culture. The book’s basic references are to writers like Kafka, Ashbery, Bernhard, Delillo, Stifter, Turgenev and Handke, i.e. American writers and those well known and translated in the US. Few of its strengths are specific to its original language; Setz’ characters’ ruminations on writing and literature, their fears and neuroses, their difficulties as fathers, as sons, with each other; their failings as writers, as persons, all these would make immediate, powerful sense in any skillful translation, well, as far as anything in the book makes ‘immediate’ sense. Reading Söhne und Planeten, which literally means ‘Sons and Planets’, means reading attentively, re-reading even, yet the book is not difficult, obscure or forbidding in any way. Like the aforementioned Hartmut Lange, Setz combines cleverness and craft with an accessible, fresh and clean language. In Söhne und Planeten (though somewhat less so in his second novel), Setz writes with an amazing literary sophistication, slipping in and out of various literary voices and modes; at the same time, he never loses sight of the simple basic story he’s got to tell, of men and their fears. This simple basic story is conveyed with simple enough words, and the closer the novel moves to its emotionally bruising finish, the clearer the language becomes. This book would be just as impressive in translation; what’s more, unlike writers like Thomas Bernhard or Andreas Meier, this book could almost be viewed as bestseller material, despite its author’s obvious literary finesse. It’s an excellent book, and one that should be translated.

I already mentioned the fact that Söhne und Planeten is composed of four sections that could be seen as separate novellas. As a novel, the book is devastatingly coherent, revealing its overall concerns and ideas only slowly, yet each of the four novellas is extraordinarily well crafted, and each of the four novellas is vastly different in the way it’s made, from each of the others. There’s no repetition, no sentimental whimsy, each of the novellas’ means are perfectly chosen, each novella is perfectly placed. The first and the last novella are relatively straight narratives of young men, the first focusing on the up-and-coming young novelist René Templ, the last focusing on Victor Senegger, whose suicide prior to the events of the book cast a shadow over everything that happens within the novel. The two middle novellas are composed of several points of view, providing more complex narratives, none of which, however, lacks the tautness and discipline characteristic of the German novella (think of Zweig, Storm or Lange). Like a finely composed piece of music, Setz aligns all of his characters, their thoughts and actions in a music that rises, in the end, to a moving crescendo. The last novella, a coda of sorts, the most sentimental, the most unvarnished piece of the whole novel, turns out to be a perfectly fitting capstone to a book where everything really is in its right place. In the middle novellas, in many ways, Setz pays homage to the vast canon of modern and postmodern American literature, somewhere between early-ish Don Delillo and Philip Roth, but it’s really the first section/novella that shows us the way, although it turns out to have been the least characteristic part of the whole book.

That first novella, called “Kubische Raumaufteilung” (~ Cubic Room Layout), and presented with a prefatory quote by a “V.S.”, presumably Victor Senegger, is basically an exercise in angst-ridden soliloquy massively influenced by Franz Kafka, although the book doesn’t restrict itself to obvious influences or homages. It also contains both pastiches and long, extended quotes, sometimes from surprising sources. “Kubische Raumaufteilung”, for example, borrows from Kafka more than the surreal manifestations of its protagonist’s neurotic fears; it also borrows, inconsistently, his exquisitely simple yet literary language, sometimes offering almost a direct likeness of Kafka’s tone and his turns of phrase. All this is coupled with a narrator who is often coarse, desperately coarse, even. René Templ is a fearful individual, a young father, an aspiring writer, a husband who cheats on his wife with another woman to feel better about himself, yet whenever he feels pressured or afraid, he shrinks to the size of a child, or at least he thinks he does. Fear, another character says, later in the novel, is just another way to deal with one’s own body, just as Celine maintained (quoted by Setz) that philosophy is just another way to deal with one’s fear. Templ is obsessed with his own body and its inadequacies. He masturbates thoroughly, and his obsession with his genitalia and bodily fluids isn’t just communicated plainly to the reader, it’s also part of why he appears to be failing as a father and husband. Templ attempts to locate himself in his own body but he can only find decay, piss and blood. A writer, his mind is only as strong as the weakest part of his body, and as a result, his writing, at least the one small bit of Templ’s work we’re offered near the end of the second novella, is a gleaming but useless prosthesis, bereft of any muscle or genuine substance.

It’s only slowly that we comprehend that Victor is really the book’s central character, his absence an important part of three of the four novellas. In some ways, the first novella centers on René, the one character that, in a skewed way, has taken Victor’s place with his father, old Mr. Senegger; at the same time, René’s about to enact a relationship with his son that has an uncanny similarity to the one, we gather, Victor and his father had. The second novella, then, moves closer to Victor by focusing centrally on death and loss. The setting of that novella is a dinner party at the house of Ernst Mauser, a friend of Senegger’s and Templ’s, who’s recently lost his wife. Present are a handful of writers, including both Senegger and Templ. It’s the most complicated and elaborate of the novellas; each of its chapters offers, Rashomon-like, a different account of the events at Mauser’s house, in different genres, from a chapter written as an essay, to one entirely composed of letters. Not that really a whole lot happens, per se; instead, the novella, called “Fuge zu Ehren des Sonnensystems” (~ Fugue in Honor of the Solar System), examines the shape of loss in a writer’s life, and the impact this can have on the way he deals with his art, and with other people. It also helps us to better understand each of the other characters, especially Templ and Senegger, both of which emerge from this novella as somewhat farcical, tentatively ridiculous characters, both laughably self-centered and devoid of self-criticism. Additionally, the novella continues Setz’ interrogation of fear and masculinity. All this, while tragedy -and victor’s story- is waiting in the wings. But there is no pressure within the careful pages of Setz’ novel, no urgency in the narrative, nothing that really tells to reader what to look for, what’s to come; instead, we often seem to be led into a pointless exercise in cleverness.

Upon rereading, the dense novel yields its complexities in a way that might not be obvious to the first time reader. The relatively autonomous nature of the novellas, their self-contained arcs and structure can seduce us into reading them on their own terms, without the larger connecting context (although that does eventually become rather difficult as the novel progresses). The impression of largely pointless cleverness is exacerbated by the way that Setz uses quotes, paraphrases and pastiches of other writers, from various literary contexts. We catch a phrase from Pound’s Cantos here, a lilting note from Musil, a whole page from Defoe and much, much more. I’m certain I haven’t caught the half of it, but the fact of the matter is that the book crawls with these. And lists, of course. The best poets to read in the spring (answer, by the way: “Jaroslav Seifert, Vicente Aleixandre und Ezra Pound”), favorite novelists, etc. As it turns out, the novel uses devices like that in order to mirror the poetical principles of Victor Senegger himself, and towards the end of the novel, Victor Senegger, lover, friend, and suicidal son, bleeds into and merges with Victor the writer, and ways to write and ways to live become comparable and interchangeable, even. In all of this, if we disregard the odd Kafkaesque interlude, Setz’ book is solidly conventional realism. The characters and their neuroses are often derived from or references to stock characters developed in a century of psychoanalytically influenced fiction. In its long quotes and giddy pastiches, Söhne und Planeten is almost contemptuous of the idea of producing something original, in the Romanticist sense of the word. But contempt is too strong a word.

The fact is, Setz often doesn’t seem to care where, within the gay mirror cabinet of literary genres and traditions, his novel can or should be placed. It’s overt simplicity does allow for easy pigeonholing, yet it seems to me that any closer look, any deeper analysis (and I haven’t even mentioned in how many ways Setz takes up the novel’s titular planetary metaphor and what use he makes of it) makes any honest attempt to do so impossible. The most remarkable thing however, and the last issue I’ll mention here, is the place it has within the corpus of Austrian literature. When Handke, Bernhard, Innerhofer and the other great post-war Austrian novelists and playwrights emerged and became a viable literary phenomenon in the 1960s, quite a few studies and essays pointed out how their kind of writing was a kind of anti-Stifter literature, a new tradition opposed to the massive influence of that titan of Austrian letters, Adalbert Stifter. And indeed, one can place a great deal of literary Austrian fiction in relationship to Stifter, yet some younger writers, especially Setz, don’t seem to fit that mold any more. In passing, Setz demolishes Bernhard just as calmly as he rejects Stifter’s ideas of order. Söhne und Planeten is a marvelous novel, one that’s worth reading and re-reading. It’s not perfect, but for a debut novel, it’s absolutely dazzling. Clemens J. Setz proves himself to be a master craftsman, even though, when he published the book he was no older than 25. The novel’s scope is small, its focus turned inward rather than outward, its basic story swaddled in several layers like an onion. If Setz keeps up his craft, care and attention, and adds vision and scope, he will become one of the best Austrian writers of our time. His second novel, however, much I love it, is not exactly encouraging.

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Paul Auster: Sunset Park

Auster, Paul (2010), Sunset Park, Faber and Faber
ISBN 978-0-571-25878-9

Given the fact that I have written a few unflattering reviews of Paul Auster novels, in particular of The Brooklyn Follies, In The Country of Last Things and Invisible, I was personally quite surprised that it was still possible for any new book by the graying Brooklynite to disappoint me. In his last novel, Invisible, though up to his usual tricks, Auster managed to wring some new and interesting effects from his writing, thus producing his best novel in a while. In some ways, it could be described as a return to form, especially after dismal showings such as Man in the Dark or Brooklyn Follies. If a return to form was, indeed, a correct description, there’s no doubt that Sunset Park, his most recent novel, marks an immediate loss of said form. To repeat: it’s not just that this is a bad novel overall, it’s substandard even for an entry in Paul Auster’s severely underwhelming oeuvre. Sunset Park is, vaguely, the story of a college dropout, and his family, both his immediate family, and a kind of adopted or associated family of friends and acquaintances. Like much of his recent work, especially Travels in the Scriptorium, this novel is crammed with allusions to and echoes of books from better days; additionally, Auster uses other people’s work as a crutch for his narrative to work and to lend it depth. What power the book has is exclusively due to the way Auster makes use of texts like Beckett’s play Happy Days, and William Wyler’s movie The Best Years Of Our Lives. Between his old work, and the work of Beckett and Wyler, Auster hangs a wispy thin story, with forgettable and clichéd characters, and a pervasive melancholy reminiscent of the weakest of Philip Roth’s recent books. It’s an old man’s pessimistic look back at books he liked, books he wrote, a sentimental gaze into the abyss of age. Auster’s voice is so strong and distinctive in Sunset Park that we keep forgetting that the book’s protagonist is a 28 year old man, because the voice, outlook and resigned pathos that most marks this character is that of a man several decades his senior. If this voice wasn’t deadeningly dull, the incongruity could have given rise to interesting readings. On the other hand, this distinctive voice is the novel’s main selling point.

Dull it is, yet Auster seems additionally committed to giving the whole proceedings an air of creepiness by having his protagonist engage in anal sex with a very child-like looking minor. When Miles Heller, Sunset Park‘s central character, meets the girl, Pilar Sanchez, he thinks that

she was even younger than sixteen, just a girl, really, and a little girl at that, a small, adolescent girl wearing wearing tight, cut-off shorts, sandals and a skimpy halter top.

Granted, these are just appearances, since Miles met Pilar the month she turned seventeen, but that difference is a legal difference only. Not only does Miles see Pilar as a young girl, he also plays games with her that his father played with him, and the decision (suggested by Pilar) to not have vaginal intercourse is never framed in explicit terms like these. Instead, Pilar offers to have sex up the “funny hole” and not up the “mommy hole”, and

he has abided by her wishes, restricting all member penetration to her funny hole and putting nothing more than tongue and fingers in her mommy hole.

The whole affair is, from the start, clothed in terms of childhood, of paternal relations and the like. Miles teaches Pilar about the world, about literature and tells her stories about baseball. Miles is a man who matured prematurely, who left his own home before he would have needed to, and his paedophiliac attraction to Pilar clearly stems from this aborted childhood and the resulting feeling of being ensconced in exile. In some ways, his relationship to Pilar is a re-enactment of the relationship he had with his father. Yet there’s never even a shred of doubt that the two are engaged in a deeply intimate and sexual affair, one that eventually leads to a proposal of marriage. Miles knows that what he does it at least illegal, he has “qualms and inner hesitations”, and he is afraid “some riled-up busybody” could denounce him. Everybody else is fine with it, really, including Miles’ family, most of Pilar’s, and the few friends Miles manages to acquire in the course of Sunset Park. This is somewhat sordid, or, as I said: creepy, and yet there’s nothing gratuitous about it, since the book’s structure, which keeps repeating similar motifs and tropes, completely absorbs it. Readers not used to Auster’s brash non-committal attitude and his pervasive use of misogyny (cf. especially my reviews of The Brooklyn Follies and In The Country of Last Things) may be put off by it, yet since the book is very much geared towards Auster fans that’s not going to be a common problem.

Also, the affair with Pilar takes up comparably little space in the 300 page strong novel. After Miles is threatened with exposure, he leaves Miami (where he met Pilar) and moves, as is to be expected of an Auster novel, to Brooklyn, more specifically, to Sunset Park. In Auster’s work, Brooklyn has, long since, ceased being a real place, and has become a theater of Auster’s various selves, its streets, history and residents used as literary more than as topographical markers. There are multiple ways in which this, too, is the case in Sunset Park as well, most obvious in the fact that Miles puts his affair to the Latino girl on hold and moves to a neighborhood that is predominantly Hispanic. This distancing act, which for Auster is often part of a strategy that disowns commitment and putative ideals that might be part of the novel’s discourse, actually has a positive effect in Sunset Park, where it puts Miles and his creepiness at some remove from us and the author. That said, there are a lot of things that are at a remove from us as readers, mostly because as Auster gets older, he seems to draw more from his own work than from his imagination or thinking which wasn’t exactly bountiful to begin with. Now, though, Auster’s work reads like a catalogue of past Auster. Most of the similarities are, however, restrained to Miles Heller’s story. As we enter the book, we find Miles working a job that involves cleaning out abandoned houses, remove objects and trash from them. The description of the job, which extends over the first four pages, contains undoubtedly by far the best writing of the whole book, yet draws inspiration (or offers homage) to In The Country of Last Things (cue Baudrillard reference). Miles’ mind, adolescence and education, as its offered up to us, in turn, corresponds closely to almost any other male character of the same age Auster has ever written, to Moon Palace‘s Fogg, for example, but especially to The Brooklyn Follies‘ Tom. Sunset Park is like a museum of Auster artifacts, and since Auster has written a few decent books before and quite generally has been writing actively and intensely for decades now, Sunset Park doesn’t go under completely. Like the dullest of vampires, it feeds on the cardboard carcasses of Auster’s past fame, as Auster himself does.

For all that he borrows from his own work, however, this time he didn’t bother to come up with the clever structures that have almost become a trademark of his writing. Brazenly, he copied only what was easy enough to copy. Apart from the intertextual links and mirrors, the book is remarkably straightforward, yet if we’ve learned anything from Auster’s past work, it’s that he’s strongest whenever structure and tricks play a large role. The more he relies on sentimental, emotive, realistic narrative, the more his lack of fundamental novelistic skills shows. And as the book’s plot unfolds, so does our disappointment with Auster’s structural restraint. In more than one way, the book feels like a first draft, some aspects fully worked out, some things half-baked, not even tentative or sketched, but executed in a bored, uninterested way. Most of these unfinished, tedious sections are about Miles’ friends, specifically about Bing Nathan and his housemates. Miles, as we soon learn, fled New York in the aftermath of fratricide, moving to various cities all over the US, settling finally in Miami, keeping it all secret from his parents. Bing Nathan (yes, another Nathan) is the only person with whom he kept in touch, relying on him for news of his family. Bing, we eventually learn, has been a double agent, supplying Miles’ parents with information just as he kept Miles in the loop. Given Sunset Park‘s preoccupation with various kinds of intertextuality, Bing’s double role as informant can certainly be read poetologically as a way to describe how texts feed into other texts, or as a model for the interaction of readers and writers, etc., ad nauseam. But such a reading would lend complexity to a simple set-up and an even more simple, perfunctorily executed, character. To return to the story: Bing has moved into an abandoned building in Sunset Park, wherein he squats with two other housemates. Among them, a woman writing a dissertation on the aforementioned Wyler movie (which apparently every single character in the book knows and loves) and a female painter, who spends a great deal of time sketching her fellow housemates, especially Bing Nathan. Neither woman is more than a rough sketch, an assortment of well-known clichés, used to make a specific point in Auster’s narrative of personal growth and each woman adds a mirror to Auster’s blunt funhouse of 1980s cleverness.

The main character remains Miles Heller, and he’s the only character who has any kind of depth. Or rather, him and his father, Morris Heller. Miles’ father mostly serves as point of reference for the author. His voice is identical to Miles’, but in him, there’s nothing incongruous about his age and his points of view. And while we sense an authorial wistfulness and sentimentality in Auster’s Miles/Fogg/Tom characters, Morris is clearly a grown-up duplicate, who represents the author within the novel’s framework. Quite apart from his role as the complementary listener/source in Bing Nathan’s duplicitous career as Miles’ and Morris’ informant, Morris is also depicted as an investigator of sorts. With Bing Nathan’s information in tow, Morris clandestinely follows his son around. More than once we are reminded of Auster’s New York Trilogy, as we become privy to Morris’ odd tactics that involve inventing undercover personas. The threefold way that Morris controls the flow of information (informing Bing, listening to Bing, and finally investigating on his own), his usurpation of Auster’s familiar tropes of detection, all this is evidence of a kind of authorial representation. But it’s not just Miles’ father. It seems the closer we move in on Miles, the more influence characters have on structure and writing of the book (without becoming less of a cliché). Miles’ mother Mary-Lee is almost as significant as his father, although she’s accorded less time onstage. Miles’ parents are divorced and as Miles returns to New York, so does his mother, preparing to appear in a production of Beckett’s Happy Days. Beckett’s text is scattered all over Auster’s in several ways, one of which is an obvious parallel between Winnie and Mary-Lee, as far as certain aspects of characterization are concerned; as the book draws to a close, her influence becomes even more marked, as the text, as text, directly mimics Happy Days by including descriptions of Mary-Lee’s actions in parentheses, written to resemble Beckett’s fastidious stage directions. This is, of necessity a brief sketch of a plenitude of intertextual tools Auster makes use of, and I haven’t even explained any of the ways that The Best Years Of Our Lives is worked into the text.

All these are the games of a tired old man, coasting on past successes, making use of the same characters and the same tools for the millionth time, with radically diminishing returns. His writing remains as unremarkable as ever, and his characters as flat as ever. As always, the book might make a very nice movie, but fails utterly as a literary work of art. Auster demonstrates again, as if we needed to be reminded, that, despite his travails, elbow-grease and obvious cleverness, he’s just not accomplished, smart, talented or committed a novelist as he would need to be to pull off his ambitious writing. Although, actually, Sunset Park isn’t even ambitious, it’s as if he’s given up on himself, given up on creating work that is at least up to his own standards. And this he shares with his hapless protagonist. While many Auster novels end on a note of hope, suggesting a fresh start, new beginnings, the sun sets in Sunset Park without leaving a glimmer of days and suns to come. The final chapter, while brimming with sentimentality, is rather impressive, and the ending is comparably strong, and if Auster was a better writer, the end could have a tragic, powerful impact. As it stands, we have nothing, not even routine Auster. This is sub-Auster. Here’s this: if you believe The Brooklyn Follies to be a good book, chances are you will enjoy Sunset Park, as well. If you are a fan of Auster’s better work, you might still enjoy Sunset Park. Anyone less than a fan should stay away from this book. Don’t buy it, don’t read it, don’t make a gift of it. If less people read Auster’s books, he might write less. It’s a win-win scenario all round.

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Damon Galgut: In a strange room

Galgut, Damon (2010), In A Strange Room, Atlantic
ISBN 978-0-85789-157-0

Damon Galgut is one of those writers who, despite being successful and acclaimed novelists, have never really captured my attention and so it wasn’t until this year that I had an opportunity to read this incredibly accomplished writer. Galgut, a South African novelist and ardent traveler has set his earlier successful novels in South Africa, working through historical and moral issues connected to South African history and culture. This is different in his seventh novel In a Strange Room, or at least it’s different in large parts of the book. In A Strange Room is, broadly speaking, a book about love and loneliness, about desirous dependencies and deathly despair. At the same time, it’s quite obviously a book about travel, about the way that Western mythologies of the self are often connected to travels through culturally rich exotic locales, about the way that modern day tourism follows historical routes of imperialism, but refracted through a personal, and individual lens. This is a deeply moving, devastating book that I can’t still think about without getting chills down my spine, written in a lyrical yet sparse language that is often close to trite phrases reminiscent of Coelho, but rises ultimately far above such trivial fare. The closeness in style or language to the terrible Brazilian hack can be chalked up to the fact that Galgut attempts to engage the sentimental, without falling into the morass of weepy trash; the book provides three comparably straightforward narratives of love and loss, written in a way that suggests honesty and unvarnished directness. If Galgut provides the occasional hokey adage, it’s because the plausibility of the voice demands it: the narrator of In A Strange Room is embattled and emotionally abused and consequently triteness surfaces as a way of reasserting authorial power and authority over events and, ultimately, his own life. As for the author: producing as marvelously clean and precise a book as this is a bravura achievement, and judging from this novel alone, Damon Galgut is a master of his craft.

In A Strange Room consists of three parts, called “The Follower”, “The Lover” and “The Guardian”, respectively. They are at best tenuously connected, more or less exclusively through the narrator, in whose life all three episodes take place. There’s also a thematic connection, since, as the book’s subtitle has it, it’s about “three journeys”, and lastly, they refer to one another obliquely, usually in small ways, as when the second part begins with the phrase “A few years later…”. It is not until the end of the book that we can suddenly see how In A Strange Room works as a whole. Thus it’s not surprising to read that the three section have been separately published in the Paris Review, since none of the three sections is really dependent on any of the others. In a way, both through their length and their narrative structure, it would even make sense to read In A Strange Room as a collection of novellas, but read in one piece, it’s clear that the three sections are part of one cohesive text. Each section is about 60 pages long and all three are about one formative journey and one important personal encounter. While the first two sections/parts are about homo-erotically charged (but unconsummated) relationships involving the protagonist, the third section is centrally concerned with friendship rather than love. In each of the sections the protagonist (who is also (arguably) the narrator), is a South African male called Damon, who is very young in the first story and middle-aged in the last. Given the obvious similarities to Galgut himself (including of course the shared first name), it’s safe to assume that the book toys with the idea of autobiographical writing, yet Galgut has not committed, in Philippe Lejeune’s oft-quoted terms, to the autobiographical pact:

Pour qu’il y ait une autobiographie, il faut que l’auteur passe avec ses lecteurs un pacte, un contrat, qu’il leur raconte sa vie en détail, et rien que sa vie.

Instead, the similarities and the shared first name serve to establish a close rapport with historical or biographical truth, a sense of authenticity and, implicitly, plausibility.

This concern is one that keeps coming up in the way the book is written. One other such instance is the book’s prefatory quote “He Has No House”, attributed to Vojislav Jakić, which returns within the book when the protagonist “spends a day in a gallery of outsider art”, “and from this collection of fantastic and febrile images he retains a single line, a book title by a Serbian artist whose name I forget, He Has No House.” Unlike Damon the narrator, Damon the author knows who the Serbian artist was, yet using Jakić’s book title as an introductory quote for the whole book suggests that Galgut himself found the quote (and found it significant). Jakić is significant in still other ways: Jakić, who died in 2003, is known for having made art of his life, and what’s more, he’s explicitly introduced to the reader as a creator of outsider art. Since Galgut’s novel works with the vocabulary of the intensely personal, and alludes to (auto)biographical truth, and since it, additionally, presents a narrator in various states of emotional distress, it’s hard not to think of the whole book as being, as Leo Navratil famously put it, “zustandsgebundene Kunst”, i.e. art which is derived from a very specific emotional or psychological state. Since the book is introduced to us with a quote by a well known outsider artist, these seem to be self-evident connections. Moreover, Galgut is pretty insistent we understand what that psychological state is. To that end, early in his book, he quotes a passage in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, which same quote is also the source of the title of Galgut’s book:

In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you were filled with sleep, you never were.

This brief quote, one that Galgut’s narrator remembers from a distracted reading on a campsite after an exhausting day of walking, is continued by Faulkner like this: “I dont know what I am. I dont know if I am or not.” and end, after a short deliberation, affirmatively: “And then I must be, or I could not empty myself for sleep in a strange room.” By eliding all these thoughts from the quote, Galgut retains the doubt, the vague, insecure atmosphere that pervades the whole book.

The quiet question “what are you” haunts Damon throughout In A Strange Room, and giving the book this title suggests that it describes the process of working through existentialist doubt, not with the goal of arriving at a satisfying philosophical conclusion, but merely with the modest seeming goal of calming down enough to sleep, i.e. to be comfortable in the “strange room” that is the world. Uncomfortable and insecure, Damon falls in love twice, and blows it both times because he fails to grasp the situation completely, to take control of his life and the things and people that are important in it. In the first section, “The Follower”, he tries, at least, by striking up a friendship with Reiner, a raven-haired German whom he meets in Greece and eventually invites to visit in South Africa. Damon and Reiner are both perfectly aware of the sexual tensions and attractions between them although neither speaks of it. In Greece and in the letters, as well as at the beginning of Reiner’s South African stay, the two men circle each other carefully, and although we can see a power imbalance developing, it doesn’t flare up until the two decide to undertake a hiking journey through South Africa. Reiner repeatedly displays his independence, both financially and emotionally. One night he sleeps with a middle aged prostitute, an action clearly designed to antagonize Damon. Reiner (whose name contains the German word ‘rein’, meaning clean, pure) is oddly aristocratic. He can afford to travel the world without thinking about money, yet he withholds from Damon any information as to his professional or financial background. It is inferred that Reiner doesn’t have to work, or if he does, he works little. The same lack of need or professional necessity can be found in his emotional life initially. He is distant, and in fact breaks up with women if they demand too much in the way of closeness of commitment. It is Damon alone who is sullied by desire, by sexual need, by financial difficulties and emotional dependencies. This imbalance leads to Reiner taking emotional advantage of Damon, which dooms their unspoken and unfulfilled love affair. As their relationship deteriorates, Galgut hands us that Faulkner quote in order to demonstrate whence Damon’s discomfort and alienation.

The alienation is also stressed by the seemingly loose way that Galgut has with pronouns. Much of the book is told in a third person perspective, limited to Damon’s point of view and Damon’s knowledge. Frequently, however, the third person is switched to a first person, sometimes within the same sentence. Invariably, when the narrator reflects on the time that has passed between the events and his telling of them, he uses the first person; yet when he recounts events, he does not always use the third person. Unless I am mistaken, the first person turns up whenever the narrator closes in on events, when things come to a head or when emotional states climax. Thus, the unstable self that we are presented with in terms of characterization, can also be found in the way Galgut constructs his book’s language. This instability, this unease is further developed in the second section, set “a few years later”. This time, Damon meets a group of (again) European travelers en route to Malawi. He is immediately attracted to a young Swiss national named Jerome. His name, which etymologically means “sacred name”, is not the only similarity to “pure” Reiner. Their careful, unspoken attraction is another. Jerome is considerably younger than Damon has become, and financially dependent on his parents and friends. Theoretically, this should give Damon an advantage, it should help him take the reins in this particular relationship, but once again, he fails to do so. Between Damon and Jerome, a power vacuum develops, and for weeks and months, the two men keep meeting each other, keep (though occasionally) traveling with one another. As Reiner visited Damon in South Africa, so Damon visits Jerome, yet he does not manage to seize the situation as Reiner has. Loneliness and a tragic sense of impending loss permeates every page of this section; tragic because both want it to be different, yet Damon’s obstinate discomfort stands in the way of true happiness. Damon is too confused, too insecure to transform his and Jerome’s desire into more. To watch Damon abandon his life like that is saddening and deeply frustrating. The third section, then, switches situations again some more.

Although in the third section, Damon is the narrator as well, his is no longer the life that we watch breaking apart, being abandoned and mistreated. Instead, Galgut offers us Anna, the homosexual lover of a friend of Damon’s. Anna suffers from manic-depressive illness, and during her trip to Goa with Damon, she keeps taxing his patience, but at first in a mostly harmless way. In this section, it’s Anna who falls in love, and Anna who hands over the control of her life, heading for a disastrous end. In many ways, Anna’s psychological disintegration is the realization, the bodily mirror of Damon’s own destructive emotional life, and in her fate, Damon finally finds his own, he sees himself in the reflection of other people’s terminal self-destructive acts, and he comes to terms with it. As “[l]ives leak into each other”, Damon suddenly sees his own predicament clearly. The book as a whole, then, serves as a demonstration of his insights. The titles of the three sections, echoing Tarot cards, or rather: archetypes, imply a deep understanding of the roles he’s played in his life so far, and how each of them is connected to the man he has become and the lives he’s led. I’m sure a Jungian reading of the book can be undertaken profitably, yet as I close this review, it seems important to stress yet another point: this book is not all self-absorbed interiority, although I have put a lot of emphasis on this aspect of In A Strange Room. It’s really a testament to Galgut’s craft and intelligence that every chapter, every section, every page of the book is shot through with a thorough awareness of the places he sets his book in and their history, especially their recent history. We are always reminded of the fact of imperialism, both the historical phenomenon and its contemporary counterpart, as we are always reminded of the way that sexuality, gender or color of skin frame situations and encounters. Yes, the book is full of haunting evocations of places, but these evocations are never an end in itself. Galgut’s novel is a marvelous book that succeeds at everything it attempts to do and if it feels a bit ‘minor’, it’s because it’s meant to be. In A Strange Room is a breathless self-examination, a small but potent book, and one that will lodge itself in the reader’s brain for weeks.

John Fante: Ask The Dust

Fante, John (2002), Ask The Dust, Canongate
ISBN 978-1-84195-330-4

“Either I paid up or I got out”, this is the decision that Arturo Bandini, the protagonist of John Fante’s Ask the Dust is faced with as the book opens. And he doesn’t do either: “I solved it by turning out the lights and going to bed.” This is quite symptomatic not just of Bandini’s behavior in general, but also of the way the book as a work of art, operates. Although Fante is respectful of the general rules of ‘proper’ writing (such as they are), his book often takes oddly original decisions, and fascinating flights of tone to arrive at a point in literary history that no other book quite occupies. Originally published in 1939, Ask The Dust is singular in that it has acquired a huge amount of fans, is found in many well-stocked bookshops, yet has appeared to be flying under the radar consistently. The novel has been re-discovered a few times now, most notably when it was reprinted by Black Sparrow Press in 1980, with an introduction by Charles Bukowski which pointed out how much of a debt he as a writer owed to the example of John Fante and Fante’s original and surprising work. Today, despite still being reviewed and perceived as underrated, Ask the Dust, John Fante’s second novel, is actually quite well known, and almost universally liked. As it should be.

Ask The Dust is humorous, entertaining, moving, and written with a careful pen and an alert mind. A book about a writer struggling to get published and to get by, it’s also a very clear-eyed view of the strictures and possibilities in the craft of writing prose. Actually, apart from writers like Joyce, it’s quite rare that a writer can exemplify in the structure and rhythm of his own prose the aesthetic demands that he has a character or the narrator make within the novel itself. At best, there’s a contrast involved, as with Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist (cf my review here) which featured a ‘knowledgeable’ protagonist, whose knowledge was limited and curiously slanted. Contrasts like these are much easier to accomplish, which tritely explains why far more writers make use of them than there are writers who go down the way Fante chose. Based on this book alone, Fante is a creator of perfect prose. Not in the way that every sentence of his sings or is particularly quotable or poetic. No, his achievement is larger than that: Fante writes an exquisitely calibrated prose that is perfectly tailored to the subject matter, mood and register of the book. It’s lean, not spare. The language is not simple, but it’s draped snugly around the muscles of the narrative and Fante’s swirling thoughts. Ask The Dust is an excellent work of art, well made and moving.

Fante’s protagonist is young Arturo Bandini, who has recently published a short story in “J.C. Hackmuth’s journal”, a publication that’s never explicitly named (but bears a striking resemblance to H.L. Mencken’s American Mercury), and is very proud of this achievement. The story is a simple love story, as Bandini falls in love with a waitress, who’s not just in love with another man, but who also takes drugs and is sexually attracted to men who treat her badly. Although Fante develops the plot in a straightforward enough fashion, one can’t help but feel that it’s not very central or important to the book as a whole, which is more about Bandini and his writing. He appears to suffer from a dry spell of sorts, although he is overflowing with an almost manic creative energy, it’s just that he doesn’t appear to be able to sit still enough for long enough a period of time to compose a story. Bandini is well aware of how to compose prose well, he’s not waiting for inspiration to just flow out of him. True, he does need (and currently lacks) a spark to set off his writing, but once underway, he works hard on his prose. He’s a tough reader of prose, both his own and that of others, an attitude that is also evident in the way he’s writing. This is one of many interesting incongruities in Ask the Dust. While it’s written with many of the usual markers of Romanticism, presenting, for example, a hero torn by desires, emotions and his (self-)destructive urges, there’s actually a rather distinct sense of form and tradition in the novel, both explicitly, through Bandini and his thoughts, as well as implicitly, through John Fante’s excellent and balanced writing.

While we do hear echoes of the Romanticist poet who is tortured by a white page, and suffers from hunger, madness and one or two debilitating diseases, the substance of the book is untouched by this. And it’s not even just the fact that Bandini does not suffer from any problematic illness or the fact that he isn’t mad. Bandini’s mind is clear and remarkably focused, as far as his work is concerned or that of others. He is a writer, someone who makes use of the world that happens around him, someone who reads the world in certain contexts and transfigures his reading into art, and the novel is soon suggested to be a means by which Bandini goes about his task: the book is narrated in the first person, by Bandini, and although it’s never made explicit, the novel as a whole doesn’t just loosely exemplify Bandini’s poetics, it is his book, written by him, or at least that is the underlying suggestion. Fante, in 1939, doesn’t need the crutch of postmodern self-referential games for this. There is, I think, a tendency in much postmodern prose to externalize thought. External to the central narrative that is. Framing, wrapping, packaging the book in explicit self-reference allows especially weaker writers (one thinks of Paul Auster) to simplify the central narrative, to seek complexity by assembling one’s book from simpler parts, without ever really making the thought work through the resulting mosaic of simplicities, an aesthetic that seems to have become rather popular these past decades (although of course better writers can take the same method and be tremendously successful with it. Adam Levin’s recently published debut novel The Instructions is a good example of this).

Of course, an L.A. native might read the book much more realistically than I did: Fante’s language is realistic, transporting a vivid sense of place and time, making us feel, directly, unmistakably, Bandini’s despair, confusion, his hunger, or, for example, his delight at holding in his hands two cold bottles of milk. Yet at the same time, the book has its sights on much more, and achieves more, as well. The book is about romanticist ideals just as much as it depicts them. Arturo Bandini, the hungry writer, is mirrored in another character, Sammy, the untalented (but gainfully employed) writer, and the disdain and rejection that Bandini suffers at the hands of society is mirrored in the character of a Latino waitress called Camilla Lopez, whom even Bandini himself now and then attacks with racist slurs. Although we know little about Bandini’s first short story (called “And the little dog laughed”), we do know quite a bit about his subsequent fictional endeavors. His very next story is derived from a letter he wrote to his editor, a letter that Bandini toiled and worked over for a long time, that ran to several pages and through several drafts. His editor, J.C. Hackmuth himself, decides to cut off the salutation at the beginning and the end and print the rest as it is. There’s a whiff of Hunter S. Thompson in all of this, but the amount of work that Bandini spends on his letter, and the amount of work that Thompson claimed to do on his post-Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas publications couldn’t be further apart.

Like Thompson, however, Fante’s novel is propelled forward by a strong and distinctive literary voice, clear and musical syntax. Starting with the first chapter, there always seems to be a sub-clause more than usual, a turn, quirk, lilt of voice. Right from the start, we are served a narrative voice that is easy to read, yet not simply constructed, and as the book continues, the prose perfectly adapts to the exigencies of the story, injecting false pathos into it when praising America. The prose is one of the reasons why the book is better than it may sound at first. A book about a starving writer in the depression is not a subject matter that seems awfully original, and so it’s not here, either. Fante elevates the dour themes of his story by writing a book that is a fun, quick read, and that, at the same time, comments on the fact of its being a book about a well-trodden topic. The idea of epigonic writing is used in the book quite a few times, in different ways. There is, for example, Sammy who writes odd, derivative Western stories, there is Bandini who adapts a stanza from a poem by Ernest Dowson (another mirror: Dowson, too, was, for much of his life, a hungering poet, who eventually died penniless) to impress a girl (a stanza, by the way, that is the source of the title of Margaret Mitchell’s gargantuan epic Gone with the Wind, published four years earlier), and many more. Fante answers the Romanticist concept of originality with a writing of repetition.

Although the plot of the book is pretty direct, ideas keep circling and repeating. For example in its basic use of place. Many depression era novels talk about migration of one kind or another and that is true to an extent of Ask the Dust as well. Bandini has moved from Colorado to Los Angeles and has been living in hotels ever since. Yet as far as the novel is concerned, the picture is slightly different: Bandini may travel to various places in the book, both in memory as well as in the book’s present, but the novel starts in Los Angeles and ends with Bandini’s return there (which, oddly, is another repetition of his first move to California). More examples of repetition can be found in the uses the book makes of characters who mirror other characters, and in the way that racism makes an appearance. Racism is depicted (as it commonly is) as a vicious circle. When Bandini arrives in California, the Italian-American writer is subjected to racist looks and comments, and is almost thrown out of a hotel because its owner thought Bandini looked Mexican. The fear and the poverty at the time bred a racist response to newcomers (as it always does) and Bandini, in his interactions with the beautiful waitress, reproduces it. Some critics have taken the book to task for being racist, but it merely depicts racism that was prevalent at the time. The fact that some of the xenophobia is related to us in Bandini’s voice directly, without the qualifying frame of dialogue or comment seems to aggravate the problem for some.

But here is where the metafictional structure of the novel becomes important. See, in Bandini’s work, his own life and his writing are entangled, and so, implicitly, in the book itself, as well. His second published story did not start out as fiction, and wasn’t framed or worded to be fiction, yet Hackmuth (and presumably the readers of his magazine) saw it as fiction and re-framed it as such. Another instance of life being turned into art is Bandini’s first novel, based on an affair he has in the course of the book, and published towards the end of the book. Given his literary proclivities, it’s not a stretch to read Ask The Dust as a later novel authored by Bandini, as I pointed out earlier. And Bandini is very self-obsessed, yet artfully so: many of the book’s circles and repetitions revolve around its maudlin protagonist, a method that is not explicitly referenced by the book since it appears to be all Bandini’s; as a creation by Fante, however, the book directly comments on the limitations of its narrator. It’s not that Bandini is in fact an unreliable narrator, but the text is an extension of his character, an expression just as revealing and important in any reading of Bandini, as individual lines of dialogue are. The more one ponders the book, the more it unfolds like a precious flower. Ask The Dust is a very good book about a budding writer, which uses the historical context well and precisely and while it shows itself conscious of various clichés and problems with a genre too often marred by self-importance, it doesn’t fall prey to any of them.

Fante maneuvers his book expertly between the dangers of his chosen mode of writing. He is accessible without becoming cheap, and nuanced without losing any readability. Additionally, apart from one or two outdated lexical choices, the book seems, to use that dreaded cliche, timeless. Comparing it to books clearly influenced by it, and published 30 or more years later (am I wrong in seeing a strong reflection of Ask the Dust in John Barth’s debut novel The Floating Opera?), I daresay one would be hard pressed to decide, deprived of information, which was published first. Its topics range far wider than this review has been able to show. There are whole slates of topics, from Catholic sexual guilt to gender issues, that I haven’t been able to touch upon despite their importance for the book. And at the end of the day, centrally, there’s Los Angeles, the heat, dust and air of which permeates every page of the book. It’s hard to imagine the reader who would not be taken by this book.

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Mathias Énard: Parle-leur de batailles, de rois et d’élephants

Énard, Mathias (2010), Parle-leur de batailles, de rois et d’élephants, Actes Sud
ISBN 978-2-7427-9362-4

This has never happened to me before : upon finishing Parle-leur de batailles, de rois et d’élephants (~ talk to them about battles, kings and elephants) I was ready to toss a coin in order to decide whether this, Mathias Énard’s fifth book, was a success or not. It may often take me some time to puzzle out details of books, but I have never been as much at a loss about the basic quality of a book as I was in this case. The reason for my bewilderment is due to the highly original structure and writing of the book, and to Énard’s enormous basic skills as a prose writer. The same project and approach, in the hands of a lesser writer, could easily be chalked up as a bad failure. What Énard did was to take a little known episode in the life of the Italian Renaissance artist Michelangelo, and develop it in a highly elliptical way. In only 155 narrow pages, the book attempts to do justice not just to a rich and sumptuous setting, but it also tries to contain clashes of civilizations, and the biographies of three of the most remarkable men of their age: Michelangelo himself, Sultan Bayezid II (also known as Bayezid the Just) and the early important Ottoman poet Mesihi of Pristina. Ottoman poetry, the development of a complex architectural structure and the difficulties of being an artist in a violent world that appears to be constantly at war are just a few of the themes that crowd this small book. There is no doubt that no book of this length could do any justice to as convoluted and complicated a set of topics and problems, yet Énard tries. We can see how good a writer he is by the mere fact that his method, an impressionistic, fragmented, superficial narrative that is more about the act of telling stories than about the story it purports to tell, appears to us, on finishing the book, to be the only way to convincingly work through the topics, places, biographies and ideas. Énard is highly convincing, and yet the book falls significantly short. It’s a failure, but, at the same time, it’s a valiant effort, and as far as brave failures go, the end result is, for example, a far better book than Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions. To sum up: Mathias Énard’s new novel Parle-leur de batailles, de rois et d’élephants is a failure, but an interesting, intriguing one. It’s certainly a book worth reading, especially given it’s extremely short length.

Born in 1972, Mathias Énard is a very young writer given the depth and volume of his work so far. Apart from two translations (of an Iranian and a Lebanese writer), he has published four other books before Parle-leur de batailles, de rois et d’élephants, the first of which was published in 2003. His penultimate novel, Zone, published in 2008, could well be regarded as his breakthrough achievement, winning several prizes and being translated into English (2010, Open Letter Press, trans. Charlotte Mandell) and German (2010, Berlin Verlag, trans. Holger Focker) among other languages. Zone is a 500 page novel consisting of a single sentence, a long, sometimes rambling, exploration of war, memory and violence. The contrast to Parle-leur de batailles, de rois et d’élephants, its immediate successor, following less than two years later, couldn’t be stronger. Although a second look at the book disproves the feeling, one is left with the impression of the book being constructed from a surfeit of small and smaller sentences, observations, impressions, fleeting thoughts. Part of that impression is likely due to the fact that the book consists indeed of small structures. The whole of the book is divided into tiny chapters which usually contain less than two full pages of text. And each of the chapters is well constructed, these are not continuous narratives interlaced, but small, self-sufficient prose pieces, each advancing the plot. There is barely (if any) temporal overlap, so the cut at the end of each chapter marks a jump in time. Sometimes we jump days or weeks ahead, sometimes just a few hours, but the overall effect stays the same: we are not allowed to take root in this world that Énard sketches for us, as he shoves us from event to event, from character to character. There is no authorial comment that would take us by the hand and lead us through this, but the short, elliptical chapters achieve the same thing, they bolster Énard’s authority as a storyteller, demanding we follow him, no questions asked. It may seem banal to say that the reader only sees what the author wants him to see, but it’s a relevant observation here, because Mathias Énard knows about the places and people that crowd his book, yet he does not allow us, as readers, the same knowledge.

What we know are small, labeled tidbits, just enough to understand what is happening and to have an idea of why these things are happening, but that’s all. The author’s patience with and generosity for his readers has strong, and clearly defined limits. This also explains the superficial way that places and characters are introduced. Since we are denied a deeper knowledge, Énard fills his book with flat declarations of fact, such as substituting the name Michelangelo with this description, early in the book: “le sculpteur sans égal, futur peintre de génie et immense architecte”. This tone, asking us to take it or leave it, is pervasive throughout the book. In a way, this is an invocation of the old art of oral storytelling, where the authority of the storyteller held enough weight so that simple declarative bits of information could stand without being questioned. This is buttressed by the book’s link to one of Rudyard Kipling’s books: Énard took the title of his novel from Kipling’s preface of his little known collection of stories Life’s Handicap. This preface contains a fictitious discussion with “Gobind the one-eyed”, a holy beggar, who instructs Kipling’s persona in how to tell a story; this is what he tells him:

Tell them first of those things that thou hast seen and they have seen together. Thus their knowledge will piece out thy imperfections. Tell them of what thou alone hast seen, then what thou hast heard, and since they be children tell them of battles and kings, horses, devils, elephants, and angels, but omit not to tell them of love and suchlike. All the earth is full of tales to him who listens and does not drive away the poor from his door. The poor are the best of tale-tellers; for they must lay their ear to the ground every night.

In this short preface, Kipling presents us with two worlds, two kinds of storytelling. There is the cynical, critical, careful way of storytelling that is prevalent in the west, and is caused by employment of the written word, which allows critics to scour texts for mistakes, infidelities or problems. The other way is Gobind’s, the spoken word, which endows the teller of tales with a certain authority, speaking to his audience as to children (because all people “are children in the matter of tales.”). And in order to provide a spellbinding telling, you speak “of battles and kings, horses, devils, elephants, and angels”. In Gobind’s assertion, this is not meant condescendingly, and Kipling doesn’t mean it that way either. His book is, after all, subtitled “being stories of mine own people”. And when he ends by saying that the most important stories are those omitted, he doesn’t aggrandize himself necessarily, he assigns a value to silence. All this is vastly different with Mathias Énard who only keeps the oral storyteller link and the ellipsis. In fact, it makes a great deal of sense to read the project of Parle-leur de batailles, de rois et d’élephants as being, in part, the opposite of what Kipling intended in his book that, again, Énard references explicitly.

The contrast is most easily seen if we look at a passage roughly halfway through the book that lightly paraphrases the above Kipling quote, yet endows it with an utterly different spin:

Je sais que les hommes sont des enfants qui chassent leur désespoir par la colère, leur peur dans l’amour ; au vide, ils répondent en construisant des châteaux et des temples. Ils s’accrochent à des récits, ils les poussent devant eux comme des étendards ; chacun fait sienne une histoire pour se rattacher à la foule qui la partage. On les conquiert en leur parlant de batailles, de rois, d’éléphants et d’êtres merveilleux ; en leur racontant le bonheur qu’il y aura au-delà de la mort, la lumière vive qui a présidé à leur naissance, les anges qui leur tournent autour, les démons qui les menacent, et l’amour, l’amour, cette promesse d’oubli et de satiété. Parle-leur de tout cela, et ils t’aimeront ; ils feront de toi l’égal d’un dieu.

Kipling’s preface proposes a power of stories that goes both ways, a dependence on wisdom that includes the storyteller himself, who is asked to listen to the poor people. There is nothing of that in Énard’s novel, which talks down to its audience and eschews listening. This is not necessarily a bad trait, but it appears to be an odd and very deliberate change of gears. Given the fact that the book itself is basically constructed according to the rules not of Kipling’s preface but of the condescending note in Énard’s own book, this makes for an interesting, though slightly off-putting mixture. This aloofness that engulfs the whole novel does, however, fit into the gilded setting of the book, which does not appear to portray the Renaissance as much as it does reflect well-worn ideas of how the Renaissance has been and should be portrayed. In other words, this is not so much about the Renaissance as it is about “the Renaissance”, if understand what I mean. There is no immediacy here, and most of the central characters suffer greatly from this. There is no depth, no plausibility in the Michelangelo that we are offered, for example (despite Énard’s use of letters and suchlike, devices which usually fulfill just that kind of function) and yet it’s hard to see Énard being perturbed by this fact. Parle-leur de batailles, de rois et d’élephants doesn’t need to be believed, it demands to be admired, “l’égal d’un dieu”. This intention is buttressed by the haughty poeticisms that crop up everywhere. Instead of probing for plausible emotions, or truly poetic and original images, Énard gives us tried-and-true phrases that can be extraordinarily beautiful, but in an arch, disinterested way. As the book progresses, we are presented with expressions of sadness, of love, of artistic ambition and fear, but all of them stay on the surface, none of them manages to spill over to the less-than-gullible reader. This can mean two things: either he aimed for the lazy reader, easily swayed by cheap imitations of poetic depth, or the archness is the whole point of the book.

I prefer that latter reading, in part because it has the more interesting implications. Shortly before the passage I quoted earlier, the character giving said speech says the following:

Je voudrais tant que tu conserves quelque chose. Que tu emportes une partie de moi. Que se transmette mon pays lointain, non pas un vague souvenir, une image, mais l’énergie d’une étoile, sa vibration dans le noir. Une vérité.

It’s well to remember that this book talks about an obscure historical episode. Realism, emotional truthful writing, well developed characters would certainly heighten the verisimilitude of the whole undertaking, but they would not actually add to the ‘truth’. In Énard’s historical narrative, the silences, omissions, gaps may serve a purpose in highlighting the empty spaces of written and recorded history. For the most part, he keeps to the historical record (he appends a list of sources to the book), and the superficial way of labeling and introducing characters could be read as a reflection of the paucity of these very sources. But here’s why the book is a failure: if Énard had decided to stick to his sources, to develop a narrative of gaps of knowledge, of empty spaces, his writing style might have cohered perfectly. But in a remarkable display of lack of authorial discipline, he adds sentimental inventions. He adds a tale of obsession, love and assassination, completely invented, and written in the same slick, smooth style. Thus, the main achievement of Parle-leur de batailles, de rois et d’élephants appears to be an aesthetic one. Énard provides an exercise in l’art pour l’art, fin de siècle decadence. He imitates tropes and gestures from periods like that, but laced with a noncommittal arrogance. The central dismissive stance is never balanced, never subverted, or amended, as the author appears to think that artistic perfection, perfect historical miniatures, would be enough. If only they were, perfect, that is. This book has, as I’ve been trying to show, such an enormously broad scope, it’s project is so ambitious that it can be read in all manner of ways, without utterly excelling at any single one of them. It’s, after all is said and done, a valiant attempt, fueled by a strong literary vision, and as such it’s very recommended. It’s also recommended for the occasional passages of truly beautiful prose, and for the odd startling juxtaposition of art forms and cultures (topics that I have not been able to raise here). It’s not a great book, not even a very good book, but the attempt is more than laudable. Read it. If you want a different, much more positive take on the book, please read the Fric Frac Club review by Francois Monti, excellent as always, which praises the book very highly, reading Énard as “un classique moderne”.

Edit 1. Although this novel has not yet been translated, here is a very interesting interview with Charlotte Mandell, who translated Énard’s Zone into English.

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Gene Luen Yang: American Born Chinese

Yang, Gene Luen (2006), American Born Chinese, Square Fish
ISBN 978-0-312-38448-7

American Born Chinese, Gene Luen Yang’s graphic novel, created only five years into his career in comics, won several prizes and deservedly so. Among several honors it was the first graphic novel ever to be nominated for a National Book Award; additionally, it won the coveted Eisner award, the Reuben award, and the Michael L. Printz award. However, being a NBA finalist (in the YA fiction category) is especially interesting and significant: Gene Luen Yang, who is both writer and artist, didn’t just produce a superior graphic novel, one of the best books of the non-superhero comic genre I’ve recently read, but a surprisingly complex young adult novel, within whatever convention. At 233 generously-margined pages, it’s not a big book, yet the story it tells, of Asian-American identity in a predominantly white(seeming) culture, is told with the scope of a larger, more epic book. Told not just through the writing: Yang’s art work (and Lark Pien’s colors) is simple, cartoonish, yet it delivers its points with aplomb; American Born Chinese is a serious book, one that makes concise and important points about second generation immigrant experience; but Yang’s art, as well as the light, humorous but never farcical dialogue, make this an entertaining, an amusing read. Yang creates indelible characters, although he doesn’t need all of them to be realistic, three-dimensional representations of reality. Instead, he weaves together myth, stark media criticism and a emotionally moving story of an ‘American Born Chinese’ boy growing up, and not just with what seems like effortlessness. As we read through the last pages of the book we can’t help but realize that Yang has managed to tie off the various strands of his story with a sophisticated flourish that is (to be honest) quite unexpected from comic books written for children.

These strands mainly consist of three stories told separately, in alternating chapters. All three are drawn in the exact same style, differing only in small respects, if at all, which helps bring home the idea that all three stories are really only about different aspects of the same story, i.e. what it’s like to be an ‘American Born Chinese’ boy. These three stories, similar though they look, draw on different traditions, and reference different media, different ways of telling a tale. This absolves Yang from having to be openly preachy or lecturing in the most ‘realistic’ strand of the book, because he can rely on our knowledge of these modes of writing and storytelling. He knows that in our heads, all this comes together and makes sense in an obvious yet not obtrusive way. The conventions and lines of thought and plot are so clear and move the book along so quickly, that, at the end, as all three stories finally collapse into a single one, we are even slightly taken aback. This moment of explicit synthesis at the end poses more of a challenge than the separated strands did in the bulk of the book. All these aspects show that Yang is an artist both with a profound knowledge both of the extent of our knowledge of cultural termini, tropes and markers, and with the ability to use this knowledge in a way that is accessible and rewarding. American Born Chinese is a book for young adults, and it continues a trend in recent YA fiction of creating art that does not talk down to its pimpled audience, but involves them both emotionally as well as intellectually in surprising ways. The most surprising way of them all is Yang’s decision to make the final tweak, the last part, less about shock, less about hammering a moral stance into its readers. No, the final section is about art, it asks its readers to really think about the function of each of the three story lines. This is easily the most elegant, smart, self-reflexive ending I’ve read in a book targeted at young adults in a long, long time.

Much of the complexity of this derives from the first of these story strands, a re-telling of the story of the Monkey King from the Chinese classic Journey To The West. This is a novel about a monk’s pilgrimage through China to India, accompanied by his three protectors, three mythical helpers. Among them: Sun Wukong, the Monkey King. The monk barely makes an appearance in the book, which rather looks at Sun Wukong’s life before he became the monk’s protector. It tells us about how Wukong became one of the most powerful demons of his time. We see how he learns the “Arts of Kung Fu”, including the “Four Major Heavenly Disciplines”, yet when he tries to enter a dinner party for demons, spirits and gods, he is thrown out by the scruff of his neck on account of his merely being a monkey. Sun Wukong then proceeds to throw the heavens into Chaos, defeating heavenly armies, beating up Gods and so on. The diminutive monkey seethes with anger, trying to force the Gods, spirits and demons of the heavens to acknowledge him as an equal. Eventually, he uses his skills to change his shape, making himself taller and stronger of body; this change marks a difference even to his fellow monkeys, and places him, as a queer mixture of monkey and humanoid demon, between two worlds without being able to belong to either. It takes the Buddha himself to take him down a notch: after losing a challenge posed to him by the chubby deity, the Monkey King finds himself trapped for several hundred years under a mountain, until the monk comes and frees him. The story, as sketched out here, is canonical. There is little that Yang actually changed about it, it is straight myth, though told with a lightness of tone befitting the book’s audience. What is interesting is the visual aspect of it all: on the one hand, Yang’s panels crawl with a slapstick-like humor, on the other hand, his representations of demons and Gods are clearly rooted in traditional imagery, containing echoes of traditional Chinese theater masks.

In as smart a book as this, depictions of traditional masks and looks are not merely there to display ethnic roots or connections. Yang also uses them because they conform to Western readers’ expectations of how Asian cultures look, and of how traditional Asian stories would have to be told visually. The implicit light satirical criticism is enhanced by the other non-realistic story, which is introduced to us with a TV title card saying “Everyone Ruvs Chin-Kee”, accompanied by a stereotypical/racist picture of a Chinese person with buck teeth, a long black braid, a cap, sallow skin and slanted eyes. On the bottom line of the frame the word “clap” is printed several times, suggesting a clapping audience. As this first panel makes abundantly clear, we’ve entered the territory of contemporary myth here, so to say. This story is told in the form of a sitcom, with the prerequisite laughs (“ha ha” printed several times on the bottom of the ostensibly humorous frame in question), and the typical looks, postures and narrative build-ups of the genre. While Wukong’s tale was genuinely funny, this one isn’t, at all; it is a rather intense (yet not preachy) criticism of the way we represent immigrants in the media, our easy way with racial and cukltural stereotypes. While the example of “Everyone Ruvs Chin-Kee” may seem exaggerated, characters like Dr. Rajesh Koothrappali from the hit TV show Big Bang Theory (or indeed the brand new sitcom Outsourced) show that Yang is not far off his mark with this satire. More importantly, however, it sets the ‘traditionally Chinese’ masks and pictures from the Monkey King story in a context of how Asian narratives are told and framed in general. Also, the themes of belonging (or not) to groups that discriminate based on looks, of the imperfection of not being quite Godly enough in one case, or not being All-American enough in the other, these themes are raised and presented in two related, but very different ways.

All of this sets the stage for the main story, the story of Jin Wang, whose parents immigrated to the US from China. Jin Wang grew up in San Francisco first but his parents soon move to an unnamed different city, where Jin has to attend an elementary school with just one other Asian-American student. As a scrawny, differently-looking kid, he is picked on by many of the other students but seems to find a place for himself within the complicated hierarchy of school life, an achievement that is threatened when one day a first-generation immigrant boy (whom Jin calls an “F.O.B.” as in “Fresh Off the Boat”) enters the school. To survive in that school (sarkastically named “Mayflower Elementary”) means for Jin to be -or at least seem- less different than the majority around him. The new student, who speaks Chinese, and looks and acts much less like a regular American boy, is in danger of reminding the others of just how Asian (as opposed to Asian-American) Jin actually looks. But, his initial hostility eventually wanes, and he strikes up a friendship with the new boy that will even carry over into his high school years. All this is just preamble, told in a quick, almost matter of fact way. What follows is much more typical of the ordinary teenage experience and yet contrasts starkly with how the ordinary American teenager might have experienced it. Jin falls in love and, shamed by his different looks, tries to change himself into a more regular kind of teenager. This story is warm and readers of the same age group can easily relate to the woes and worries of Jin, yet unlike most of the readers, Jin runs into a wall of racism and prejudice now and then in a way that white Americans won’t. There are no easy answers for his problems and questions, and to his credit, Gene Luen Yang doesn’t try to provide them.

Instead, he uses the “Everyone Ruvs Chin-Kee” show and the Monkey King narrative as parameters of what complicates the usual American romantic high school experience (falling in love, courting, being shy and euphoric etc.) for Asian-Americans like Jin. There is tradition, in the form of tales told by grandparents, and in texts and movies one is expected to read or watch, and there is the racist incomprehension of the vagaries of ethnic (or religious) difference. Make no mistake: Yang doesn’t throw his hands up in the face of it all. The complexity of the problem is his point, and the potential that is hidden in this chaos. American Born Chinese is everything at once. An entertaining read, an insightful deliberation on immigrant experience in the US, and a seductively crafted comic. The simplicity of the forms Yang uses turn out to fit each story as if they were created especially for them. And in a way, they were. The two contextualizing stories of American Born Chinese are, at basically allegorical, and not retellings of old stories qua old stories, but modern re-creations that just contain old proper names. In this, Yang follows the tradition of books like Journey To The West, which is itself a complicated set of allegories, pretending to retell the monk’s story but really providing an intellectual and spiritual mirror for its own time. What Yang offers us are three stories of being challenged by difference, wrapped in a book that might, read by avid children all over the country, just make a difference. Read the book, buy it for others, and follow Gene Luen Yang’s career. I expect great things from him.

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Philip Roth: Nemesis

Roth, Philip (2010), Nemesis, Jonathan Cape
ISBN 978-0-224-08953-1

The World Health Organization defines poliomyelitis, also known as polio, this way:

[It] is a highly infectious viral disease, which mainly affects young children. The virus is transmitted through contaminated food and water, and multiplies in the intestine, from where it can invade the nervous system. Many infected people have no symptoms, but do excrete the virus in their faeces, hence transmitting infection to others. Initial symptoms of polio include fever, fatigue, headache, vomiting, stiffness in the neck, and pain in the limbs. In a small proportion of cases, the disease causes paralysis, which is often permanent. Polio can only be prevented by immunization.

Before being virtually eradicated in most first world countries, it wreaked havoc in all of them. To this day roughly 40.000 polio survivors still live in Germany alone. The United States have known several outbreaks of polio before in 1962 a polio vaccine was licensed and distributed. Between 1916 and the late 1950s, polio broke out practically each summer, in various areas of the country, but with varying degrees of aggressiveness. One of the most devastating outbreaks (and easily the most aggressive outbreak since 1916) was the polio epidemic of 1944, which lasted for 5 months and affected just over 17.000 cases. The powerfully frightening effect of the sickness was exacerbated by the fact that people didn’t know yet how to cure the disease or even how it was transmitted. Until the research of Jonas Salk, Albert Sabin and their colleagues bore fruit in the 1950s, polio continuously killed, maimed or at least frightened children and teenagers, as well as their overwhelmed parents. Philip Roth, born in 1933, who was 11 years old at the time of the epidemic, chose to set his most recent book in just that period of time; and as is the case in most of his other recent output, the contact with personal or national history, as well as the impact of memories and the pathos of remembrance invigorates a work that has become tired and dull of late. It’s a joy to see a master craftsman (as Roth proves himself to be even in ridiculous novels such as Everyman) infuse his writing with more than routine.

And as a result of all this, Nemesis, Philip Roth’s 31st book, is easily his best novel in ten years. It’s not perfect, and it doesn’t rise to the same heights as his very best work, but it unites both Roth’s impeccable prose craftsmanship and a compelling story and characters. In the past ten years, after publishing The Human Stain, Philip Roth waited to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. In order to achieve this, he published a short novel once a year for the last five years. All of them could be read as career summoning achievements. Exit Ghost wrapped up the Zuckerman stories, and both Indignation and The Humbling (my review) were epics of getting old, stories that featured the typical Roth protagonist (a mix between Nathan Zuckerman and David Kepesh) as he battled age and decrepitude. Bursting at the seams with a lifetime of learning and misogyny, these are each succinct summaries of Roth’s work. On the other hand, this is unfair, since his work is so much better, fresher and more powerful. In fact, some of these books, especially the miserable Everyman, read like parodies of Roth, or at least like lifeless imitations. Roth doesn’t seem to be able to reach for something new: instead he re-works his old books, and in a way his recent novels present a cruel reading of the Roth oeuvre. None of these books are worth recommending to anyone but die-hard Roth devotees. Nemesis is different. While it does rely a lot on characters and types already developed by its author in previous novels, the result (and the drama) is new, and very, very good. The two Roth novels it is probably closest to are American Pastoral and The Plot Against America, but these are resemblances that are not overt or troubling in any way. Instead, Nemesis seems to be what Roth’s previous 5-6 novels tried but failed to become: a synthesis, a summary of a strand of his work that is more than imitation or creative cut & paste.

Nemesis‘ protagonist is 23 year old Bucky Cantor, a beautiful, strong, virile man, accomplished at sports and dutiful to a fault. Bucky’s grandfather had raised him to “stand up for himself as a man and to stand up for himself as a Jew”, to have pride in what he was and to have both sturdy convictions, as well as the courage to stand by them. Bucky, in many ways, is the ideal soldier and he did attempt to join the army when WWII broke out but due to his poor eyesight he was exempted from military service. Now, in the summer of 1944, while his best friends fight Nazis in France, he is a playground director in Weequahic, Newark, New Jersey. His girlfriend, from a good Jewish family, works at a summer resort and wants him to come as well, but he is loath to abandon his duties at the playground. This reticence only deepens when suddenly kids from his playground start to come down with polio, ending up in iron lungs or dead. Bucky is at a loss how to deal with this. He talks to parents, is attentive as far as hygienic matters are concerned, he tries to look out for the kids, but polio, when it arrives in Weequahic, comes out of nowhere, an invisible enemy, impossible to fight. Early in the book, before Weequahic kids are infected, there is an opportunity to face off against a visible, tangible enemy. “[T]wo cars full of Italians” pull up and Italian boys saunter up to Bucky’s playground, declaring: “we’re spreadin’ polio”. These Italians are from a Newark slum “that had reported the most cases of polio in the city so far”, and Bucky is determined not to let them spread the sickness in his neighborhood, as well. With this confrontation, the book presents its readers with the social and political parameters the rest of the novel will then continue to use. There are the working class boys, determined not to “leave you people out”, i.e. driven by resentment against a better off, healthier part of the city. On the other hand, there are the very uptight, religious, conservative, middle-class citizens of Weequahic, who couldn’t have chosen a better champion for their cause than Bucky.

This opposition is only one side of the coin, however. With the expression “you people”, the Italian ruffians don’t of course merely mean “you rich people”. There is no doubt that “you people” is also simply short for “you Jews”. With this episode placed near the beginning of the novel, we’re soon made to be aware of two levels of signification here. There is the story of Bucky Cantor and his attempt to save the kids of his neighborhood from dying of polio. And there is a clever substructure that plays with notions connected to antisemitism and medieval jew-hate and possibly even Zionism. This is not a full-fledged allegory, rather, Roth has put a few elements into play. There is polio which is clearly a stand-in for the plague. In the Middle Ages, Jews were often scapegoats for outbreaks of the plague. They were said to poison the wells, kill Christian children, etc. In Nemesis, Roth makes two kinds of use of this vile accusation: there are the Italians, who spit on the sidewalk to bring the plague to the Jews, which reverses the situation. And then there is the reaction of the citizens of Newark once polio takes over Weequahic, turning it into the most affected neighborhood: “Some of them sound as if they think the best way to get rid of the polio epidemic would be to burn down Weequahic with all the Jews in it.” Thus, things fall apart in Nemesis. Just as the superior standing of Weequahic residents takes a dive in the course of the book, so does Bucky’s personal life. After confronting the Italians and heading them off, he is left without a clear course of action, so what he does, in a way, is to offer ministration. He visits sick children in the hospital, attends funerals, and is generally the first person to call afflicted families in order to see whether he can help. He tries to ease tensions between various groups of Weequahic residents, and gets the kids out of the glaring sun whenever possible. Small things like that.

It is no accident that Philip Roth named his protagonist “Cantor”, because Bucky fills, in a non-religious, non-musical way, the role that a cantor would play in the spiritual life of a synagogue. There’s also a certain irony in that naming: as the book progresses, and more and more children fall sick or die, Bucky loses his faith in God. Or rather, he still believes God exists, but assumes that God is evil, that, for any of the faithful, it is just a matter of time before “He sticks His shiv in their back.” The primary reason for Bucky’s bitterness is not just the dying kids. It is the insidious way that God seems to kill these children, and the cruel way that He seems to make Bucky the instrument of His murderous game. And while the people of his generation die in the war against Germany (or Japan), the younger generation is struck by invisible bullets, shot from an invisible gun. As we read on and on, Bucky’s story becomes a tragic one. The disastrous developments in the city around him are increasingly mirrored by disastrous developments within himself. There’s his loss of faith, but more importantly, there is his fear of being responsible for everything. When things come to a head in Weequahic, he finally heeds the advice of his girlfriend, and takes up a job at a summer resort far, far away from the polio-ridden streets of Newark. Only it doesn’t take very long until the first boy at that resort, this innocent-seeming paradise (that could, to take up an earlier argument, be seen as a stand-in for Israel, Jews fleeing from Antisemitism, who can’t, ultimately, flee from it because it always catches up with them), until a boy that was under Bucky’s supervision falls ill and is diagnosed with polio. This is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Henceforth, Bucky is plagued by the question “Who brought polio here if not me?” We can anticipate that this will happen, because Roth has led us there, with a light and clear narrative.

We are made to see that what happens to Bucky Cantor is, as is the case in all the classic tragedies, necessary, destined, inescapable, because of Bucky’s harmatia. His weakness is his inability to reconcile his poor eyesight with his impeccable body, his amazingly disciplined mind. His eyesight is beyond his control, he can’t will his eyes to see clearer, and so for him, there is a line that connects his body (the body that fails him) first to polio which he doesn’t understand and can’t fight, and then to God, who he can’t fight and at whose mercy he finds himself to be. The inability to deal with bodily imperfection poisons his mind so deeply and thoroughly that everything else that happens follows. It is impossible to describe how different Bucky is from Roth’s usual characters. Roth’s characters, even when they are weak, acknowledge that weakness with a swagger. There is a constant sense of superiority in them. A character who is as desperately earnest as Bucky Cantor is rare in Roth’s work. He does, however, contain characteristic traits from several characters in Roth’s oeuvre. More to the point, he appears to be a mélange of the Swede from American Pastoral and the typical Roth/Zuckermann/Kepesh persona, with added insecurities and earnestness. This focus on character flaws as leading to a tragic destiny is supported by a web of Greek allusions and influences. There is not just the eponymous Nemesis, the Greek spirit of divine retribution. Roth also constructed Bucky Cantor to correspond in several respects to Achilles, and, as with the other subtext, various elements of the story can be seen to have an equivalent in events as re-told by the Illiad or other Greek texts of the period. Apollo’s invisible arrows bringing the plague, Achilles’ unique handsomeness, and his proverbial heel, it all fits the mold.

While none of these two allusions to Antisemitism and to Greek myth, are exact, and used in a thorough manner, they are nevertheless relevant here, and more than just imaginary, because Nemesis puts a strong emphasis (as many of Roth’s novels do) on the process of storytelling, and the reliability of memory and individual stories. Nemesis is not told by Bucky, nor by an omniscient narrator. It is told by someone who was a boy when all this happened. The narrator, for almost the complete novel, is invisible. He refers to himself only once when naming three infected boys, including himself among them. At the end of the book, however, he breaks off the narrative, and returns us to a more contemporary setting. He tells us how he encountered Bucky many years later, and how Bucky then told him his story, which he, in turn, relates to us. In a way, we, Bucky and the narrator are part of a sophisticated game of Chinese whispers, and the mythical and historical parallels and allusions remind us of the fact that Bucky’s story is told to us in a highly complex, clever and accomplished way. How many real people actually resemble Achilles? Really, Nemesis is about the loss of childhood illusions, the loss of unfettered belief in the invincibility of admired authority figures, the loss of security as we enter a life of uncertainties, a world of violence, death and warring faiths. Although the story is literarily heightened, the book still presents a stark look at history, and unlike his previous exercises in considering history, Roth really comes though, this time. There is no sugarcoating at the end, no comforting adage or twist. Nemesis is bleak, moving, and marvelously written. Yes, it is too careful, too timid, too conventional to be great, but it is a very good novel about growing up in the modern world, and the interconnection of American history with Antisemitism, myth and archetype.

A short personal note (January 2013). As I am trying to finish two manuscripts and getting back into reviewing books, I have a hospital bill to pay off, which means all kinds of issues for me. If you have a buck or two to spare, I would be more than thankful. There is a paypal button on the right hand side of this page. That’s just in case you feel charitable. As it is, I am happy enough about every single one of my readers. There are more of you than I ever expected, even through the dry months in the past year, and I am thoroughly humbled. Thank you all.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o: Weep not, Child

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1972), Weep not, Child, Heinemann
ISBN 0-435-90007-2

Frantz Fanon once wrote that “decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.” And in the work of acclaimed Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o this relationship between the historical process and the necessary and unnecessary violence that accompanies it, is always clear, visible and foregrounded, along with issues of religion and culture. This does not mean that he is a one-dimensional writer. The breadth and power of his work is extraordinary. Ngũgĩ, who, until 1970, was called James Ngũgĩ, has produced fiction, non-fiction and drama at a steady pace, creating a singular body of work and becoming one of Africa’s best and most important writers; actually, he’s become well known and respected throughout the literary world for his many excellent novels, or his essays or his plays. To delve into his work, to look at his speeches and essays, to listen to the voices of his characters can be an invigorating experience. His most well known novels are probably A Grain of Wheat (1967), Petals of Blood (1977) and the recent Wizard of the Crow (2004). As the first two of these books show, Ngũgĩ is a writer who draws directly on history, his narratives are infused by and to no small extent dependent on historical and cultural contexts. Both novels deal with recent Kenyan history, with the Mau Mau rebellion and Kenya’s first year as an independent nation. The third book, a satirical fantasy, is somewhat different. There’s another difference: the third of these books has been originally published in Gĩkũyũ, a Kenyan language. James Ngũgĩ rejected his Christian name and the English language in favor of a Gĩkũyũ name and a career of writing in the Gĩkũyũ language. This is entirely consistent with his political thinking. In the late 1960s, Ngũgĩ became an adherent of Marx and Frantz Fanon, influences which did not just shape his political thinking, but also his writing, and his attitude towards language, translation and related cultural issues.

This shift seems rather obvious if we look at the highly politicized fiction Ngũgĩ keeps publishing, fiction that not only led to his own imprisonment and eventual exile, but also to people like his Gĩkũyũ publisher Henry Chacava living dangerous lives. But to examine Ngũgĩ’s debut novel Weep not, Child, published in 1964, pre-Fanon, by a young university student, is to notice the continuities in his work. Although it was not the first novel he had written, it was in fact the first to be published and despite its many flaws, it’s an impressive work of art. What’s more, it demonstrates political and social concerns that have become constant themes of Ngũgĩ’s work since. It would be facile to identify the politics in his books from 1967 onwards with the influence of Marxism and Fanonism. He would be a less impressive, less powerful, less great writer if his political and social insights could be reduced to the influence of two very specific ideologies. Any close reading of Weep not, Child will conclude that Ngũgĩ’s critical instincts are merely very close to the positions held by Marxism, and while Marxism did help to focus and develop his instincts and his thinking, the seeds of it were already there, in his observations of the post-colonial landscape in Kenya. Ngũgĩ is not primarily a political thinker and his power and importance is not in the strength or insight of that thinking, but it is part and parcel of his literary craft, and for a writer to dip so deeply into history, a certain level of political and historical insight is necessary in order to pull it off. Ngũgĩ’s work manages to work with raw historical materials without sacrificing literary complexity, marrying both a sense of urgency and an aesthetic appreciation for the art of the novel. And his essays, in collections like Writers in Politics and Homecoming, for example, are worth reading for the same reason. His earlier essays suffer a bit from a back stiffened by jargon, but in everything I read of his, his urgent, beautiful voice shines through.

And reading several of his novels chronologically, one notices that Ngũgĩ is a serious, careful writer: in his work there appears to be a hunger for accuracy, and a willingness to switch through different perspectives, different periods to get it just right, see things, and the process of history in just the right light. And yet, in so many ways, he did get it right, right off the bat, in his first published novel. Weep not, Child is a thin book, a mere 154 pages, and yet, between the first and the last page, a whole world has fallen apart. Like many African novels, including recent ones like Ondjaki’s Bom Dia Camaradas (2001), Ngũgĩ makes use of the perspective of a high school student who witnesses his country’s disintegration, sees how order around him, i.e. school and family order, collapse, give way to violence, fear and outrage. The novel’s protagonist, Njoroge, is a bright and talented student. The novel begins with his entering school, and throughout his academic career he will be at the top of his class, excelling because he’s driven by a thirst for knowledge and by an obligation to succeed. Because, for him, education is a rare privilege. It’s expensive, and not necessarily usual for a boy his age with his background to attend several schools and to learn English, and history and other things. It is no accident that Ngũgĩ’s novel begins with Njoroge’s “unspoken wish, his undivulged dream” to have an education, to attend school. For Kenyans and other African writers of Ngũgĩ’s time, Western-style education was important, as was Christian culture. And Njoroge is in no position to resist that appeal, that, as Nigerian critic Obi Walli wrote, “uncritical acceptance of English and French as the inevitable medium of educated African writing.” Major writers such as Soyinka and Achebe continued to write in English, who was a small village boy to think otherwise? In fact, Ngũgĩ himself had not switched over to Gĩkũyũ yet, and he had not yet developed a strong resistance to Christian doctrine. In 1964, when he composed his debut novel, Ngũgĩ still played by the rules.

Seen in this light, it’s all the more remarkable that the novel itself already displays a deep suspicion towards the merits of Western education in a shifting political landscape, of going to school in a time when one’s country is exploited by white settlers, when you are governed by a political structure that can at best be called ‘feudal’. Njoroge loves school, and he quickly cottons to religion, but at the same time the world around him keeps reminding him of the limits of the world that learning and faith constructs. In a series of harsh little vignettes, Njoroge is shown the cruelty and brutality of political change. At the same time, the book doesn’t really pontificate, it is not a straightforward political screed, instead seems bent inward, crooked with though, exploring the paradoxes that Njoroge is entangled in, the conflicts arising from his place in his society and his individuality and quest for personal knowledge and growth. In a way, it seems a product of ongoing thought, not of finished speech. The book is not as surefooted as his later works, not half as cocky and adventuresome as his later non-fiction. This is not yet the writer who would, in 1970, stand in front of the Assembly of the Presbyterian Church and declare: “I am not even a Christian”, and assert that “in Kenya, [Christianity] was built on the inequality and hatred between men and the consequent subjugation of the black race by the white race.” Instead, the Ngũgĩ of Weep not, Child decides to weigh the issues, letting them simmer while the country around his protagonist burns in the fire of the Mau Mau rebellion. For Njoroge, the rebellion is doubly important: additionally to whatever effect this may have on the country as a whole, members of his family are personally involved in the whole business. His father, a proud farmer, believes in prophecies and in the fact that the Kenyan land will eventually be returned to its rightful owners, the Kenyan people. Except for one massive angry outburst, he is a Gandhi-like figure, resisting passively, suffering enormous pain for his cause without inflicting like pain on his opponents.

Njoroge’s brothers, though, trained as they are by the British army (having fought in both World Wars for them), are experienced killers, and quick to temper. Angered by the racist policies and treatment accorded to black Kenyan’s, they end up, quickly enough, in the front line of the rebellion, shooting officials, being captured, escaping. They have little patience either for their father’s mule-headed passivity, nor for their brother’s interest in knowledge, faith and English. It is not by accident that I have mentioned male characters exclusively, so far. The feudal reign of the British, and the raw violence unleashed on both sides finds an odd equivalent in the patriarchal structure of Kenyan society. This is a society that doesn’t just know and accept polygamy, but one that also practices female genital mutilation. Frankly, I was shocked by the offhand, careless way that Ngũgĩ seems to treat this horrifying practice (and the lack of moral stance towards it in books that put a stronger emphasis on it, like his second published novel The River Between which looks at the conflict between tribal tradition and modern mores) but this lack of attention is highly important for the novel, it makes it, oddly, better, because it’s part of its queer ambiguities, and of the issues that the book explores and critiques. Njoroge, his father and his brothers are all representative of various kinds of masculine ways to act. Some are seen as virtuous and praiseworthy, others are ultimately regarded as so despicable, so craven and cowardly, that Njoroge, the man acting that way, will end up trying to hang himself. The last paragraph of the novel effectively denies him his masculinity, confirms his weakness. Ngũgĩ is clearly interested in this aspect of gender. Like other excellent poets of revolutionary history such as Heiner Müller, Ngũgĩ seems unable to discuss historical turbulence without connecting it to gender issues, unable to discuss public structures without connecting them to private ones. In this light, the offhand use of female genital mutilation, of gender stereotypes and of polygamist family structures perfectly fits the violent, feudal society they take place in. As does the language. Of all the elements of the book, Ngũgĩ’s language was probably what was most vexing and strange for me as a reader.

The language is extremely simple, yet not colloquial. At times it reads like a high school essay, with its short sentences, the limping rhythm of the prose and the stilted, unnatural dialogue. It seems like a quick, interlinear translation, done without a thought for how the finished product might sound in the target language. For that reason alone, the first dozen pages can be a chore to read, but as we read on, the book suddenly hits its stride. Not because the style is so much better later, but because the odd style starts to coalesce, it starts to make sense. The book is largely written in free indirect speech, yet it’s not focused on Njoroge alone, and still the voice doesn’t change much. The reason for this is that Ngũgĩ has, in a way, created an omniscient-seeming narrator who is actually rather limited, a simple man, sharing perhaps Njoroge’s kind of education and sophistication. This way, Ngũgĩ manages to write about poor and simple people without any condescension, and create a narrative framework and a narrative logic that is not that of an outsider and we as readers are allowed to partake of that logic. The narrator and the protagonist are both a bit distanced from the main action of the book, onlookers, thus allowing us to see and feel, but not forcing us to do so. Ngũgĩ has created a ponderous, ambiguous little book, one where the author leaves various plot elements and bits of landscape and furniture comment on one another without creating a necessity for explicit or brash authorial comments. As readers, what we are left with is a terribly entangled situation, one where removing one elements comes at the cost of destabilizing another, where everything is connected and any call for change would have to take into account the whole situation. As Jomo Kenyatta, anthropologist and first President of Kenya, wrote in his very readable book Facing Mount Kenya (1938): “For the present, it is impossible for a member of the [Gĩkũyũ] tribe to imagine an initiation without clitoridectomy” (a position also held by people like Leonard Woolf). Neither Kenyatta nor Ngũgĩ are, of course, defenders of the practice, but issues like these demonstrate the intractable nature of many cultural conflicts arising in the wake of decolonization. Given these tensions the ensuing violence is hardly surprising, and writing about that kind of violence is difficult and has led to the creation of more bad than good books. Weep not, Child, its title echoing both Walt Whitman and Stephen Crane, is not merely a good book. It is also the first novel of a prodigious career. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has turned into one of the best living novelists, and one of our most urgent and committed political thinkers. Because the seeds of his work are all already on board, and because it is a fine novel in its own right, Weep not, Child is a book well worth reading.

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Hilary Mantel: An Experiment In Love

Mantel, Hilary (2004), An Experiment in Love, Harper
ISBN 0-00-717288-5

During the past year, it was hard to escape articles about or interviews with Hilary Mantel. Almost unanimous critical praise for her most recent novel Wolf Hall, a flood of praise and attention which culminated in her winning, among other things, the 2009 Booker Prize, and did not abate for months after that. I was, erroneously, under the impression that Mantel was some sort of historical novelist, given that Wolf Hall (and the next novel, according to some interviews I read), as well as A Place of Greater Safety are about periods long past, taking place on the territory of the historical romance. So I was startled to find that Mantel has indeed written books in a more contemporary setting, although imbued by a vivid sense of history and the interconnectedness and roots of community. One of these books, her 1995 novel An Experiment in Love, is an absolute marvel of a book. I may have the tendency to be too effusive in my reviews, but books like this one deserve all the adulation, praise and wonderment we can muster. Mantel’s book, set in 1970s Britain, is about a young girl’s or woman’s process of growing up, and growing into adult life. That sounds simple, and in many ways, the book is committed to a certain efficient simplicity. There are no extraneous plot strands, no superfluous characters, everything is part of Mantel’s overarching vision, and her small coterie of characters and places fit each into their assigned places in that vision without straining the overall control and structure. The book’s intentions are, one might say, small-scale. The historical view of the British 1970s is particular and careful. There are no sweeping panoramas of society, no large disquisitions on the state of politics and there is no need to provide a variety of naturalistic ‘slices of life’ for Hilary Mantel. There is just Carmel McBain, her protagonist, and what happens to her during her final years at school and first years at university. My ability to contextualize her life are naturally limited, yet for several reasons, her life rings true and is absolutely believable. The conclusion of the book, and the way it wraps up the whole epoch and a section of female experience, is all the more devastating. An Experiment in Love is a great novel. It may seem small, in more than one way, but it most certainly is not. It is a novel that is both economically written and readable, smart and moving, authentic yet densely constructed.

The plot is roughly chronological, but contains so many flashbacks that it, in effect, takes place on three different levels. The most obvious and most direct are Carmel’s university years. We follow her as she finds her room in the dormitory at London University and leave her years later, as she has matured, both in matters of love as well as academically. This account is threaded through and through with flashbacks to her time at school, first at a regular school, and then at a posh Catholic grammar school to prepare her for university. Each phase of her life, school, grammar school and university adds at least one significant person to her life, and when, at the end of the books, events come to a head, she is, in a way, forced to look through the ranks of the friends and acquaintances she has acquired and understand their role in her life and how her life is connected to theirs. The person who seems most significant at the end, whether in a good or a bad way I won’t divulge just yet, is Karina, the first friend she makes at school, who will accompany her throughout grammar school and university. At times, in the book, the two levels, university and school, seem to run alongside, but not only are the school days more often framed as flashbacks. There’s also the fact that Carmel has to explain to fellow university/dorm students the odd behavior of Karina, and the book never quite distinguishes between remembered history and re-told history, dependent on the contextual use of that telling. All this is further complicated by the fact that a third level exists, beside school and university days. That third level is the present day. The first sentence of the novel is “This morning in the newspaper I saw a picture of Julia.” The narrator here is Carmel, and on that third level, we never leave “this morning” and since there are no indicators as to when exactly “this morning” is, we are led to believe that it is roughly the time of the book’s publication, i.e. 1995. The present day narrative is a sort of frame story for the whole book, providing not just bridges and segues between the different smaller episodes, and between school and university years. That means it is difficult to really persist in calling the schooltime narrative ‘flashbacks’, because not all of them are.

Some are memories dredged up by the present day narrator, some are remembered by the university-era narrator (as remembered by the present day narrator) and some are told to fellow university-era friends. If I make it all sound complicated, that’s not how the reader experiences the book, which is a smooth and supple read. However, Hilary Mantel shows herself to be a consummate prose writer and her elaborate narrative structure helps her touch on several registers and evoke different emotions and appeal to different readers without really compromising any single narrative. Also, it is important to note that Mantel’s protagonist addresses an audience. There is no explicit listener in the frame narrative, but through devices such as procatalepsis, the narrator often pre-empts and adresses objections her readers might have. We as readers are taken by the hand, we are part of a dialogue. This is important because, in fact, communication, connectivity, is a central concern of the book. This book is not merely about Carmel McBain and her friends Julia and Karina. This book tries to be about far more: a book on the female experience at the beginning of the Thatcher era. To manage that, the book mixes two different kinds of écritures. There’s authentic, almost memoirist writing, and there is artfully heightened near-allegorical writing. The first is Mantel’s way in, her basic connection of the material to the time and to actual female experience. Of course, there’s a distancing moment, and of course plots and devices further that distance, but the multiple re-framing of memory as detailed above lets the reader see a life, though told by one and the same person, from similar but different angles. A certain simplicity inasmuch as details are concerned, are part of this. Although a high amount of details adds to the convention of realism, furthers the verisimilitude, no-one actually remembers so much. Construction, and re-interpretation in hindsight is obvious in such stories. Mantel however focuses on just a few details, just a few aspects and problems, and so, in an uncluttered language, in uncluttered rooms, we are closer to the devastation that her time, her education and her fellow Brits wreak on her. There are a handful of themes which the book pursues doggedly, without distractions, without indulgence, yet wrapped in soft and clear English. This kind of writing is supported by the near-allegorical elements. Most of the plot elements do double shifts as tropes or allegories.

It is really difficult not to read everything as being there not because it is remembered as having happened or having been there, but to signify something to the reader. Whole dialogues sometimes have an otherworldly sheen to them. This, however, does not lessen the authentic impression of the book at all, which is a very impressive achievement. These two levels additionally, implicitly, address a certain androcentric bias in Bildungsroman literature and in the tropes surrounding the genre. One of the ways that the book does that is by developing one of is characters consistently as a villain. One of the girls is odd, mean, and growing fatter each year. She’s zaftig but stingy. One memorable scene has her scarfing noodles without even adding butter, all the while growling at her best friend. We should empathize with her: she helped the protagonist now and then in school, she takes care of her mother, and because of her dialect and her foreign looks, as well as because of her increasing girth, she’s an outcast. At the same time, the book does not want or allow us to do that, pushing the stereotypical villainous description. She is both a person we should like, as far as the authentic, realistic level is concerned, but one we don’t like, almost as a direct result of the literarily heightened structure and the way her character is related to us, the audience. That girl does something terrible at the end, but in a moving, and hard twist at the end, we are not allowed to single her out for derision. “This is where we went wrong”, the narrator says, in the frame narrative, a “we” that includes all the women of her generation. And the illness, the problem, the great plague that the narrator sees as emerging from that period is not villainous meanness, or any act of individual violence, but “Slimmer’s Disease”, anorexia, an disorder that Carmel herself suffers from during her university days. This juxtaposition of a complex analysis of what’s wrong with her generation, and a subtle use of tropes usually used in androcentric narratives reinforces the problematic at the heart of the novel: the pressures of becoming a woman in modern Britain, and the difficulties of writing authoritatively about it. These pressures can, again, be divided two ways: class issues, and issues concerning the female body. Easiest to discuss is probably class.

Carmel hails from Lancashire, up north. When she enters university in 1970, Lancastershire is the most populous British district, and one closely associated with working class values, and an industrial landscape. Before a reform in 1974, both Manchester and Liverpool were part of Lancashire, and going south means escaping all that, building a better future for yourself. Carmel’s mother tries to make her daughter apply for Oxbridge, but Carmel eventually goes to a college in London. Be that as it may, it is still respectable, and still a way out of the same old, same old. Additionally, this is a time on the brink. In 1970, a Tory prime minister was elected (Carmel says “It wasn’t my fault, I wasn’t old enough to vote.”), and the Tory party runs on a platform that will eventually turn into Thatcherism. Thatcher wasn’t elected until 1979, but the roots of her politics can be found in the years covered by An Experiment in Love. Mantel, without lapsing into complaints, does an excellent job in detailing how poor and affluent families are part of different cultures and of the pressures at work in each of them. Ultimately though, all the women are on equal footing as far as their bodies are concerned. Although love plays a role in the book, bodies play a larger role by far. Bodies, that is, not in a general way, but specifically bodies as they come into play at the crossroads of experience. Among the two most central experiences involving bodies are pregnancy and hunger. Hunger is, of course, also hunger for success, hunger for public recognition, but hunger here is also the self-imposed hunger that self-consciousness and stress can effect. In the discussion of the Slimmer’s Disease that begins and ends the book, hunger is further elevated to the status of a general problem. It ties into the class problem, of course, since for Carmel, food competes with clothes and train tickets and is not taken for granted. But it’s also a matter of self-preservation, a sign of self-respect, and it directly corresponds to how the world reacts to you. The people in the novel can be arranged to how they feed their bodies, how they react to hunger. Bodies, without Mantel having to stoop to preaching, or obsessing, are a battleground here, and appearances are key, oddly enough for a novel in a tradition that emphasized interiority.

But interiority is most easy to achieve for the unmarked, and confirms structures and strictures at work in society, interiority, for all the seductiveness it can bring, is often deaf to the din of other voices, other people, other minds. Hilary Mantel isn’t, and An Experiment in Love is a wonderfully open, important, tough book. There are far more aspects to it than I was able to mention, as for example its treatment of politics (with traces of Doris Lessing’s reminiscences) and of religion, as well as of issues like marriage, knowledge and learning. Mantel is a grand writer, who is able to expertly manipulate both private and public registers, a craftsman in full control of her craft, and a dear, moving novelist, to boot. Read this book.

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Lisa Moore: February

Moore, Lisa (2010), February, Chatto & Windus
ISBN 9780701184902

February is the first book off this year’s Booker longlist I finished, and I am not happy. Luckily, it was not shortlisted. Originally published by House of Anansi Press in 2009, this novel, Canadian novelist Lisa Moore’s third offering to date, is an interesting little critter though. In slightly more than 300 pages, Moore attempts to present an account of loss to her readers, the loss suffered by a family when Cal O’Mara, husband and father, suddenly dies in a terrible accident, leaving a surprisingly large family. In a flurry of short chapters, Moore shuffles her reader through different points in time, looking not just at the fateful day when the family learned of Cal’s death, but at various small events between that day and the day, 16 years later, when his son becomes a father himself. This sequence of events suggests a saccharine ‘circle of life’ kind of rhetoric and structure, but Moore tries her utmost to sidestep this danger. Most noticeably, the sequence of events does not directly correspond to the sequence of chapters in the novel as the reader jumps back and forth between various points in time until dates start to matter less and less as various events start to develop a kind of synchronicity. Moore doesn’t dwell on the details of the accident, they are important only inasmuch as they matter to Helen O’Mara, Cal’s widow, and her process of grieving. Her focus on small everyday details and emotionally fraught observations function as attempts to ground Helen’s grief in a common understanding of depression and emotional duress. We feel with Helen because we recognize parts of what she is going through. At the same time, the book scorns actual realism, unfolding, rather, like a strange, melancholic dream. All this is interesting, intriguing, even, but Moore isn’t content with letting her material work its magic on its own, and so she laces her writing with sentences that try too hard, structuring her chapters like short stories aiming for the utmost effect. This makes for many moments that are at best precious, at worst terribly, terribly annoying.

On 15th February, 1982, the oil rig Ocean Ranger sank 267 kilometers east of Newfoundland. All 84 men who had worked on it died as a Rogue wave struck the cumbersome vessel and caused a chain reaction of malfunctions, that ultimately led to the rig’s capsizing and striking the bottom of the ocean. February looks at the aftermath of the Ocean Ranger disaster, taking a fictive family to illustrate the plight of the 84 families who were devastated by the events during Valentine’s night, 1982. In her acknowledgments, Moore tells us that she has researched this incident thoroughly, and throughout the book the only obvious inventions are the O’Mara family members themselves. All the details of the oil rig sinking seem/are genuine and well-researched. Given the recent oil spill catastrophe in the gulf of Mexico, Moore’s novel might seem oddly timely and prescient, but on the other hand, ecological concerns play at best a very minor role in a book that is concerned with the impact of such catastrophes on those who are left behind, the workers’ families. In fact, Moore’s book doesn’t need the exact incident in order to work, its emotional gambits are relatively independent of this exact incident, there is nothing in it that is intrinsic to this specific catastrophe. On the other hand, once picked, Moore makes the best out of the material at hand. She -excuse the pun- floods her book with maritime images and metaphors, linking her novel to a vast and rich literary tradition that contains the Bible, Herman Melville, Anatole France and countless more recent books (think The Perfect Storm). This, though, feels added to the book. Reading the book, we get an odd feeling of incongruity: on the one hand there is the emotional, personal aspect. With occasional flashes of great emotional insight, Moore works on the particulars of everyday feelings, confronted with loss and age, with childbirth and responsibility, with love and heartbreak. Her voice is very well suited to express this kind of discourse.

This has its advantages and disadvantages. Lisa Moore opts for short sentences, writing, now and then, almost punchlines, but basically, her unsubtle and sentimental use of short sentences is yet another instance of the the stylistic miasma that Hemingway popularized in Western literature. Short, trenchant sentences that clearly aim for depth and miss far too often. It’s raining. We never slept. Fall apart. Not all sentences are like that, but Moore scatters them strategically throughout the book, and after a while, we read even hypotactic phrases with a glum low note at the end. To enforce these kinds of readings, Moore also often replaces the question mark at the end of a question with a full stop, giving her readers no choice but to strike a low note again. The same effect is produced by her constant need to repeat bits and pieces of dramatic monologue or dialogue, but in a shorter, glum voice. What’s more, from the evidence of this novel alone, Moore’s literary talent seems to be closer to the short than the long form. Almost all of the short little chapters are structured like short stories, and what’s worse, short stories tailored on O’Henry’s and Hemingway’s example. They tend to end on moody, emotional last paragraphs or even phrases, and they are weirdly closed affairs, in the sense that many of them produce puns and repetitions and allusions that point not to other places in the book, but that are restricted within the individual chapter. All of this is evidence of strong attention to craft and structure: there’s nothing accidental about these things, as they all feed into the overall mood and emotions of the book. Isolation, loneliness, fear are pervasive everywhere, and with this deft move, Moore manages to compare the surviving family emotionally with their husband and father who died hundreds of kilometers away from the coast, dying of hypothermia in the vastness of the ocean. If this sounds complex: it’s not really. In tone and depth, the book is closer to bestseller epics of the quotidian, for example Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones books, Nick Hornby’s mush or any book from Sophie Kinsella’s growing repertoire.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, I think that February works best if you can connect to it in some way, if you recognize some of the details. I mean, despite a certain touch of the clichéd, I think many observations, while realized in cheaply sentimental writing, do hit their targets. The way the protagonist worries about aging and attractiveness, the way children can cling to their mother or become strangers to her, and small details, the smells of cooking, and everyday sounds rebounding off the walls of family homes. The plot isn’t as important as the characters are and their observations and the relationships between the characters. There is Helen, widowed by the sinking of the rig. Helen is no idealized wife, we know that there are tensions between Helen and Cal, and in the face of his death, she doesn’t behave as we would expect. She is helpless enough to allow her oldest son John to take over as head of the household. Despite being barely a teenager, he quickly assumes responsibility, starts to work early, and matures within few years. This rapid emotional and personal growth has left him scarred. His mother’s weakness didn’t leave him an opportunity to come to grips with his father’s death, and so he grew into a man who was afraid of open water, yet also a man determined to achieve anything he wanted. Highly successful professionally, we are led to assume that his personal relationships with the other sex are slightly aloof, and stop short of commitment. When an affair of his (the relationship lasted all of a week) tells him she’s pregnant, John panics and turns to his mother for advice. This is how the book starts. As a character, John is less well realized than his mother, and I think that the book, although it is about a circle of life coming together, and a deeply wounded family coming, finally, to terms with Cal’s death. See, although the small chapters are not linked by a narrator and although each chapter is related from the point of view of the specific character which that particular chapter focuses on, I couldn’t rid myself of the feeling that most of this, in a way, takes place within Helen’s upset mind.

Or within her dreams and memories. Because here is another aspect of the book that fascinated me: the way that Moore weaves this tale of ordinary loss and emotional empathy into a highly literary web. Yes, observations and language are pretty down-to-earth, but within all this lurks a very literary sensibility. The moodiness and gloom, the surfeit of maritime images, allusions and metaphors, and the way that not just the chapters, but the whole book is like a mirror cabinet, references pointing to points within the novel rather than outside. This book, explicitly written with a real catastrophe in mind, based on sound research, seems, at times, almost like a fantasy. I think Moore herself realizes the strenuous and difficult relationship her book has to the real world and extra-literary facts: towards the end of the book, Helen first tells us about the incident by paraphrasing witnesses from another ship that was ready to pick up survivors. Then, after a paragraph that ends, typically, with a three-word phrase (“He is gone.”), Helen shifts gears and tells us: “But this is not a true account of what Cal faces, and Helen knows it. It’s better to keep to the true story [...].” What follows is an imaginative account of Cal’s last hours, not based on witnesses, but based on speculation and empathy. And here’s the fun part: we know that Cal, unlike his rig, is an invention, and the description of his death is anything but “the true story”. The part before was crammed with real world facts. This complete reversal of facticity in a book that uses, remember, the actual name of a real catastrophe, is endlessly fascinating. What Moore offers us is a different kind of truth, a poetic truth, and she liberally, and not without deftness and skill, employs the tools of her trade to get at this special truth. The dreaminess, the internal consistency of images and metaphors, the almost allegorical way plots unfold, all this is not in the service of being precise in a realistic way, it is in the service of being as truthful as possible, and more truthful than simple realism would allow for.

And while all this is interesting, and well realized, it clashes massively with the direct, realistic way her characters experience all this. Lisa Moore wants to have the cake and eat it too. She wants to write characters that are believable, that are realistic, that her readers can connect to instantly; and at the same time she wants to fill the gap in the known facts with poetry, with literary flourishes. She manages to do the first by sacrificing literary artifice and produces, to my ear, third rate sentimental mush that depends on emotional contact in order to work. She manages to do the second by sacrificing realism. The result is a book that is smaller than it could be, less powerful than it should be, and not a very good book overall. It’s not a bad book, by all means, but one can’t shake the impression that Moore has shrunk it on purpose to fit her goals. It’s not enough for me. It might be enough for you. It will not rattle your cage. It will not change your life. You’ll probably not reread it nor recommend it to others. It’s a small book with a huge subject. It may be enough for some readers. That’s the best I can say.

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Alan Moore and Oscar Zarate: A Small Killing

Moore, Alan; Oscar Zarate (2003), A Small Killing, Avatar Press
ISBN 1-59291-009-2

Alan Moore is one of the titans of the comic book industry and probably the best living writer in the business, especially after Frank Miller went off the rails. Unlike a few of the leading writers/artists of alternative comics (if you read this blog regularly, you’ll know I am a raving fan of Charles Burns’ and Jeff Smith’s work), Moore managed, throughout his career, to touch on a truly vast array of notes and genres, and rare is the unsuccessful book penned by Moore. With whatever artist he collaborated, whether he worked on a creator-owned book or for DC Comics, whether he wrote an elegiac Superman story or the pornographic narratives of Lost Girls, Moore always came through and produced a standout work, one that was both recognizably his, and that gave the artists he worked with the space and freedom to shine, as well. A Small Killing is no exception to this rule. Originally published in 1991, it is a fascinating work of art, both a compelling story, as well as a intriguing, seductive, colorful maelstrom of a comic. Both the writing and the art are exceptional, and the overall product, short as it is, is a tremendously powerful, awfully dense political and creative statement, which is both completely original, and full of echoes to contemporary and more classical art and literature. Although its content seems mired in the 1980s, since it tells a story about a yuppie’s nervous breakdown, replete with cultural and political criticism of 80s politics, it actually exchanges the narrow scope of contemporary reference for history and psychology. It is not surprising that this book has been repeatedly picked up by various publishers and been reprinted several times since the 1991 edition, then published by Victor Gollancz, dropped out of circulation. This book is both terrific and terrifying, and it’s an understatement to say I recommend it to everyone.

In the coming weeks, I will also review Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing enthusiastically, but one of the most interesting things about A Small Killing is the fact that, unlike, say, Swamp Thing or Supreme, it’s really not a graphic novel tailored to and of primary interest for readers of the genre. The reason for this is mostly Oscar Zarate’s stunning art. Zarate’s pages, if one associates them with other artists in the industry at all, reminded me most of José Munoz’ (who is probably the main influence on Zarate) or Bill Sienkiewicz’ work (say, Electra: Assassin or Stray Toasters). But while the latter is a well-known artist with a thick portfolio of excellent and popular work, many, like me, will draw a blank where the name of Oscar Zarate is concerned. Even searches in online venues come up almost empty. Reading them we learn he has illustrated a handful of books, penciled a few short stories and co-created A Small Killing. While it’s hardly surprising that a masterpiece like this would overshadow the rest of an artist’s work, it is indeed odd that there doesn’t appear to be much of a ‘rest’ if one’s resumé includes work as singular and powerful as this. To return to the book at hand, the first thing you notice is that Zarate did not, as is usual in the genre, pencil, ink and color the panels, Instead, he appears to have painted it. Indeed, the contours and depth that an inker works with, the use a good inker makes of different degrees of clarity and visibility, of shadows, of light- and of darkness, Zarate hands over to colors. The strongest contours in A Small Killing are those of Zarate’s intrepid pencil and what appears to be a very fine ink brush. Some panels are almost exclusively penciled, with few colors entering the hailstorm of leaden lines, some seem to be completely in color, with contrast between different fields of color as the only kind of contour and boundary. From panels I found elsewhere on the web, I gather that this is, indeed, Zarate’s style, and that other writers have had comics created for them that looked similar.

However, the combination of a lack of a large back catalog of work, and the singular nature of this book right here made me feel this this style was created just for this story, these characters. The small fact that it wasn’t isn’t really important. Fact is, Moore wrote a story that Zarate’s art fit like a glove, and vice versa. It is not often that calling an artist a co-creator makes as much sense as it does here. It is almost impossible to say whose contribution is more important for the overall effect of the book, but Zarate’s style seems most specific to the kind of writing and thinking that A Small Killing represents, especially the way that Zarate’s swirling, disturbingly slanted art recalls early 20th century artists like Otto Dix but especially Max Beckmann (pre-1930s). Of course, Zarate’s work is very comic-like in the simple garishness of some of his colors and the lack of figural complexities, but the basic structure of the colors and the way he treats characters and actions in individual panels are highly reminiscent of Beckmann’s work especially where Beckmann depicts groups of people in bars. I found it impossible to read this book quickly, I think it needs to be savored page by page, and not only those pages that include a crowd tableau. Zarate slips his protagonist in and out of the artwork, sometimes as a blueish character in front of a screechingly orange mob, sometimes merging with crowds or background, sometimes threatened by erasure. Faceless sketches of people are inserted and glorious full-page visions. There’s really everything here, but the strongest part, and arguably the most important part for how the story is perceived and read, is the way Zarate treats crowds: a nameless mass of grotesque gluttony and vapid sensationalism. The slants and lights in many of those images make it impossible not to think of Dix or Beckmann.

Here the undecidability concerning Moore’s and Zarate’s contributions kicks in again, because part of that association may also be due to Moore’s story. Moore wrote, as many writers in the late 1980s and earlyy1990s, a harsh indictment of the shallow and chintzy 1980s culture. Of these writers, the most successful was probably Martin Amis, who rose to fame on the strength of his 1980s satires. But Amis’ brand of topical writing doesn’t always suit Moore very well. He doesn’t have Amis’ narrow obsession with the smallness of minds, or Amis’ bitterly biting pen. It’s not that Moore doesn’t try to be topical now and then, but he’s always best when the topical bleeds over into the allegorical, mystical, strange or the plain personal. Lucky for us as readers, and for A Small Killing, this is exactly what he does here, and it’s one of the main reasons why the book is still so readable today. Unlike Amis, Moore is a generous, easily puzzled writer, and this insecurity and openness enables him to write tales about the abyss in us and our culture without damning it all to hell. The story is simple enough, but engineered in a complex manner. It involves Timothy Hole (which is “pronounced ‘Holly’, actually”, “it’s a sort of English thing”), a middle-aged yuppie who works in advertising, and is quite talented at it. As Hole lands a new job and a great contract, marketing a fictional soda (a stand-in, quite explicitly, for Coca Cola or Pepsi) to Glasnost-era Russia. This set-up, and a few stray lines here and there may make the reader think of Billy Wilder’s One, Two, Three (1961) but laughs are scarcer in Moore’s and Zarate’s book. Bewildered by the difficulties this job entails, Hole suffers a nervous breakdown and encounters a small boy, apparently bent on killing him. After appearing in the middle of the road one dark evening, causing Hole to swerve and crash, he appears to follow him, menacingly, for the rest of the book. Hole develops a paranoia, screaming whenever he’s sure to have caught a glimpse of the unknown dark-haired child, sweating with fear whenever he doesn’t see him.

There would be a Twilight Zone-style cheesiness to this mysterious boy, if Moore hadn’t made sure that we all knew pretty soon who that boy was. So instead of hurrying through the book to find out what would happen to the book’s protagonist, we watch as the environment changes around Hole’s increasingly frantic mind, and we follow the flashbacks down their path to Hole’s past. Hole, who is from Sheffield, which is a British industrial town that aw its industry fail in the 1980s, moved first to London and then to New York. Mad with terror, Hole retraces his steps in the present to the places of his past, flying first to London, then taking the train to a more affluent part of Sheffield and finally walking to the poor quarters where he grew up as a child. There is no real explanation for him taking this trip, but as his memory travels back in time, so does he, in a way. Moore takes the metaphor of space and travel that discussions of flashbacks and memory entail, and mirrors it in literal travel. At the end of the book, in a revelation that is devastating for Hole, both levels come together in an epiphany of sorts. The colors of Zarate’s mad tableaux of crowds and landscapes reflect Hole’s own disturbed mind, and his alienation not only from others but from himself, from his own ideas. Hole is really unpleasant protagonist, we don’t much care for him, he betrays people, cheats them and cheats on them, a truly shallow individual who apparently found his niche in advertising. There is the palpable (and explicit) influence of existentialism on the book, but despite a few similarities, Timothy Hole is no Antoine Roquentin, and the book ends on a different note. A Small Killing is about self-discovery, about how people can change as they age and the lies they tell themselves about their own past. As the world is subsumed by Hole’s feverish brain, and past relationships with women, his parents or mentors are seen to have failed due to his increasingly uncaring and empty emotional state, we as readers are drawn into Zarate’s terrifying whirlwind of colors and lines.

But, really, it’s more than just personal. Two aspects in particular are worth mentioning. One is Moore’s mastery of various registers of speech: this skill shines most in the large, full-page crowd panels, which are flooded by small pieces of dialogue, ad culture nitwittery, empty 1980s hipsterism and other bits. The way Moore zeroes in on those moments, and the way he makes a highly economic use of them within the larger structure of A Small Killing is so well realized that it reminded me personally of William Gaddis’ use of salon banter in The Recognitions. The other aspect is political. With a handful of deft allusions and hints, Moore and Zarate settle the book firmly within a fixed historical and political context, as the book was written and published at a time when the United States were governed by George Bush père and the United Kingdom by Margaret Thatcher (and Thatcherite PM John Major). Thatcher is especially significant as Moore connects modern apolitical culture with the demise of a traditionally left-wing worker town, and Hole’s betrayal of himself with that same change. This sounds topical, but I don’t have a personal context for Thatcherism, and yet it still works. Hole can be made to stand for any political peregrine who endorsed ideals as a young person yet swore off them as he grew older and more successful. The central focus of A Small Killing is on the was our core beliefs about society are linked to core beliefs of ourselves. In a book of dichotomies, of overlapping levels, this is one of the most important. I’m not sure this book has been very influential or important for the genre or literature in general, but as a work of art, it is amazing, and very powerful. Alan Moore’s enormous body of work casts a large shadow, but that should not be an excuse for readers to ignore or shun a small, less widely publicized masterpiece such as A Small Killing.

A short personal note. As I am trying to finish two manuscripts and getting back into reviewing books, I have a hospital bill to pay off, which means all kinds of issues for me. If you have a buck or two to spare, I would be more than thankful. There is a paypal button on the right hand side of this page. That’s just in case you feel charitable. As it is, I am happy enough about every single one of my readers. There are more of you than I ever expected, even through the dry months in the past year, and I am thoroughly humbled. Thank you all.

A.L. Kennedy: What Becomes

Kennedy, A.L. (2010), What Becomes, Vintage
ISBN 978-0-099-49406-5

I deeply love and admire the work of A. L. Kennedy, the Scottish writer of short stories, novels and screenplays, as well as part-time stand-up comic. Thus, the following (enthusiastic) review may be slightly biased. However, I don’t think I overreach by calling Kennedy not just a master of her craft, but a great writer, a rare writer. There is, for example, her versatility: in her novels and stories, A. L. Kennedy consistently proves herself to be a writer interested in and adapt at using complex literary techniques, including even being able to nimbly slip into a smooth postmodern playfulness at times, but I value Kennedy most for being an emotive, direct, personal writer who keeps moving and surprising me. At her best, she is able to command a language that seems simple and direct, almost autobiographical, but is actually the product of a writer in full control of her craft. If we compare her work at the sentence level in her most recent collection What Becomes with other contemporary short story writers, for example Bonnie Jo Campbell, finalist for the 2009 National Book Award with her collection American Salvage, we quickly see how unerring Kennedy’s syntactic precision is. There are very few living writers who can boast of writing so simple, so seemingly indulgent and emotional sentences, that nevertheless are anything but indulgent. Their craft isn’t obvious in the sense of simple musicality or strong stylistic oddities, it’s the way Kennedy adjusts and tucks at her syntax sentence after sentence, length, music, slipping from hypotactic into terse, punning paratactic sentences and back, whatever she does, everything is just right, everything seems intentional and careful, while writers like Campbell work with slabs of language, leaving a rough, muddy surface.

But language does not take center stage in Kennedy’s stories, the stories and the characters within them do. And here’s where her success is most visible: she almost always manages to completely inhibit her characters, no matter how different they are. Her writing is a writing from inside, a writing that does not use her characters’ particulars to hang a moral tale from them, she doesn’t present them on a literary platter so they’ll be of use them as objects judged and portrayed from the outside. Kennedy writes from within, and she does it with humor, and a quiet understanding. Of course, on the other hand, she doesn’t just serve up some random slice of life. Like most writers, Kennedy, too, has very specific obsessions, and a very specific slant on life, art and writing. Although the exact focus of her obsessions varies from book to book, all her work is united by a very distinct literary vision, and she has managed to improve upon her expression of this vision as her work slowly grew and started to develop a voice of its own. More and more, Kennedy has moved from expansive books like the magnificent Everything You Need, which took up too many issues to be perfectly successful in all of them, to far more precise collections like Indelible Acts, which focuses explicitly upon bodies and the acts (or rather: performances) we subject them to. Then, her previous novel Paradise looked on dependencies, alcoholism and the unraveling of a life in an unraveling of social relationships, just as her next novel, Day, was concerned with memory and violence. Reading Kennedy today is reading a writer who knows what she can do with language, and is perfectly comfortable in her own literary idiom.

That idiom includes idiosyncrasies that might bother first time readers, yet both they and veteran readers of Kennedy’s work will likely see that there’s a writer at work in What Becomes who is able to blend a vast variety of voices and devices into stories that feel extremely natural and direct, whether they are narrated by men or women. Kennedy is a writer of the interior, thoroughly, untiringly exploring the horribleness of empty contemporary lives. Or rather: lives that are commonly viewed and narrated as empty. The characters in What Becomes are filled with life, with hope and with dreams. Let down by partners, friends or down on their luck, they nevertheless try (and retry) to connect, to work things out. They get lost in the mechanics and particulars of the mundane, the cast reality of the objects that surround us, the objects that complement us. In the story “Confectioner’s Gold” (one of the collection’s best) there is a couple on the brink of failure, who get together one night, and gorge themselves on a lavish, decadent meal. They don’t enjoy themselves, they don’t eat because they love eating or spending time with one another, they eat because eating means not talking. This story is partly narrated by the husband, who, as we learned earlier in the story, in an unusually plain fashion, identifies with blind people he sees passing in front of his house. He ‘feels’ blind, although he isn’t. An angry man, angry with life, angry with his situation as a man, a husband, as a white person, he runs on entitlement, and we get the impression (though it is never spelled out) that the loss of privilege that progress forces on him makes him angry. There is no space in him to consider other people’s predicaments, people who are really handicapped. He represents the norm and his anger feels justified to him.

People like that husband, and disintegrating relationships like his, are, as in his case, created as a consummate mixture of interior and exterior explanations and visions. “Confectioner’s Gold” is a great story to use as example, because it is quite explicit about issues that are part of the underpinnings of Kennedy’s writing, and of the way it is connected to literary and cultural contexts. On the one hand, there are objects that are made to serve as extensions of the failing, miserable bodies of Kennedy’s protagonists. On the other hand, there is the city, the treatment if which sometimes seems to refer directly to writers like Walter Benjamin, and his theories (e.g. about the flâneur and his role in comprehending metropolitan reality). Benjamin is also important in his treatment of history, and his doubts about the veracity of accounts of the past, or rather: their reliability when dissociated from the present. What Becomes is very much about the future, as its title (which alludes to Jimmy Ruffin’s hit single “What becomes of the broken hearted” or rather the idiomatic expression that has been spun from it) demonstrates unequivocally. Although all of the stories have an uneasy but important link to the past, whether it is some unspoken, but still menacing falling-out, as in “Confectioner’s Gold”, or a past relationship, as in the title story, or an episode from childhood as in “Saturday Teatime”: the past is never quite confronted, except through the shambles it has made of the present. Sometimes, Kennedy’s characters try and cope with the past without confronting it at all, sometimes they try to mend it, sometimes it just ambushes them in a quiet moment of self-reflection. The central question of all these stories, in the face of a threatening, dark, unspeakable past, is: what now? How do I behave once my life has been broken by those once dear to me, or by myself? What will I do?

In all her work Kennedy has never asked this question so clearly, so urgently, and in many ways: this, I think, makes What Becomes her most old-fashioned work (and, incidentally, the book of hers that is least concerned with death.). In the tradition of ancient philosophy, this collection of stories take a look at the ars bene vivendi or the ars vitae, the art of how to live, the art of life. Now, this is a common theme in literature, and many writers focus on this aspect, but the concentration and precision of A. L. Kennedy’s new collection is note- and praiseworthy. The answer to the question of ‘What now?’ turns out, often as not, to be a question of whether or not to confront the past as represented by people we once knew and loved, people who let us down or whom we let down. Some people do both, as the protagonist in the title story, who confronts his former wife in her kitchen, cooking a meal, trying to persevere, to rekindle a flame long gone. On the other hand, once he starts to really comprehend that their marriage has failed, that they really are no longer an item, he flees into the obscure embrace of a cinema, preferring to sit in a dark room, while a movie plays in silence, instead of getting on with his life, forging a future. In this story, as in many others, the protagonist’s bodily reality almost merges with the objects around him, the tools he uses to create a reality for him. There is the blood that he sheds on the kitchen floor (and on the knife he uses to cut up vegetables), and there’s the broken movie reel in the cinema that fails to supply the movie with sound, mirroring his own self-imposed deafness. The protagonist cannot provide answers on how to deal with disaster, but his very helplessness is instructive, and the emotional core of the book.

Other stories, like “Wasps”, the short, devastating tale of a married man’s ‘second family’, the result of an affair that eventually metamorphosed into the family he visits on some weekends and on the occasional holiday, seem to come up with answers: “[t]his is a way to be ready when he finally doesn’t come back”; answers however, that aren’t helpful or teachable, that are testaments of a similar helplessness, a similar lack of resolve and willpower. This all the protagonists of What Becomes share: the gap between what they know or intuit should be done, and what they can get themselves to do. Even those whose acts show a willingness not to engage with the issues, to ignore them until they hopefully vanish of their own accord, even they clearly know how they should live, since their acts are mere acting out of rote roles and performed joylessly, mechanically. Even “Marriage”, the story that I feel is the harshest of the bunch, the most cynical, implies, in its blatant display of cynicism, how to live well, although its characters aren’t able to. The story, which closes with the firm assertion “This is exactly what it looks like. Marriage.”, portrays an estranged couple, which is brought together by an act of domestic violence. Hitting his wife in the face, the husband, who’s the story’s protagonist, not only manages to arouse himself, but also to bridge a gap of affections that had opened between him and his wife. The event leaves him as bruised emotionally as his wife is physically, and the final scene has them hold on to one another for comfort, for strength, to endure the present, and one another. Although in “Wasps”, the lover watches her almost-husband leave into a rainy night, holding on only to herself, while the lovers in “Marriage” have each other, it’s hard to say who’s lonelier.

It is quite the miracle that Kennedy can pull off stories like this one without having to enter precious melodrama (except for maybe one or two slips), and also without subscribing to the well-worn workshop mantra “show don’t tell”. In my reading experience, that mantra is helpful if writers lack the creative urge and talent to make ‘telling’ work. Stories are quickly uncluttered if one concentrates on ‘showing’, which also facilitates further editing. Raymond Carver is a rather notorious example of all this. When in 2009, the Library of America published Carver’s Collected Stories, the editors Stull and Caroll decided to include “Beginners”, a version of Carver’s first major collection of stories that did not contain his long-time editor Gordon Lish’s cuts. Lish is famous for having truncated Carver’s writing to the essentials, even adding and changing phrases to make the cuts fit and retain the mood. The resulting stories are breathtaking masterpieces of concision, both moving and trimmed of fat. The original stories are far less than that. Not only is the reader forced to wade through what feels like undisciplined blather, but the emotional force is blunted and dulled through Carver’s penchant for telling, for spelling things out that Lish had mercifully expurgated from the original publication. Carver’s Collected Stories are a lesson in the difficulties of making a strong, introspective interior voice work in the short story format and my having recently read them may have heightened my attention to this kind of writing, but upon closing What Becomes one really feels that Kennedy’s resounding success at it is more than commendable, it’s wondrous. Kennedy never sacrifices emotional impact for elaborate speechifying, she makes the voices work for her, wrenches melodies, surprises and modulations from them, grabbing its readers by the throat.

And at the same time, she is often very, very funny. There is no need for her to paint a bleak picture in doom and gloom. Her stories are filled to the brim with the fullness of life, whether it’s a discussion of orgasm, or a humorous narrative of being afraid of the dentist, whether it’s remembering Doctor Who in a flotation tank or trading books with a blond beauty. People in her stories don’t give up on life, although most just hang on, but at least they do that. I called What Becomes an ars vitae, and then went on to enumerate stories where none of the characters really show us how to live life well, which might seem contradictory, but then Kennedy is not a philosopher, she does not intend to provide us with lessons or teachable moments. Instead, her stories are powered by her characters’ own drive to live their life well and Kennedy shows herself to be both a deeply moral writer, touching on various political and philosophical issues, as well as a compassionate, beautifully open and accepting writer, who waits for her characters to come up with a solution of how to live their lives, how to deal with others and one’s own ugly self. The most sublimely moving moments are those where here characters have the will and the vision to re-design the future, if not for themselves, then for their children, to make sure they will not be as damaged, as warped as they themselves. Despite Kennedy’s reputation for being unremittingly bleak and despite, too, the darkness in these stories, none of them are without hope, without the tacit potential of a better, a brighter future. All this is presented in Kennedy’s inimitable style, in her unique lines that have both the brevity of punchlines, and the sinuous flow of human thoughts and feelings.

I know some people don’t take to Kennedy, incomprehensible as it is to me, yet I’d go so far as to recommend this book to everyone who likes to read short stories. Maybe Kennedy takes some getting used to, maybe her stark sense of the body and of the world of the corporeal and of objects, and the long ruminations of her characters are not for everybody, but A. L. Kennedy is easily one of the best writers of her generation, and What Becomes might just be the best introduction to her work one could wish for.

David Anthony Durham: Acacia

Durham, David Anthony (2008), Acacia: The War with the Mein, Anchor
ISBN 978-0-385-72252-0

David Anthony Durham is one of a flood of new fantasy novelists, one of those who, like Brandon Sanderson, Patrick Rothfuss or Scott Lynch, has been able to command a great deal of attention. Praise for Durham and his fellow fantasy rookies often revolves around the changes they made to the familiar fantasy formula. It is indicative of the low expectations in the genre that a divergence from a tired old formula is not what is expected of all decent writing, but is seen as a hallmark of excellence. This does not, of course, diminish the quality of Rothfuss’ or Sanderson’s books (cf. my review of Rothfuss’ book here, and of a Sanderson novel here),where the departure from fantasy stereotype is a sign of larger visions and ideas than lesser writers like Jordan can boast of, as well as of a more complete understanding of what use the underpinnings of the fantasy genre really are. Changing the formula, in their case, is part and parcel of a more intelligent or more aware kind of writing. In this context, Durham is an odd writer. On the one hand, in Acacia: The War with the Mein, the first installment of the Acacia trilogy, Durham conjures up a ravishing world, one that is very different from the usual fantasy worlds in many ways and that displays the awareness of a writer who has, so far, primarily written historical novels dealing with North Africa. Fantasy novelists’ worlds are too often infused with one of two sets of imagery: either a middle European medieval scenario, or, often used by way of contrast, a world based on a vaguely East Asian image. In my reading experience, the varieties of African cultures have been severely underrepresented. Durham’s world is convincing in the way that it offers a multitude of non-European images and cultures, without losing the feudal, medieval charm of mainstream fantasy.

In fact, this is what makes this book such a curious experience. The setting, and the thoroughness of his use of setting (including discussions of skin color, race, and non-European concepts of magic) clashes with the gentle acceptance of almost every other aspect. This book is as harshly androcentric and vaguely misogynistic as Jordan’s multi-volume epic of tediousness is, and Durham’s take on feudalism and courtly intrigue, as well as his take on warfare and the individuals in it, are similarly unreflected and simplistic. Durham’s heroes are of royal blood, and he treats them like Gods, in the sense that the welfare of the people of his populous country is entirely up to them and their moods and their virtues or flaws. A general’s mistake leads to millions killed, a king’s cowardliness leads to their enslavement. The contrast to even as generic a book as Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy is stunning. Sanderson combines popular uprisings with courtly intrigue, he roots his magic in the earth of his world, connecting nobles and the poor through magic as a common element. Durham’s magic is written magic, the magic of the word, and by hiding a book away one can restrict access to magic and eventually remove magic from the world. The world of Acacia: The War with the Mein is extremely hierarchical, and there’s no signs of change and no real criticism of that fact (what’s debated are merely different varieties of feudalistic hierarchies). Instead, he endows two royal families with attributes (bravery, jealousy, faith etc.) that will determine the fate of the people of Acacia. There is something extremely unpleasant about this, an unpleasantness that is exacerbated by the fact that hierarchies include those of gender. Not in the sense that the society is misogynistic, as the broadly medieval setting would well explain this.

No, in creating his protagonists, Durham has recourse to archaic stereotypes, which makes for extremely accessible reading. There is the brave, bold and innocent hero, there is the scheming, mean anti-hero, and so forth. Needless to say, the brave warriors are all men, except for one woman, whom we are introduced to as a kind of Joan of Arc, a warrior-priestess, a permissible mode. The scheming, sneaky good guy-turned-bad is a woman, of course, who, as the book proceeds, turns from whore to assassin and scheming queen. Additionally, Durham cannot muster enough interest in his world to explore it to any degree of thoroughness. All descriptions, all the elements feel superficial, random, cursory. The plot as well, based as it is on various heroic and gender stereotypes, seems to run on automatisms. The changes that George R.R. Martin brought to the table, the way that Martin’s heroes die left and right, and not in glorious duels, but in ignominious arrow hails, the way Martin thought about the inner workings of feudalism, his deep commitment to heraldry and other geeky subsets of writing about a medieval world, none of that appears to have brushed Durham’s mind when he conceived his books. Durham writes in a way that is easy on the mind and heart, a fantasy that is comfortable because there are no surprises, nothing to jolt or excite the mind. Reading Durham is fun, but only for fantasy loyalists. I happen to have a sweet tooth for this brand of writing, and if you have similar predilections, you will have a great deal of fun. Durham’s world is sumptuous, his story is epic, and filled with magic and mystery. If you want more from your fantasy (or literature in general), you should give Durham a pass. Unlike Rothfuss, Martin, or even Sanderson, this is not for outsiders. This is fantasy for fantasy/romance fans. As such, it works well, and I highly recommend it for these purposes. It is an engaging, escapist read of war, intrigue and love in a warm climate.

What it’s not, is well written. Granted, great writing is rare in fantasy, even good writers like Rothfuss are not stellar stylists. But for whatever reason, Durham under-performs, even given the poor expectations of the genre he chose. The main problem is that he decided to at least partially imitate a high, elegant, epic register in his writing. Especially the first third of the book, while the reader is trying to get used to the language, Durham’s poor imitation of Renaissance English grates. Inversions, awkward rhythms and courtly circuitousness are but a few of the stylistic jinks employed by Durham to make the language of his book sound as epic as the story it helps tell. It’s hard to tell whether this annoying attribute is due to his past writing of historical novels, or whether it is an attempt to achieve what Martin and Tolkien did with their use of language. It’s likely he didn’t read Martin or didn’t read him well, because I always admired the way Martin constructed a sturdy yet old-sounding language that contained just the right amount of anachronisms to fit the setting; yet his language was always simple and strong enough not to seem more literary than it needed to. What Martin recognized, and Durham should have done, as well, is that Tolkien’s example is a tough act to follow. The readability of Tolkien’s work and the immediacy of his story hide the literary complexity of his writing. Like him or not, Tolkien was no mean writer and fantasy novelists who want to copy the effect without having the literary acumen to back it up, are bound to fail. And if, as in Durham’s novel, the result is primarily annoying and distracting, it’s arguably worse than if the writing were just simply bad and pulpy (insert random Lovecraft comment here).

However, the mediocre writing is symptomatic of a larger malaise in Durham’s book. Durham is a stylist, not in the sense of a writer with a good or remarkable style, but in the sense that he is heavily invested in style, not just (or even primarily) literary style. The interiors and landscapes of the book are polished, gleaming, well, stylish. One feels, as a reader, that this, his first experiment at constructing a world, has led him astray. I would not be surprised to learn that he had watercolors of the landscapes and cities made to flesh out his vision. Acacia is not an actual country and nothing in the way that the book is told suggests to us that it might be one, there is no sense that this may be a conflicting, opposing or in any way relevant reality. Durham has created his world as an object, as a location wherein to put elegant furniture and epic heroes. There is a chapter where he appears to try and slip out of this view of the world, by introducing a drug-addled ex-soldier, getting by on the streets of a country ravaged by war and a devastating plague, yet that chapter sticks out like a sore thumb (and it doesn’t work). It’s a testament to Durham’s qualities as a storyteller that the book as a whole nevertheless does work as a piece of escapist literature. But the distanced, artificial world Durham builds has severe consequences for other aspects of his novel. Durham is a smarter writer than the book shows him to be, and we as readers can see how he, time and again, attempts to inject interesting ideas into his story, social concerns, even allusions to contemporary politics, but the clean, non-stick surface of the book precludes any success in this endeavor. One hopes that the second and third volume blow the world of the book open enough for the ideas to take some hold in the flesh of the world and the book, instead of staying surface phenomena.

The story itself focuses on an invasion of the barbarians. Yes, that is a very common motif, but while other writers tease their readers with the imminent threat and start with skirmishes, Durham wastes no time in confronting the ruling people of the Known World, the Acacians, with the brutal invaders from the north, the Mein. Hanish Mein, the leader of the barbarians, soon proves himself to be a crafty and courageous enemy, smashing the Acacian army to bits and taking over the Known World. Durham is not interested in the things that happen to ordinary people and the minutiae of warfare is also of lesser interest to him. Instead he focuses on a few climactic events and then just briefly summarizes what happened. People die, the bad guys win, end of story. But while he is not interested in ordinary people, he lionizes epic heroic characters and who could be more heroic than a king and his brood. In fact, the whole book is narrated with a focus on the four children of the Acacian king. The king, killed in the brief war (dare I say Blitzkrieg?), has left instructions to send his four children, two girls and two boys, to the four corners of the Known World, to provide them with save havens and the opportunity to learn something about the land that their family has ruled for such a long time. That “Known World” is basically one long continent which contains all manner of vegetation and all kinds of peoples. A few scattered islands near the coast complete the Known World. It is contrasted by the Other Lands, an unknown country or continent beyond the sea. The king and his dynasty has been involved in shadowy dealings with the Other Land for generations, although they never dealt with them directly. Instead, they chose to trust the League, a group of merchants who watch over the commerce between the two continents. That much is not shadowy, but the goods that are dealt in are.

The Acacians buy a drug called “Mist” from the Other Land, and in return they pay with children. I’m not kidding. This is a country that knows not only enforced child labor in mines, but that also pays with children to acquire drugs. Drugs, moreover, that are not used to pleasure the decadent ruling class, but to keep the populace quiet and peaceful. Mist is literally an opiate for the people. The Acacian rule does not need religion, in fact, one of the most important kings of the dynasty, a consummate magician, has banned all magic from the kingdom, leaving him the only powerful magician in the realm. Subsequently, all knowledge of magic and the associated religion, was purged from the world. The fact that this family, who traffic in children, drug their populace and crack down on unwanted knowledge, that these are the good guys of the story, that was a brilliant idea, and one that deserved a better payoff. The bad guys, the barbarians from the North, were sent there by the same evil magician/king who purged his world from magic. Given the historical cruelty inflicted upon them, their return could seem morally justified, but in Durham’s book, they stay bad guys all the way through. And this is the problem. Durham had a brilliant idea but his decision to keep things simple and palatable, he is unable to divest himself of simple oppositions, and so he compartmentalizes, by killing every member of the dynasty except the children before the book begins, allowing him to use them as positive, innocent heroes, with royal (read: heroic) blood, but no evil past. The good children, the scheming woman, and the bad (but not really evil) barbarians, this reminded me a lot of the Song of the Nibelungs. Especially towards the end of Acacia: The War with the Mein, as power shifts, the book carried strong associations to the classic text.

But this association also makes one of his strengths visible. Because the landscape and the cultures of his book are so original, and diverge so much from the usual fantasy fare, his barbarians are fascinating creatures. Many fantasy books feature attacks from the north, but Durham is adamant that races exist, if they do, because people migrate somewhere, races evolve, and they can adapt. The Otherness, encoded in the Song of the Nibelungs through the Huns, is displaced here, and relocated. The Barbarians are not Other, they are victims, and fundamentally similar to the Acacians. However, the unknown and unseen population of the Other Lands is quite literally ‘other’. However rough he treats other details, he is very careful with that place. Even calling one continent “Known World” is enough to make any reader think of European explorations other countries and the imperialism it led to. The regime of Acacia is already far more evil than any monarchy in Europe was when explorers uncovered the unknown, and subjugated peoples on all continents. Yet in Durham’s world, we are led to believe that the Others are more rich, more powerful and far more dangerous than Acacians can imagine. Since Acacian culture appears to be a version of various African cultures, this turns the table on obvious assumptions as who ‘we’ are and who ‘the Others’. Most contemporary fantasy works with invaders who seem stronger, but aren’t really, who are mostly strange. With these books he shares a tendency to portray the Others as vaguely menacing, but the cultural parameters are different. This is part of what makes reading the book such fun.

I repeat: this was a very enjoyable reading experience. It has obvious flaws that might make reading the book for people who are not either fans of epic fantasy or fans of romance a less joyful event. But for me, the 750-something pages just flew by. Durham is a marvelous storyteller, not a smart or thorough one, but still an excellent craftsman. The suspense is built perfectly, as we move from one event to the next, his heroes are positioned perfectly. I said he relies heavily on typical elements. that’s true, but on the other hand, he has utterly mastered them. Acacia: The War with the Mein is not a good book, but I had so much fun reading it, that I cannot but recommend it.

Joe Kelly and JM Ken Niimura: I Kill Giants

Kelly, Joe; JM Ken Niimura (2010), I Kill Giants, Image Comics
ISBN 978-1-60706-092-5

Yes, it’s a cop-out to assail those who don’t like a book you love with claims that they didn’t really open up to it, didn’t really engage with it, yadda yadda. Yes, it’s true to say that it’s probably not really a good book, if it only works for the very emotionally open reader. But, preemptively, that’s exactly the argument that brewed in my head when I finished I Kill Giants and thought about a review. It’s a simple fact: you are not allowed not to love this book. There is much in the book that is excellent, especially the artwork which is just stunning. The writing is, except for exactly two panels near the end of the book, always at least solid, more often great than not. But as a whole, I feel it needs the reader to respond to the way it tugs at his or her emotions in order to cohere and deliver a finishing wallop. This is an amazing book, yet as I finished it, I feared that not everyone might think so (although no-one in their right mind would call it a bad book per se). This is something that is true of a lot of fantastical, young adult or romantic literature: unless you accept their terms and read them with an appropriate openness, they won’t work. But even if you happen to not love this book as much as I did (and everybody should), you cannot fail to recognize all the excellent qualities of the book. I Kill Giants is a graphic novel, published as a limited miniseries with seven issues from July 2008 until January 2009. A collection of all issues was then published by Image Comics in 2009, which runs to 184 pages and is a gorgeously designed object. The writer is seasoned comics veteran Joe Kelly who has written all kinds of stuff, from mainstream Marvel issues (Spiderman, JLA and others) to I Kill Giants and the similarly original and odd Four Eyes. The artist is the extraordinary JM Ken Niimura, who’s relatively new to the industry. This, in fact, is his first published full graphic novel, I gather from an appended interview. The result of their cooperation is a magnificent, marvelous book that I cannot praise highly enough and that you are not allowed to dislike.

Graphic novels are always the result of both a writer’s and an artist’s input and a change of artist can mean a change in style. Writers can control the look and feel of a graphic novel only to an extent, and when they do dominate the artist, as Brian Wood does in his DMZ series of books (see my review), the result is often weak. And a writers’s efforts, as Millar’s in the early Ultimate X-Men issues, can be weakened by an artist who’s a bad fit or second-rate. On the other hand, a great artist can save even sagging, sentimental writing by transforming it into a great, affecting visual narrative. This is, in part, what happened with I Kill Giants. Joe Kelly is not a bad writer, and much here, especially the dialogue, works very well, but the novel’s concept isn’t, to be honest, terribly original and Kelly grapples with the difficulties arising from trying to keep artless sentimentality as far as way from the book as possible. This book, without giving too much away, deals with a kind of grief, one could say. In the appended interview, Kelly tells us that he experienced a somewhat similar situation himself, and it shows. Roughly two thirds of the book are intent on finding and exploring an apt metaphor for the protagonist’s emotional duress, but the closer we get to the end, the more loose Kelly’s reins are on the explicitness of the emotions his books discusses. This culminates in two positively cheesy panels full of well-meaning, daft, life-affirming advice. Niimura doesn’t complement Kelly here, he saves him from his worst instincts. All that said, I have to repeat and affirm that I was very moved by the book. Joe Kelly undertakes a balancing act here, as far as his writing is concerned, and throughout most of I Kill Giants, he pulls it off. The protagonist’s journey away from fear and into the light of day, friendship and family is always convincing, and, at certain points, truly powerful. Stories like this have been told before, but it’s Kelly’s achievement that we care enough for this specific pointy-eared protagonist in order to read this story nor as one of many but as a special story, the moving story of Barbara Thorson.

Indeed, Kelly’s skill at evoking his protagonist Barbara Thorson, bringing her to life before our eyes, is the most praiseworthy aspect of his writing, and the only place where he is not dependent on Niimura’s art to make it all work well. Kelly assembles a broad array of scenes, dialogue and juxtapositions that help us to see Barbara not merely as an oddity, but as a very specific, flesh-and-blood person, a girl that life has dealt a harsh hand and that decides to batter away at the dark force that invaded her home and her heart. As we meet her, she sits, hidden behind a bed-sheet, on which she has drawn violent mythical fight scenes, planning her imminent fight against the giants. Because Barbara Thorson, as we learn a few pages later, is a giant-killer, carrying a hammer with her in a pouch, reading books on giants and conversing with invisible angels. Always ready to pounce and defend the world against giants or, even worse, the fearsome titan. Barbara is a natural storyteller. She has no difficulties inventing giant-killer stories and planning the upcoming fight against oversize opponents, in part because even before she was entrusted with this mission, Barbara was a storyteller of heroic battles: Kelly’s heroine is a Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) Dungeon Master. D&D is a fantasy role-playing game that requires a high degree of imagination. A group of friends sits around the table, each of them an actor in a story that is completely concocted by the dungeon master. They act and react, but the environment, the monsters, quests and rewards are invented by the Dungeon Master. D&D has a thick rule book, but it’s the Dungeon Master’s reading of these rules that ultimately counts. He or she is the highest authority as to the specifics of the story, the world and the mechanics of fighting and living in that world. One very telling episode has Sophia, friend of Barbara, look for her in a comic book shop, where Sophia learns that Barbara commands a deep respect among fellow fantasy devotees. These skills, this kind of commitment to narrative and imagination is then transferred into real life and Barbara’s fight against giants. But Kelly is smart enough not to disparage and minimize her mission by treating it as pure invention.

Instead, he projects her obsession onto the real world, like a second, diaphanous layer. In this, Niimura’s art is more than a great help. Niimura’s vision of Barbara’s world, both the one she seems to inhabit alone and the one she shares with others, is stunning in its poetic power. The art does several things. There are, on the one hand, transparent objects, small little winged critters, like chubby little fairies, which appear to be scrawled onto the real world. They are related, the reader soon realizes, to the millions of sketches and drawings that Barbara has undertaken, not just on the bed-sheet of the first panel, but later, as well. The giants that Barbara sets out to kill do not make an actual appearance for most of the book, there’s no need for Barbara to invent or imagine them. For us they only exist as actual drawings, the accuracy of which is hard to judge. So in Niimura’s depiction of Barbara’s worlds, drawings as inventions and imaginary (or not so imaginary) beings and forces coexist uneasily, and each often intrudes on the other’s turf. As part of a graphic novel’s discussion of art and the imagination, Niimura offers a powerful plea for the strength of imagination to infuse our daily lives with, well, life, due to changes in perception. Barbara’s imagination is her own, the drawings and sketches are her own. She doesn’t trade cards or paint figurines, she draws from scratch, and the insights into herself or life that she gains are her own, strong convictions, scooped from her own plentiful source. Very early in the book, she stands up, derisively, to a motivational coach, because she doesn’t need his narrow, dull, restricted grandstanding. This is not to deny that she has problems that she needs to deal with, but listening, waiting, encouraging turns out to be the best way to help her. Barbara doesn’t need an educational fiat, a psychological, medical or pedagogical sanction of her way of dealing with things. Both Kelly and Niimura stress this aspect, but it’s really Niimura’s art that impresses it most on the reader who might skip some of Kelly’s overwrought language, his hokey, ‘meaningful’ dialogue near the end. A lot of panels, or even whole pages, would have worked better with no words at all. Almost the whole last fourth could have been easily shorn of dialogue and would have been much improved upon.

There is one last aspect of Niimura’s art that is worth mentioning. I talked about how he mixes drawings and a perception of the world. But he also mixes imagination and reality. In the interview in the back, he tells us that in working out a version of Barbara Thorson that he liked, he suddenly started adding hats and large rabbit ears. Kelly kept his manuscript as it was, despite the added ears, so that the dialogue or story never reflects Barbara’s odd hare-y ears, which has the effect of adding a constant level of surrealism to the book. There is no clear division between what’s real and tangible and what’s imagined. There are rationalizations, and explanations aplenty, especially for the more outrageous phenomena, but I think (and some people I know disagree) that the book never really takes sides. Motifs and explanations are fragmented and scattered all over the book, as rivaling mythologies, such as the many different evocations of meteorology. In fact, some scenes appear to make this point almost explicit: it is not about some vaguely objective facts of nature, but about how you read them, within which cultural and personal context you situate certain phenomena, what you are prepared to accept as explanation and what you are not. Niimura works heavily with visual hints and clues and it’s been awhile since I read a graphic novel that used the resources of its genre this exhaustively, that made it so clear that this is not a deviation from ‘regular novels’, that a story like this needs the images Niimura provides, that it is completely dependent on its visual aspect, and what’s more, Niimura’s highly successful in doing so. But not to downplay Kelly’s work. He does his part in adding layers of dream and imagination, for example in casting the whole story in a mythical light. You see, Kelly manages to both present the events of I Kill Giants as an episode in Barbara’s life, as well as a kind of destiny, a mission that her life is formed around. Even her name, designing her a son of Norse God of Thunder, Thor, is connected to that mission (and to the weather/myth ambiguity near the end)

In fact, Kelly assembles a whole subset of items and references that connect Barbara’s story to Norse mythology. Thor fought giants, as well, and he did it with his trusty hammer Mjöllnir, which was, like Barbara’s weapon, of variable size. I suspect that some of the intrigue, traps and upheavals in Barbara’s story have a parallel of sorts in one of the various versions of Thor’s story. This is all very plain but effective, as is another parallel established by Kelly: the American myths, like Baseball history. Barbara’s hammer is named after Harry Coveleski, a Major League Baseball pitcher who, during his time on the Phillies, earned himself the nickname of “The Giant Killer”. The mythical qualities of the American obsession with Baseball have been pointed out quite a few times, most recently perhaps by Michael Chabon in his book Summerland. Baseball, Thor and Barbara’s art and appearance are all mixed in this heady, emotionally powerful book, which shows us a person, enmeshed in cultural, mythical and social contexts who draws on her imagination, on her art to cope with personal problems. This is a very strong recommendation. You may not be as moved as I was, but you can’t miss the craft of Niimura’s art and the overall strength of the writing. Niimura’s work here stunned me, and it will stun you, however you react to Joe Kelly’s sadly uneven writing. This is a very, very good book, made by two masters of their trade. Given the fact that Niimura’s career has only just begun, this book is also a promise of great things to come. In my opinion, I Kill Giants is a masterpiece, but even if you disagree, you’ll still be admiring a lot of it.

James Welch: Winter in the Blood

Welch, James (2008), Winter in the Blood, Penguin
ISBN 978-0-14-310522-0

Books about Native Americans, especially books written by Natives are often prone to simple sentimentality. There’s absolutely none of that in James Welch’s starkly astonishing debut novel Winter in the Blood (1974). Welch is both of Blackfoot and Gros Ventre ancestry, as is his narrator. His previous book, the poetry collection Riding the Earthboy 40, was set in the same area, a vaguely unpleasant, loveless place. As Winter in the Blood opens, this narrator, who will stay nameless throughout the novel, has just come home, but this homecoming to his parents’ house is harshly described as “a torture”. And in the novel that follows, there is little fun to be had for the narrator who wrestles his own demons and his family’s secretive history in order to regain a sense of self. The reader, however, is well served by James Welch’s immense literary talent. James Welch was a poet and novelist who, upon dying in 2003 at 63, had only published five novels and three collections of poetry. This appears to be a meager output considering the fact that most of the novels, just like Winter in the Blood, are short books. Since I tend to prefer longer books, it took me awhile to get around to reading anything by Welch. This was the first book of his I tried, and I highly recommend you do the same.

Winter in the Blood is an absolutely stunning piece of fiction, a dense work of art, crawling with an awareness both of western and Native fictional traditions, of political and economic necessities and it’s written by a master of prose. Welch has managed to write a book about a Native experience without ever becoming maudlin or sentimental. His book is hard as rock, yet it’s welcoming to readers. The softness of myth, of oral history, of Native tragedies informs every page of the book, even as we follow a narrative that seems fractured, harsh, bleak, even. People hit each other, contemplate murder or deceit, they distrust one another almost constantly, and this is just those who are welcome there, who see one another on a daily basis. Welch’s narrator is a visitor, and, broadly speaking, a loser, who can command neither love, nor respect or fear. He’s just there, fending for himself. Yet at the same time, any accusation of bleakness must fall short since Welch’s book describes a hopeful trek towards, not away from a firm sense of identity. As you see, even a rough description of the book is complicated and apparently contradictory, yet one of Welch’s many achievements in the novel is its utter unity, its strong, coherent voice.

Originally published in 1974, a reader of the Winter in the Blood today, especially one who is not a Native, is probably far removed from its immediate cultural and geographical contexts. While I can read and appreciate its literary and cultural contexts for what they are, readers like me have to believe critics who assure him that the geography of the book is absolutely accurate, that bars and houses and farms like that really exist in real life Montana just like they do in the book. It seems that the author took great pains to be fair and clear in how he treats the landscape that he abandons his narrator in. We never learn much about the narrator’s life outside of his homeland, the city he lived in, the people he met daily and the pressures and contexts that shaped his life outside. Instead, Welch drops his narrator into a landscape that is rife with historical and cultural contexts, a landscape that tells its inhabitants about the tragedy of its tribes, and the foul events that led them to their present state. As many Native critics, discussing this book, have pointed out, all or most tribes have a story of hardship, a special event in their more recent history where the tribe’s survival was threatened and the members of the tribe had underwent trials and tribulations to make it through the wayward historical storm.

Native sob-stories often use that tragedy to underscore the present tribe’s troubling situation, and there are undoubtedly millions of troubling situations to be handled as stories, but Welch deviates from this pattern. His narrator’s troubles are not primarily due to his tribe’s tribulations, they are, first and foremost, personal issues. It is his connection to his tribe that ultimately helps him resolve a psychological imbalance, without any of his real world problems being resolved by it. His tribe’s story of hardship is the mythical story at the heart of the remnants of his family, his connection to his family history, and like in a detective novel, or a Rashomon-like story, he uses the malleable, viscous quality of the storytelling to find out a hidden family secret. This uncovering is not, however, something that we are expecting or thinking about, it’s a sudden, almost epiphanic revelation that has as much to do with the nature of traditional Native storytelling as with any careful thinking about the story itself. Winter in the Blood is four things at once. It tells the story of his tribe’s past in three different ways, it tells the story about the narrator’s present and the awakening of his identity, it tells us about a formative experience in his youth (a personal story of hardship) and it tells us stories about telling stories.

It would be easy, as I initially did, to foreground the book’s use of traditional Native narrative techniques and patterns, and its narrative reflection of those same techniques. In fact, although Native storytelling does turn up at a crucial point of the book and although it does indeed contribute to a central revelation, it is not the most important or even the most central literary touchstone of James Welch’s magnificent little book. One of Winter in the Blood‘s most important forebears is arguably Ernest Hemingway’s story “Big Two-Hearted River”, the final story of Hemingway’s collection of stories In Our Time. “Big Two-Hearted River” is one of Hemingway’s numerous Nick Adams stories, this one focusing specifically on Nick Adams’ return from war and a fishing trip he undertakes. In Hemingway’s typical style, Adams’ only partially successful attempt at fishing and his accompanying ruminations on how and where to fish take the place of sentimental complaints about Adams’ harrowing experiences on the battlefield. Fishing, for Welch’s book, plays an almost identical role. Absurdly funny discussions about fishing take the place of meaningful human interactions and the success of fishing, and knowledge thereof is used as a social and economic signifier.

Given that the topics of the book include life, death and procreation, it’s hard not to also see in Welch’s narrator a hapless variation on Eliot’s Fisher King. In fact, such is the structure of Welch’s places and images, that it’s both a Hemingwayesque realism, plumbing the abyss between the unsaid and the undone, and a symbolist landscape to do Eliot proud. In these qualities, Winter in the Blood reflects the fact that the land where the narrator and his tribe live is both a place where rituals could take place or have taken place (some of the narrator’s actions almost have a ritual bent), and a real place to live in, a place with problems and history. This creates a kind of tension, a tension that has the book’s readers constantly on their toes, both trying to parse a vibrant web of human relationships and a confluence of literary and cultural signifiers. The tantalizing thing here is that both Eliot and Hemingway write densely, elliptic, allusive literature, and drawing on both of these traditions only heightens the density of Welch’s own novel, which is at no point inferior to its predecessors, and handles both kinds of literary speeds with admirable ease. It is quite humbling to read a book that is so in control of its material yet isn’t difficult reading. Granted, one should keep one’s eyes on the page, but the book is actually a good read, a funny one, too.

In fact, at times, the novel attains a comedic level of absurdity that will have many of its readers laughing out loud, with odd images and zany dialogue that seems to come straight from a Marx Brothers movie. One set piece in particular has this effect. Welch uses the fictional convention of the mystery man from elsewhere, rich and inscrutable, who visits a village or town with some secret motive or errand or mission, and turns it inside out. His mystery man, though clearly and efficiently set up to resemble his conventional counterpart, has no such thing and seems, in fact, somewhat confused and bewildered by the town he ends up in. He intends to go fishing, and all kinds of patrons in the bars he visits give him advice on when and where to fish, including the narrator, but he never seems to be motivated to go fishing. Indeed, the more often he crosses Winter in the Blood‘s narrator’s paths, the more we start seeing his function as being primarily that, someone to cross the narrator’s path. This is part of the tension I mentioned earlier. On the one hand, everything appears to be described in a very realistic manner, on the other hand, all devices and descriptions seem to be geared towards the narrator, rising up wherever he walks, and disappearing whenever he leaves.

The protagonist himself seems oddly unreal. On the one hand, he is highly believable, a character crafted with sublime skill. On the other hand, he seems to be more than that. He is, we are led to believe, of mixed blood, and personally, I chalked up his slightly unreal quality to the figure of the ‘mixedblood’ as Gerald Vizenor describes him, a trickster figure that Vizenor calls “mixedblood” or “crossblood”. Without wanting to imply an influence either way, I think James Welch operates, in a way, with similar ideas. It’s the trickster’s influence that warps the mystery man’s motivation, and it’s the trickster’s influence that shapes the two tragic events involving cows that met with an accident. Winter in the Blood‘s narrator is hard up or else he would not have returned to his home, and however cataclysmic the novel’s events will eventually prove to be for him, they do not change anything as far as his financial circumstances or personal relationships are concerned. What he does, is, and I’d argue it’s the trickster’s spirit that partly imbues the narrator, to re-arrange the family myths, to re-shuffle his childhood trauma and to re-align himself with a certain tribal history. To do that, the narrator dons the cloak of literary tradition but keeps changing and inverting it. The bits I mentioned are but a few of the many traditions he uses. There are also traces, for example, of the noir, among other things.

Most important, however, is the way that the narrator fuses the serious and humorous elements. The trickster’s hand becomes visible in a kind of mock-up of creation stories near the end, and, more strikingly, in a queer kind of epiphany that starts with the sentence “Bird farted”. Bird is the narrator’s horse and its fart appears to make the narrator realize some hidden family truth.

Bird farted. And it came to me, as though it were riding one moment of the gusting wind, as though Bird had had it in him all the time and had passed it to me in that one instant of corruption.

This is unabashedly comic, yet the revelation, the new knowledge that comes to him in that very moment, is momentous, and life-changing. Winter in the Blood is full of these moment, yet this specific moment is special. It exemplifies the author’s mastery of both the tragic and the comic, and shows, like the rest of the book, why contemporary novelists like Paul Harding (see my review of Tinkers here) fall so short of the mark. James Welch is both a committed writer and reader, one who takes his readers seriously, his own life history, and the literary tradition he makes use of. In many ways, he’s as much of a regional writer as his teacher, the master poet Richard Hugo, and this is not derogatory. Winter in the Blood is filled with a thorough understanding of a landscape and the economic ties that hold it together. It is not, like Harding’s novel, set in some fantasy version of reality. At the same time, his command of the spiritual, the mystical, the prayerful moments is also superior to a kitsch artiste like Harding, because he grounds its needs and necessities in the real world. The result of all this is that Winter in the Blood is a great novel, and James Welch is a great, great writer.

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Sarah Hall: Daughters of the North / The Carhullan Army (rev.)

Hall, Sarah (2008), The Carhullan Army, Faber and Faber
ISBN 978-0-571-23660-2

Is it worrying that a good deal of my more recent negative book reviews are negative primarily because of personal disappointment? Shouldn’t an author’s work be judged on its own merits, and not by what it could have been, might have been, should have been? But then, any competently written book might be deserving of a positive review and some, like Paul Harding’s overall mediocre and complacent little debut Tinkers (my review here), just don’t deserve that. It is the author’s fault if they don’t work through their ideas and tangents in more than a glancing way. Recently, critics like Lee Siegel have excoriated the contemporary novel, and while they were wrong-headed in their specific arguments, I think that the stark air of complacency that envelops much of MFA-produced prose contributed to Siegel’s ire. Today’s writers have an incredibly large array of themes and styles at their finger tips. They can emulate effective modes of writing with astonishing ease, hint at political or philosophical depths without ever having to deal with them in a thorough way. Books like Joshua Cohen’s most recent novel Witz, which go beyond simple pyrotechnics to create prose of significance that is both technically dazzling as it is intellectually and emotionally rich, have become increasingly rare. Critics should, I think, point this out, and shun books that are content to explore the byways of MFA-approved prose artistry, flirting with poetry, ditching each and every commitment. Sarah Hall’s third novel, The Carhullan Army, is both an excellent example of that kind of shallow writing and not. For me, it was a puzzling novel that was both annoying and interesting, both thoughtful and conventionally complacent. Ultimately, it is a fun book, a quick and easy read with some interesting tangents and possibilities that it never works through. A book meant and conceived to be a popular read, easy on the brain, presenting no hurdles, innovations or critical difficulties. And yet, there’s a spark of originality in it, of careful thought. It is this spark that makes it worth reading.

Sarah Hall is a British writer and has published four novels so far. The Carhullan Army is her third, published in 2007. Its geographical and social reference are strongly British, and elements, like the title, appeal predominantly to a British reading public, which is why the title was changed upon publication in the US, where it was published as Daughters of the North (hence the double title of the review). The US title is more emotive, more simply evocative of certain gender-based dichotomies; it also serves to situate the novel firmly in a literary tradition both of writing about the North, which is often symbolic of untamed, bristling natural landscapes (cf. Margaret Atwood’s seminal critical texts, especially Strange Things), and of writing about femininity in a patriarchally structured society, the word, or term ‘daughter’ set to evoke both the more benign term ‘mother’ and the fatherly power structure that the daughter inherits. Readers will have no problem pulling up these kinds of references in order to contextualize the book. The title stresses the book’s most simple and cheap elements, which are also those that inordinately dominate the novel’s discourse. Thus, it fits the book far better than the more complex original title which deserved a more reasoned and complex book. But then, it is indeed significant to state that the book’s wild North isn’t the allegorical landscape of Atwood’s more recent fictions. Sarah Hall sets her novel in a precisely defined region of northern England, Cumbria. The names of cities, rivers and towns either correspond exactly to existing cities, rivers and towns, or resemble them strongly. The invented town of Rith has a mirror in the Cumbrian town of Penrith, and both the nearby river Eden, as well as the Carhullan holdings exist under these exact names. Not a native of that remote region, wedged between the bulk of England, and the adjacent Welsh and Scottish countries, I gather that some travel routes and small geographic details have been changed, that there are small divergences as far as minute details are concerned, made to fit the story, but the overall principle is one of geographical accuracy.

At the same time, Hall, who herself lives in Cumbria, appears to be well aware of the mystical and allegorical potential that this region offers. She has demonstrated this awareness in her first novel, Haweswater, a sad, poetic novel about the destruction of a rural community by the invading forces of modernity. The Carhullan Army harks back to that first book, adding layers of significance, writing a tale set in the near future rather than in the past. Hall’s intent to make symbolically rich use of a landscape rich in vistas, resources and a rugged history is announced by the most central name-change. Penrith which means “Red Hill” or rather, “Hill Red”, is shortened to just “Rith”, i.e. red. As we infer from the rest of the book, Hall connects that color both to the Christian tradition of martyrdom (which, especially in Catholic traditions, is signified by the color red) and to the sense of guilt and accusation that literary forebears like Nathaniel Hawthorne made use of in creations like the eponymous scarlet letter. This, in relation to the biblical place Eden (via the Cumbrian river of the same name), allows the book’s readers to connect what seems like a simple, sparse, somewhat post-apocalyptic tale of rebellion to a broadly Christian context of storytelling where women as adulteresses, temptresses and wily sneaks have traditionally been handed the short end of the stick. It is especially in moments of crisis that masculinity, as the necessary force of stability and order, has been privileged over an unstable brand of femininity, and The Carhullan Army starts out with just such a moment of crisis. Due to a series of crises and mishaps, the British economy has collapsed, and Britain is now ruled by a military dictatorship of sorts, The Authority (an unfortunate name, recalling comics and satires more than an actually oppressive regime).

Written in 2007, the scenario of The Carhullan Army uncomfortably recalls the events of the past two years, “the ruthlessness of banks”, the dangerous dependency on oil not because of a lack of the necessary technology but because of a lack of “the will to invest”, and the downward spiral of governmental actions, breeding resentment against foreigners, arranging for “deportations” and, lastly, establishing the haplessly named military police force. Although, in the beginning, large crowds form in protest, The Authority ultimately manages to quell public unrest, until the British hunker down and accept everything. For The Carhullan Army‘s narrator who goes by the name Sister (not her real name, but the one she eventually adopts. In the first chapter, she declares “You will call me Sister”), its different. As a woman she’s suffers more from the new laws, and develops a growing unease with the status quo, until a deeply humiliating and invasive mandated procedure, meant to keep women from conceiving children, a wire contraption inserted into their uteri, pushes her over the edge. Suddenly, without any warning, she drops everything and leaves in order to join Carhullan. In Sarah Hall’s future Britain, Carhullan has become, even before the geopolitical crisis really took hold, a female autonomous community of some 60 women, a refuge for those persecuted and discriminated against, a rough-and-tumble community of women who live off the land, completely independent of governmental facilities and structures. Water, power and food are all produced on the lands of the Carhullan farm. Although no men live in Carhullan, the farm has not become some hot exotic lesbian fantasy world or a prim world of celibate gardeners. Granted, many of its inhabitants do live in same-sex relationships, but several others frequent nearby farms, striking up emotional and sexual relationships with Cumbrian men. Men may not be allowed on the farm, but the Carhullan ideology is not misandric, it doesn’t try to expunge male influence or anything. Instead, the point is to create a safe haven for women, to provide an opportunity for them to have a choice whether they want to seek out the male gaze or not, whether they want to play gender-fantasy roles or not, empowering women by taking them out of the patriarchal system (in several different ways).

In a string of extremely competently written flashbacks and straightforward storytelling, we are apprised not only of Sister’s personal history before coming to Carhullan, but also of her stay at the farm, of her discovery of its structures and inhabitants, of her amorous relationship to one of the women. It is a story of self-discovery, with all the yawn-inducing conventional cliché scenes and images one would expect. The Carhullan Army contains a few sex scenes, which are almost all of them risible and cheesy instead of erotic and involving. The same applies to the book’s depictions of Carhullan’s revolutionary leader and her ideology. It is as if Hall decided that all the worst implications about femininity and the images and contexts of it in male-dominated prose were all correct and worth emulating and reproducing. The embrace of cheap clingy stereotype is the single worst part of the book and I can personally understand every reader who broke off reading the book after the first or second of these scenes, although it is certainly worth persevering. There is only one (albeit central and important) difference to established discourse. Unlike some who foster a deeply sexist discourse that would have women as benign beings, intrinsically incapable of violence, a discourse that tends to posit a fantasy matriarchy, based on shoddy anthropology and archeology, as a pacifist, peaceful kind of reign, Sarah Hall has none of that and for that at least, she is to be commended. The Carhullan inhabitants are not averse to violence, and the Carhullan leader, a former soldier, harbors dreams of setting up a revolutionary army of women. The Carhullan Army firmly and clearly shows that this is not due to male influence or patriarchal society around them. In fact, in many ways, it seems to extol violence as a means of retaliating against an oppressive, nocent society, one that brands them with a scarlet letter and that invests its Christian creation myths with a foundational female misdemeanor. And even if you turn out to disagree with my reading, the novel’s ambiguous treatment of revolution and communities is closer to Hari Kunzru’s most recent novel or Heiner Müller’s tantalizing plays, than to essentially reactionary books like Dana Spiotta’s competent but noncommittal 2006 novel Eat The Document. (my review here).

Thus, the book’s ideas and story have both good parts and shortcomings. Where Hall really lets down the reader is the book’s narrative and formal structure, which is written in the most tired, conventional way possible, although Hall is clever enough to suggest otherwise, suggestions that eventually add up to a huge feeling of disappointment. The writing and artistic vision is tame, making me think of a crossing of the work of a clever essayist and a mediocre if competent novelist. The book consists of seven chapters, each of which is called “File”, and each of which carries either the comment “Full recovery” or “Partial recovery”. A prefatory note states that the book to come is the

English Authority Penal System archive record no. 498: Transcript recovered from site of Lancaster holding dock. Statement of female prisoner detained under section 4 (b) of the insurgency Prevention (Unrestricted Powers) Act.

It would, I gather, be fair to assume that what follows is in some way a transcript of a spoken statement, and would follow, in diction and form, the exigencies of that situation. Really, one would hope or assume that the novelistic parts of the book would reflect the odd nature of the book in some way at the very least, but it never really does. Except for the first and last paragraph of the book, the situation that Sister is in never penetrates the sleek surface of the narrative. There is no sign that anything in the book was actually spoken by a person, and even for a written statement, it is weirdly calm and measured. It is impossible to overemphasize how utterly unremarkable, dull and conventional Sister’s narration is. As if she was writing a humorless version of a 19th century novel, we perambulate through the story, with flashbacks and commentary shedding the necessary light on every detail and every scene. The writing is simple, with small streaks of poetic prose. Given the far richer prose of her previous novels, I gather Hall has tried to simplify her style to fit the occasion, but the result is merely a tad less florid. It’s still smooth and warm, easy on the eyes and brain. A book you can read on the beach, on a train or during a dull world cup game.

Even the ‘partially recovered’ chapters turn out to be a trick without real narrative consequences. Flashbacks help fill in all the necessary gaps, and what we don’t know, we don’t want or care to know. The effect is disappointing, yes, and deeply puzzling: why would the writer hint at complexities she clearly has never really attempted to include in the book? It’s false advertising, that’s what it is, and what’s more, it fits the general air of undisturbed cliché scenery. For every interesting idea there are five ideas and scenes that reproduce ideas and scenes we all know, ideas and scenes that barely manage to coalesce into creating any kind of interest in the book’s developments for its readers. There are riches hidden in these connections, but Hall never really avails herself of the cultural vocabulary to make us of all of that. For the reader, it’s a bit frustrating to see these ideas taken up only to be discarded lazily a few pages later. It’s like reading a writer whose heart’s not in the story she tells. This is why I found the American title Daughters of the North more fitting: it is simpler, and the meaning of it is apparent and obvious. The original title The Carhullan Army is more complex: see, Carhullan is a farm, and until the last fourth of the book, its inhabitants do not have an army in the literal sense. However, the aspect of violence I mentioned, the revolutionary and vengeful motivations of its inhabitants, most of which have already committed a violent crime to avenge behavior that was harmful to them, this makes the Carhullans an army even before they ever decide to become one. Women who come to Carhullan have to understand that their earlier, submissive behavior was part of the abuse, to quote Sister:

I began to understand that I owned the abuse. I was the only persecutor.

This is fascinating, interesting, and thoroughly out of character for the book as a whole. But clearly, it would not have needed to be, and yet the timid allusions to contemporary politics, the lack either of a thorough indictment of the things that are, or of an original, powerful vision of the things that could be, this pushes novels like The Carhullan Army into near irrelevance and opens up the possibility of attacks like Siegel’s. It is a good read, but would the world have been poorer had it not been written? I don’t know.

*

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Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann: Correspondence

Bachmann, Ingeborg; Paul Celan (2008), Herzzeit: Der Briefwechsel, Suhrkamp
ISBN 978-3-518-42033-1

[English translation: Bachmann, Ingeborg; Paul Celan (2010), Correspondence, Seagull Books
Translated by Wieland Hoban
ISBN 9781906497446]

2023. That’s the year until which the legendary correspondence between Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann was supposed to be blocked not just for publication but even for scholars. In biographies, the relationship of the two most important German post-war poets used to be a mysterious affair. Everybody knew about it, people knew when it started and when it ended, but the details, how and why it broke off, for example, were shrouded in mystery. Everybody waited for 2023, including yours truly. Thus, when the heirs decided to publish the exchange of letters in 2008, it was nothing less than a literary sensation, one of the most exciting publications of the decade, and probably one of the bestselling volumes of letters published in recent German literary history. The book Herzzeit: Ingeborg Bachmann-Paul Celan. Der Briefwechsel. consists of every extant letter between the two, plus all the letters that Bachmann and Celan’s wife Gisèle Celan-Lestrange exchanged and the handful of letters between Celan and Bachmann’s lover of four years, Max Frisch. Together, all these letters paint a vivid and devastating picture of two writers, who were both perfect for one another, and utterly wrong. Toward the end of their lives, both suffered from depressions, both were institutionalized for one reason or another, and when they died, they died alone. Celan chose to kill himself in 1970, and Bachmann burned in her apartment in 1973, numbed by her addiction to pills and booze. Neither death is part of the Bachmann/Celan letters, although the decomposing breath of despair is audible behind quite a few of the passionate, dark, extraordinary words between these two masters of literature.

Instead, we witness two great writers rising to fame, neither able to escape public detractors and critical backlashes in a German and Austrian culture that Bachmann, in the title of one of her best known stories, described as “between murderers and madmen”. Bachmann’s travails as a woman in a male-dominated society and Celan’s as a Jew writing in the language of those who murdered his parents were forcibly different, however, as was their pain. The letters chart two lonely lives and a relationship destroyed by misunderstandings, suspicions and a deep-seated bitterness. There is no word to describe what a moving and utterly engrossing reading experience this book provides, especially if you are partial to Bachmann’s or Celan’s work. Lucky for those who can’t read German, this searing, magnificent book has now been translated into English as Correspondence by Wieland Hoban, and contains, like the German edition, the Bachmann/Celan letters as well as the Celan-Lestrange/Bachmann letters and the letters between Max Frisch and Celan (though, hopefully, the commentary and endnotes are better than those in the German edition). This book is highly recommended. You cannot possibly be disappointed by it, especially if you are familiar with these writers’ literary output, each of which left the world a completely original, masterful, and highly influential body of work. The letters move from youthful heartbreak and poetical exuberance to the destructive later exchanges between two people who cannot trust one another although they are, until the end, drawn to each other. It’s not a book you read and shelve. It’s a book to read and reread, a book to treasure.

Paul Celan, primarily a poet, published more than seven collections of poetry that are unequaled among German 20th century poetry. He also translated poetry, from French poets like Rene Char or Rimbaud to Russian ones like Yesenin and Mandelstam. In the collected works, his translations add up to two thick volumes, and are consistently amazing, almost overpowering, every bit as strong as his poetry. The third kind of work that Celan is known for is poetological prose, especially his Meridian speech which he held upon receiving the prestigious Büchnerpreis. Celan was a poet through and through. Incapable of doing much other work, he threw himself into writing (and late in his life, teaching), publishing his first book in 1948. Celan was a survivor of the Shoah, originally from the Romanian province of Bukovina, a region where, due to the fact that until 1918 it had been part of the Austrian Empire, German-speaking immigrants lived. Shortly after the Germans invaded, the Jews in the province were rounded up and shipped to internment camps and labor camps. Celan’s parents died in the camps while Celan survived and eventually moved to Vienna. In Vienna he met the 21-year old Ingeborg Bachmann, at the time studying philosophy, psychology and German literature (in 1949, at 23, she published her dissertation on Martin Heidegger) and the two hit it off almost immediately. The first letter in the book is a poem by Celan dedicated to Bachmann on her 22nd birthday, called In Ägypten, one of his most beautiful early poems.

Their love affair didn’t last, it ended in 1951, for reasons that none of the two spelled out in the letters, but reading closely, one finds, in these letters and the heartbroken, bitter ones that followed, the same net of accusations and suspicions that would continue to haunt their relationship. When, in 1957, Celan (who was by that time married to Gisèle Lestrange) and Bachmann resumed their affair, it ended for very similar reasons and was followed by the same incriminations, the same bitterness, although this time, it was laced with a despair that was to be deadly to both. From the start, Bachmann and Celan were wildly attracted to one another, but wary of the passion and the darkness they sensed in the other and in themselves. Meetings were postponed, letters were not sent for fear of creating misunderstandings, for fear of crowding or overwhelming the other. Hot intimate letters were often answered by cold, distant, careful letters, regardless who wrote which. We as readers find, in the thicket of letters, two people who see each other’s hurt and pain, and want to help one another, but neither knows the best means to go about it. One aspect is especially remarkable: from the start, these letters are all about Celan. With a few, very moving exceptions, most of the letters discuss Paul Celan and his mental problems or public issues. As early as November 1949, Bachmann writes of the “lostness” of Celan who “drifts out into a great ocean”. This is the ocean of a traumatized survivor who uses his murderers’ language to construct a new life in poetry, and who uses poetry as a place to encounter other people, a lostness that never left him, and that led to the end of not only both of their affairs but also of their friendship. Loneliness was Celan’s fate, despite his insistence, as a poet, on the power of poetry to connect people.

Poems, for Celan, are places where people meet, and his use of language in the poetry is less a matter of stylistics than a reconstruction of reality in language. Celan’s writing is incredibly direct, and possessed of an almost obsessive honesty and concreteness. This is the reason why it hurt him so much when, in the course of the so-called Goll-Affair, he was eventually publicly attacked not as a person, but as a poet, and his work derided as cheap second-rate imitations. Published in Germany, a country that was governed by a former member of the Nazi party, his poetry, starting in the mid-1950s, became a target for bigots and antisemites of all stripes, and the angrier and more desperate Celan became, the more he rejected friends and acquaintances unless they shared his anger to the letter. The climate at the time didn’t just affect him: bigotry and philistinism was on the move and a great many brilliant, sensitive people suffered. A year after Celan’s suicide, fellow survivor, friend and brilliant critic Péter Szondi, for example, chose to kill himself as well. In Celan’s post-war life, as his professional career and fame as a poet started to gain traction, winning him some of the most prestigious prizes of German literature, selling well, his personal life started to deteriorate; more exposure came to mean more attacks, until he finally, as his wife wrote in a letter to Bachmann, chose “the loneliest death”.

Celan, though often wrongly thought to be obscure and unreadable, combined Jewish and German literary traditions, restacked the stock of German vocabulary, reached for archaic words as well as combined words into a new creation. He was sincerely interested in language and its power to convey an image of a world gone awry, a world standing on its head, feet into the air (this image, from his Meridian speech, is borrowed from Büchner’s Lenz). But Celan’s humanity doesn’t ‘walk on air’. The air beneath our feet is threatening, destabilizing. Pascal wrote “Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie”, and this is the kind of air he refers to. In the 1960s, he couldn’t be further from contemporary phenomena like postmodern irony. He wrote with a straight face, recognizing the urgency of poetry and the need for a common language between people in a disintegrating world. His work, highly dependent on the work of such thinkers as Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem, and integrating rather than excising the influence even of writers like Martin Heidegger, didn’t shy away from mysticism, but religion and spiritual content didn’t lead Celan’s poetry away from the real world. Instead, as his work became denser with mystical and linguistic difficulties, it also became more precise. He shed the rhetorical flourishes of his romantic early poetry and aimed straight for truth, refining his language and his poems into small, concentrated doses of signification. Poetry, for Celan, was not about saying things in a beautiful way, but about saying things, as good and precise as possible, and colloquial language just wasn’t precise enough. As his work moved toward denseness and a difficult clarity, it also moved from the melancholy of his first book into the despair and bitterness of his last books.

In his Meridian speech, Paul Celan references Büchner’s Lenz, the eponymous character of Büchner’s astonishing novella. Lenz’ story is one of constant decline, he’s shown to be a man at odds with reality and yet obsessed by it, a man with a murderous fantasy who tries to kill himself repeatedly. Lenz ends with a statement of resignation that is among the most searing and affecting in literary history. Lenz lives on, empty, seemingly rational and social, but really hollowed out and finished, living on because he can’t die, finishing the business of life, completely and utterly resigned. It is his search for truth, his passionate madness that precedes this resignation, however, that has entranced and inspired writers for decades. The Lenz figure also unites Celan and Bachmann. Bachmann, in her own acceptance speech for the Büchnerpreis made use of Büchner’s novella, as well, and also used the image of walking on one’s head. This is not even remotely the only connection of Bachmann’s and Celan’s writing, but it is the only aspect where the two meet as equals, equal thinkers and writers. References, as with the whole exchange of letters in Correspondence, are mostly slanted towards Celan. Celan’s weight as a genius poet is obvious everywhere. His metaphors surface time and again in Bachmann’s work, especially in her only finished novel Malina and her early poem Dunkles zu sagen. The latter is most significant as far as these letters in Correspondence are concerned. It is a poem dealing with the Orpheus and Eurydike myth. But while in the myth, the man comes to retrieve the woman from death’s grasp and loses her when he looks back to ensure she follows him out of the underworld, Bachmann reverses the roles. The poem begins with the words “Like Orpheus, I…” And indeed, in their relationship, it is, time and again, Bachmann, who reaches back to drag Celan into the light.

We know how the darkness encroached upon Bachmann in the 1960s, how she had to deal with attacks and depression, but in Celan’s letters, there’s not a trace of this. He is the demure, sensitive part while Bachmann organizes meetings, fights for his reputation, calls publishers and, letter after letter, tries to assuage his worries and anxieties. Her own poetry, far more than his, often has a skewered hymnal bent to it. It seems like public poetry, poetry that asks to be declaimed, small, volatile declarations from a vanished world. The poems themselves are sometimes rhymed, sometimes not, but are all deeply and explicitly rooted in a German literary tradition that contains both Romantic poets such as Klopstock and Eduard Mörike, and such modern poets as Wilhelm Müller, Georg Trakl and Stefan George. All these poets are highly important for her work, but she’s more elusive. Her poetry (as Celan’s) is often called “hermetic”, by which critics mean to say that you need a ‘clue’ to ‘unlock’ the meaning. Alas, that is not the case, but one can see the difficulty of her work in the fact that her poems seem supple and beautiful and clear on the surface, but are actually composed of layered, almost imaginistic, metaphors, which, like small explosive devices, detonate the more often one rereads her work. Between her first and second volume, this denseness of metaphor increased, and that second volume is a complex, shifting, thorny, but completely alluring piece of poetry. And it is, like Celan’s fully committed, as art, but also as a personal statement. In one of the few post-1961 poems, she writes

This sentence is not written by someone
who doesn’t underwrite

(note that the last word in German is unterschreibt and is actually closer to the word “(to) sign”). Young as she is (she published the second (and last) volume when she was only 30 years old), she created, in her 70-odd poems, an influential, original, extraordinary body of work.

In Celan’s letters, there’s nothing of this. Bachmann frequently alludes to or talks about his work, but he does nothing like that. When Celan talks about Bachmann’s poetry, he treats it as an extension of her person, its beauty an aspect of Bachmann’s, like her hair. He isn’t the only man in her life to do this, in fact. As we read her letters, and Max Frisch’s and see the facsimile of a broadsheet that Hans Weigel, a former friend and lover put out with the intent of attacking her, we gain the impression of her as an embattled but strong woman, looking, like Celan, for a true language, but despairing of finding it. Nowhere in the whole book does Celan reflect this problem, her troubles; he never speaks to her as an equal, never helps her, consoles her, attempts to drag her into daylight. Instead, he finds something to reproach her with whatever she does, especially after they break up for the second time, and the public detractors of his work become more vocal. Without debate, without an attempt to make it up to her, he just expects her to support him, and he expects her to do it in the exact way he tells her to. The public attacks on Celan’s work really take off with a review of his 1959 volume Sprachgitter by a critic called Böcker, a review that Celan, his wife and many other readers (including yours truly) considered implicitly antisemitic and explicitly bigoted. It referred to as well-worn antisemitic clichés as the homeless Jew. Böcker explicitly denied that poems like Todesfuge have any relationship to reality beyond the author’s (Jewish) cleverness. It’s a short review, crammed with resentment and idiocy, by a critic who shouldn’t have written about literature in the first place. But stupid critics abound, as do hateful ones, and a few kind words by his friends might have floated Celan’s boat here, so Celan, hurt and anguished, sent a copy of the review to his friends in the hope of obtaining support and succor. The answers of his friends were not as expected, however.

When he did not receive an immediate reply from Bachmann, who was busy and en route from one engagement to the next, he wrote to Max Frisch, with whom Bachmann had entered a relationship shortly before. Max Frisch is arguably the most important Swiss post-war writer, whose vast work includes journals, novels and plays, but he’s in many ways the antithesis to Celan. Although he’s certainly interested in politics, he’s far more of a postmodern trickster and ironist, his best work discussing the vicissitudes of modern identities (the title of one of his best novels (Mein Name sei Gantenbein) could be translated as “Let’s assume my name is Gantenbein”, etc.). He’d published plays with a facile moral fiber and two layered, well-composed journals discussing art, writing and the issues of the day. Just this year (March 2010) drafts for a third volume of journals has been published posthumously (called Entwürfe zu einem Dritten Tagebuch). I mention this new journal, because a surprisingly large portion of it is devoted to his ambiguous feelings towards Jews and Israel, and he spends many pages justifying his latent antisemitism; Celan would not have been surprised by these ambiguities: Frisch’s peculiar answer to Celan’s questing, anxious letter for help against Blöcker and his antisemitic cohorts caused Celan to call his attitudes towards Jews “dubious”. This answer of Frisch’s, of which Correspondence offers two earlier drafts, too, is a well-written, eloquent exercise in noncommittal sophistry, a reply that stunningly turns the tables in the matter and puts Celan on the defense. Instead of discussing Blöcker’s malfeasance, Frisch interrogates Celan’s reaction.

I treat this matter at length because this short exchange has subsequently caused all ties between Bachmann and Celan to be severed beyond repair, and Frisch, who keeps referring to Bachmann in a condescending way and would leave her devastated a few years later, is an important part of the whole downward spiral that ensues. Mind you, there are letters that follow this exchange, but Celan would never forgive Bachmann’s mild attitude towards Frisch (and, by implication, towards Böcker’s review) and as the second, far more harmful and aggressive wave of attacks washed over Celan, he regarded any silence, any hesitation on Bachmann’s part as proof of her enmity, of her tacit support of the generally hostile critical air. This second wave is the so-called Goll-Affair, engineered by the widow of the poet Yvan Goll. The widow, the infamous Claire Goll, had started, in the early 1950s, a thorough attempt to smear Celan as would-be plagiarist of Goll’s work. To achieve this she undertook a series of crude forgeries, serving up transparent lies and frighteningly effective appeals to the base instincts of German reviewers. Her lies, obvious though they were and badly though they were argued, managed to sway legions of critics who kept publishing articles about Celan the “shyster” and “crook”. Celan, shy survivor, felt persecuted again, and with some justification, blamed the residual antisemitism that regained strength at the time. He was, to take up Bachmann’s early letter, no longer just adrift on the ocean, but drowning in it. Although, by 1967-9, the ire and the lies had abated somewhat, Celan’s integrity and his will to write, live and create were damaged beyond repair. This poet whose poetics were primarily social, about encounters and other people, this poet felt deserted by his publisher, by friends and, yes, by Bachmann, his other, his love, whom he appeared to never cease loving even when they were apart, and just friends. It might have been just this feeling of desolation that led to his death in the hungry waters of the Seine in April 1970.

On the other hand, his deep sorrow and his obsessions threatened to engulf Bachmann, drag her down with him. Notwithstanding her own problems, she never stopped trying to save him, trying to keep him from being overwhelmed by his darkness. A draft for a letter, written late in 1961, shows how much his coldness, his suspicions and his deep despair affected her, as well. 1961 was a time where she tried to find a new way of writing. This was a time when she ceased, almost, to write poetry, and turned to prose almost exclusively. Before her death, she went on to publish two volumes of stories and a dark, haunted novel, Malina. Contrary to the suggestions of critics such as Marjorie Perloff, she didn’t quit poetry because it was dominated by a “male voice”. German Lyrik is a genre that provided a safe space for female writers, from Annette von Droste-Hülshoff to Marie Luise Kaschnitz, it was an allowed mode of writing that enabled male critics to read these female poets’ work as artfully crafted precious pieces. Celan’s reaction that read Bachmann’s poetry as an extension of his loved mistress wasn’t surprising, he reacted like many other writers and critics. And Bachmann was a runaway success as a poet. She sold extremely well, won many prizes and became almost a household name. Ingeborg Bachmann was a poet. Everyone knew that. But behind that facade, something else grew. Bachmann grew tired of the roles she was assigned, tired of condescension and allowed ways of expression and so she launched into writing prose. In 2000, a stunning collection of Bachmann’s unpublished poems and fragments was published, called Ich weiß keine bessere Welt (~ I don’t know a better world), where we can see the poet fighting to regain control over her means of expression. She twists and turns small phrases and images and castigates herself for not finding the right metaphor, the fitting phrase. These fragments show us a poet wrestling with her art, a poet ceasing to be a poet, a writer discovering prose.

In the 1961 letter, which she never sent, she demands of Celan the courage to believe in his own strength, to disregard the feeble public opinion. “The world can’t and won’t change, but you can”, she writes and admits “you might say I demand too much of you for your own sake. You’re right, I do” and adds the observation “but I demand [the same] of me, for my own sake, which lends me the courage to tell you this.” The edition contains a facsimile of this letter, which is typed in a feverish manner, letters tumbling against one another, words bumping into others, testament of her inner turmoil. Bachmann, readers of her work know, fought to change, fought against a tide of negative criticism: between 1961 and her death in 1973, she was almost constantly assailed for her deviation from the public image critics had cherished so much. Her work was attacked for being a “fall from grace” and “verging on trivial”, befuddling assessments for today’s readers. But between 1961 and his death, Celan wrote all of two letters to Bachmann, the last one a distanced note of thanks for her role in securing him a translation assignment. On the other hand, there are no letters of Bachmann, either. Contact with Celan, however much she had loved him, was harmful to her, he demanded too much of her and as her own psyche started to give way, it’s likely she didn’t have the surplus energy to buoy Celan again. In all the preceding letters there’s nothing to indicate that Celan would have been a help in any way. In 1962 she was left by Max Frisch and later that year she was briefly institutionalized. Her last ten years, from all we know, were a constant struggle, but the book is silent about it, as it is about Celan’s troubles.

In 1963 he writes enigmatically “I have a few not quite pleasant years behind me”, and the next thing we learn is in Gisèle Celan-Lestrange’s letter to Bachmann, telling her “la terrible nouvelle”, the horrible news about Celan’s death. Her regretful conclusion “Je n’ai pas su l’aider come je l’aurais voulu” holds true for both women. The silences towards the end of the book are terrible, and one can’t help but think of Bachmann’s poem Reklame, a satire of modern advertising upbeat hopefulness, and its final lines

but what happens […]
when a dead silence

occurs.

Correspondence is highly recommended; it’s a no-brainer for fans of either of these two genius writers’ work, but moreover I urge everyone who isn’t a reader of Bachmann’s and Celan’s work, to become one. Take the opportunity to read Celan’s or Bachmann’s poetry, read Bachmann’s novel or stories. Both writers have been widely translated into English and French, there is no conceivable reason not to have read them. Essential as their work is for German post-war literature, their greatness makes these books required reading for every reader of poetry or literary prose. One is tempted to call this collection of letters just as essential. It’s not. But it’s a great read, a moving, inspiring book that I have been reading and rereading constantly ever since I acquired it, a book that you will love even if you have read nothing of either writer’s excellent work. I cannot overpraise this book. It’s that good.

*

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Jeff Smith: Rasl: The Fire of St. George

Smith, Jeff (2010), Rasl: The Fire of St. George, Cartoon Books
ISBN 978-188896322-9

Jeff Smith is an extraordinary writer and artist. Ever since he started publishing the Bone comics on his own imprint Cartoon Books, he has been consistently brilliant and fun. The whole of Bone, now available in one indispensable, addictively readable volume is one of the best graphic novels of the past decade. Since the completion of that series, he has undertaken a few smaller projects, all of which are highly recommendable, but many readers have been waiting for another epic work to approach the narrative scope and power of Bone. Two years ago, Smith did just that when he published the first volume of his new project, Rasl (pronounced like dazzle). I reviewed that first volume, which collected Rasl issues #1-3, on this blog (click here), and recommended it unreservedly. Rasl: The Drift is a fascinating work, a take on an ensemble of topics and literary traditions, from the noir to time travel books; it showed us a rough, unshaven young man, the eponymous Rasl, who travels through different dimensions, to find out he’s being hunted by a lizard-faced villain in a trench-coat who can travel the dimensions with as much ease as Rasl himself, and threatens his girlfriends in several dimensions. Does this recap confuse you? Well, it is confusing, as is the book. Rasl: The Drift is a dense introduction to what promises to be one of the best contained graphic novel series of our time. Jeff Smith introduces us to a plethora of plot strands, ideas, and lots of other suggestions. The Drift is a dazzling display of the range of Jeff Smith’s mind, and at the same time, it raises very high expectations for the rest of the series. When I picked up the followup volume, Rasl: The Fire of St. George, which collects Rasl issues #4-7, it wasn’t without hesitations. The expectations that The Drift raises are almost impossible to fulfill. And yet, The Fire of St. George is a deeply satisfying read, both following up on ideas and suggestions of the first volume, as well as further raising expectations for the next volumes.

Rasl: The Drift told us little about the protagonist. We learned that Rasl has a lover, and that there’s a version of her in every dimension he travels to, which is true for other people, as well. We find out that Rasl is a nickname of sorts or a pseudonym. His real name is Dr. Robert Johnson and he used to be a physicist, working with a friend, Dr. Miles, and a female co-worker (who eventually became a lover) on an exiting but obscurely dangerous new project. We infer that their professional relationship has gone sour and that this demise is connected to his current existence as a dimension-hopping art thief. This aspect comes somewhat late in the book and the overall topic of (serious) science was but one of a multitude of tangents that The Drift proposed to us readers. Instead, while we were busy trying to make sense of all this, Smith offered us several other kinds of explanations. Masks and symbols suggested myth and religion to us, while the lizard-faced man, the variations between the different worlds and the rough-and-tumble manner of traveling between dimensions had a strong whiff of the paranormal, with its implications of X-Files-like intrigue. All this appeared to be part of the tangle of Rasl. I say ‘tangle’ because The Drift makes no serious attempt to explain anything, it just piles reference on reference and plot on plot and character on character, stringing its readers along, offering but small clues here and there. This is is stark contrast to the new volume, which at times almost seems earnest, as it slowly, carefully and patiently explains a few of the allusions and suggestions of The Drift. The aspect Smith decided to shed light on first is the science bit, but he doesn’t explain what exactly is happening, scientifically speaking. Instead he has Rasl tell us the story of how he and his friend came to make a momentous discovery; at the same time, he tells us about Nicola Tesla’s life and his discoveries, his scientific genius and his eventual downfall.

Tesla has become a touchstone of geek-culture these past years, especially since the advent of steampunk fiction. On TV, Tesla has featured prominently in shows like Sanctuary, and the steampunk-fest Warehouse 13. In literature, apart from the use Alan Moore makes of him in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the perhaps most prominent appearance of Tesla is in Thomas Pynchon’s masterful Against The Day. Tesla appeals to a certain demographic because he’s just the right amount of anti-establishment, mixed with a dash of unorthodox genius. His attraction for writers is also due to the fact that for every invention that was eventually realized and used, there is an obscure, unfinished, rumored invention. And because we don’t really know, writers are free to imagine anything, and so Nicola Tesla, whatever the facts about the historical Tesla, has become some kind of real-life Jules Verne character, just as outrageous and mysterious as Captain Nemo. In The Fire of St. George, Smith even proposes that Tesla was the inspiration behind the Frankenstein in James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein movie that deviated quite strongly from Mary Shelley’s novel. This idea is then followed up by a short re-telling of Tesla’s life as a scientist. For anyone even remotely familiar with the man, these sections of the book will seem a bit tedious, a reiteration of what seems to be common knowledge. Telling one’s readers about some relatively well know historical fact is something that many lesser writers do in order to manufacture some fact-related credibility for their far-fetched plots. The most annoying example of this is probably Dan Brown, but these days, that’s all the rage, from Kostova’s Historian to Mosse’s Labyrinth and the books by Preston/Child, bookshelves groan under the weight of annoying, simplified knowledge. Smith, however, isn’t a lesser writer, and his use of these historical sections may seem similar, but they are in fact far more complex and intriguing than that, but they don’t wear this difficulty on their sleeve.

In The Drift, readers knew they needed to look for clues to find their way around the bewildering events of the book, and so most will have read the book with care, parsing the panels for hints and subtleties. The tone in The Fire of St. George appears to be very different, the narrative far more clear and conventional. The X-Files reference has become stronger, with a mixture of unexplained phenomena (in the 1940s, a ship vanishes in the middle of the ocean), sober scientific explanations and the beginnings of a governmental conspiracy or cover-up operation. Jeff Smith, however, is a talented and insightful writer, and so even simple-seeming stories have unexpected depths. There is, for example, the absence of mysticism or religion from this volume (with a few eerie exceptions) although the first volume strongly hinted at these issues. But in the retelling and the images thereof, there are ellipses, and smaller nudges that one could almost have overlooked, from the fact that Rasl tells us about the creation scene of the Frankenstein movie, but omits the line “In the name of God! Now I know what it’s like to be God” that is one of the central lines of the movie and is, I think, one of the underlying themes of the whole Rasl story, that will be talking about issues like the creation of dimensions and the question of the humanity of people in other dimensions. Smith’s art contributes to this, by abandoning what feels like a dark, hollow black-and-white style for an almost flat iconicity in his biography of Tesla (except for a few panels where the Tesla bio bleeds into Rasl’s disturbed own life. This is but one example of countless others. Smith has abandoned the nested detail of Bone for a style, both in the writing and in the art, that seems more simple, dominated by large swathes of black and white, with sweaty, scared, hunted Rasl aka Dr. Johnson trying to make sense of the trench-coated man who follows him everywhere, making ominous threats. For all the explanations, we are doing the same, because every answered question opens up another pack of questions.

To the mysterious symbols introduced in the first volume, a mysterious silent child is added. The symbol tied into a whole discussion about native American myths, and its speculative connections to mysticism and extraterrestrial life. Since the symbols only appear in the ‘new’ dimensions, i.e. dimensions different from Rasl’s original one, questions about the nature of chronology and the laws of cause and effect are raised. Also, skeptic doubts about the validity of referring to any world as the ‘original’ one. The child, as well as Rasl’s multiple lovers add to this questions of the body, and of its connection to intra-dimensional energies. If this makes it sound as if Smith were engaging in weird esoteric speculation, he isn’t. Instead he is using common scientific knowledge (there’s a very short bibliography appended if you happen to not know some popular books on the subject (I’m betting all of you know at least 80% of them, so common is this knowledge)) and his own inspiration as writer and artist to launch questions and suggestions at his readers, nudging them, egging them on, raising expectations again and again. To be honest, there’s so much build-up even in this second volume, that it’s hard to see how on earth Jeff Smith’s going to make good on his promises, but experience tells us that he might manage. After all, if we remember all the things that happened between the first Bone volume and the last, we might almost be confident that it works out to the best. If it does, the Rasl narrative might turn out to be one of the best graphic novels of our time, similar to writers like Grant Morrison or Thomas Pynchon, but more grounded than the former and just plain different than the latter. Already, an announcement of a new Rasl volume is a great bit of news, but so far, all we have are teasers. If Smith follows up on them, we are bearing witness to a great work in progress. Already, Rasl: The Drift and Rasl: The Fire of St. George are excellent reads, intriguing, well written, fantastically penciled and inked. I recommended the first volume in my review of it, and I do so again. Read Jeff Smith, and read Rasl. The next volume will be called Romance at the Speed of Light.

Ryotaro Shiba: The Last Shogun

Shiba, Ryotaro (2004), The Last Shogun, Kodansha International
[translated from the Japanese by Juliet Winters Carpenter]
ISBN 978-1-56836-356-1

When Commodore Matthew Perry appeared in Tokyo Bay (then Edo Bay) in in July 1853, and demanded that Japan open its ports to European tradesmen, he set in motion a process of revolution that completely transformed Japanese society and politics. Japan at that time was ruled by a military administration, the Shogunate, the rule of which was a complex interaction of bureaucratic mechanisms and a wielding of dictatorial power, a post held by one family (and its collateral family branches), the Tokugawa. The Tokugawa Shogunate’s dominion had been established by military successes, and it rested on a balance of power between the different Japanese nobles and warlords. The Japanese emperor was head of state in name only, having no military or financial power, whereas the Tokugawa were one of the country’s richest clans; its fabulous financial assets one of the main sources of the Tokugawa strength. The changes that European pressure effected led to the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate and to a restoration of the Emperor’s standing, albeit within a constitutional monarchy, with limits to his powers. Although Western-style democracy had not been introduced until after 1945, the so-called Meiji Restoration was significant in moving Japanese politics into modernity, abolishing an intricate feudal society for a more open, enlightened one. The period between the day Perry and his threatening ships appeared, and the day the Shogun stepped down and a new constitution was introduced, is an endlessly fascinating one; in historical studies like Conrad Totman’s eminently readable The Collapse of the Tokugawa Bakufu, for example, it proves to be an incredibly engrossing subject of modern historiography. Books like Totman’s, however, also show how obscure many aspects of the period are, how elusive certain details and motivations.

This is one of the reasons why The Last Shogun: The Life of Tokugawa Yoshinobu, a good historical novel by Ryotaro Shiba (or Shiba Ryotaro), is such an eminently interesting read. There are a plethora of flaws in this relatively slim book, but despite all them, The Last Shogun is highly recommended if you like either historical novels or have an interest in the period. It’s author, from the evidence of this novel, would not be amiss in the company of historical novelists more common on Western bookshelves like Stefan Zweig or Hilary Mantel. Beneath the ebb and flow of its history, there’s also a mind at work with insights into his culture and past not unlike that of major thinkers as Masao Maruyama. The Last Shogun, translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter, was a runaway bestseller upon publication in Japan in 1967, and its author one of the most popular novelists of his day. Unlike Yasunari Kawabata, Kobo Abe or Yukio Mishima, Ryotaro Shiba is relatively little known outside of Japan, with only a handful of books translated into English. Before Carpenter’s translation in 1998, no other books have found their way onto American or British shelves, as far as I know. Since then, notable translations have included The Tatar Whirlwind, translated by Joshua Fogel and Drunk as a Lord, translated by Eileen Kato. The Last Shogun is a completely bewitching book, and an odd fiction, as well. In about 250 pages, Shiba manages to tell the story of a life spent in the heart of power, and a tragic, very brief reign, as well as the story of a country changing irreversibly, shedding its feudal skin, opening up to enlightened ideas and politics. Shiba throws names and events at us, without blinking, without long sentimental introductions.

The shifts between certain events can be brutal, as he makes no attempt to fatten up his story with unnecessary décor and small exotic subplots. If you have any experience reading low-quality books in the genre, you can almost see where writers like James A. Michener would insert flowery prose and emotive stories, but he goes beyond merely evading trashy filler in his elliptic history. At times, this spareness is tantalizing, especially since The Last Shogun is not, in fact, told without any digressions, but the small detours that do occur are precise and dense with significance and symbolism, more often than not consisting of one or two pages at most detailing a particular observation or event, and it’s almost never repeated. There is a pause, for example, when he offhandedly asks of his mistress to be ready to commit suicide when he embarks on a dangerous mission. Or gruesome moments, as when a close adviser is killed and the narrator observes that “every time a sword had penetrated the flesh, there had been a soft sound, like the sound made by hitting a rubber ball.” These moments are rare, though, especially compared to the enormous amount of history, replete with names and dates. This wealth of names and details, however, is never overwhelming for the reader, which, one assumes, is due in part both to the translator and the particular edition here. The edition helpfully contains maps, a glossary, a list of characters and a genealogy of the Tokugawa family, as well as a highly informative introduction by Frank Gibney, journalist and vice chairman of the Board of Editors at Encyclopædia Britannica, to make sure we do not get lost in the sea of the history of a country and culture that is not ours.

It must have been slightly different for Japanese readers. The Last Shogun, originally serialized in a newspaper, was one of many successful books by the author about the period, and his long and prolific work has created a sense of trust and respect in the Japanese reading public. Indeed, his gluttonous reading habits and his endless curiosity had helped unearth and popularize historical figures not well known before they became a subject of one of Ryotaro Shiba’s novels. This respect explains the utter lack of references, footnotes or historiographical defensiveness. Shiba spins his tale, assailing his readers with what he proposes to be facts and is done with it. It’s not a romance, it’s pretty serious about is history and yet Shiba is so confident he refrains from all explanation and commentary, giving us sometimes little more than the bare details. However, as readers of the translation, we don’t really know exactly how bare the details were in the original, since Carpenter is pretty cavalier about staying close to the text and prides herself in her “Translator’s Note” on having “slipped in a bit of explanation” “here and there”, or, indeed, on “having done a bit of trimming as seemed necessary”. This is, I shit you not, the full extent of her explanations of the changes she made to the text. There are no footnotes by her, either, pointing out changes, or explaining what would have made the “trimming” seem “necessary”, or how much “here and there” or “a bit” really is. It’s the sort of thing that usually makes me put away a book unread, and as a reader, I can’t help wondering how much editoring Carpenter has done. How much does this book still resemble the book Shiba wrote? Is this book better or worse than the original? The fact that the language is the single worst aspect about the book, musically wooden and lexically uninventive, does not bode well for Carpenter’s competence in making these cuts and additions. But in cases like this, we have to take the good with the bad, and state the obvious: we can complain all we want about Carpenter’s meddling and her cavalier explanations (or lack thereof), but the fact is, without Carpenter’s efforts, I wouldn’t have been able to read this book at all. To be honest: I wouldn’t even know its author had ever existed, and my life and my shelves would be poorer for it. There is an invaluable service that translators provide, yet one hopes that some of them would be more careful and considered about it.

The Last Shogun, readable despite or because of Carpenter’s meddling (either could be true) spends less time with momentous events like the devastating battles that marked the death of the Shogunate’s and forced the Shogun to leave Japanese politics altogether, than it spends with his youth, and the turning points in his life. The Yoshinobu that Shiba describes to us is a true polymath, incredibly gifted at intellectual tasks as well as at sports and artisanry and craft. Shiba largely skips battles and fights and focuses instead on rhetorical battles, showing us a man who will forgo a fight and try and engage his enemies in a discussion instead. Yoshinobu, whose office represented the height of Japanese feudalism, is painted by Shiba as an enlightened ruler, for all intents and purposes a precursor of the Meiji era. The word meiji appears to mean something like “enlightened government” and Shiba’s Yoshinobu is the epitome of the enlightened ruler as so many philosophers envisioned him. Few studies of the period focus as intensely upon Yoshinobu as Shiba does in his novel, and so the depiction of Yoshinobu seems a bit fanciful, less a realistic portrait of a historical character, as Shiba’s idealized version of him. In the characterization of Yoshinobu we find a powerful cocktail of positive and negative traits that perfectly explain some of the obscure points I mention earlier. Yoshinobu’s fear of being branded a traitor and his obsession with the reading and writing of history serves, for example, as an explanation for the lack of military resolve that the administration showed at the time, the lack of military forcefulness, which Totman is a bit puzzled about. However, these ‘explanations’ are not, strictly speaking, about historical accuracy. Instead, Shiba took pains to create a narrative for modern Japanese history that established a continuity from the Tokugawa Shogunate to post-WWII Japan. History, for Shiba, is not just an accumulation of facts and factoids, it’s about understanding the foundations of contemporary society in the dark recesses of the past, as any good historical novel does, really.

Sometimes, reading a book like The Last Shogun makes one worry about knowing too little about Asian and especially Japanese literary traditions, because one feels that Shiba makes use of a mixture of traditional phrasings or descriptions, and individual ones. This feeling stems from the fact that Shiba’s ideal, pacifist, pro-Enlightenment narrative reads very different from other descriptions of Yoshinobu that keep praising him effusively in an almost unmediated fashion. Part of the book read less like a novel and more like formulaic praise for an Emperor, dictator etc. by a loyal subject, the kind of rote praise that we have, most recently, heard from the coach of the North Korean side at this year’s World Cup. It doesn’t really add content, but what it does is add texture. Whatever the tradition or Shiba’s reasons for including it, one of the effects is that the stiff, ritual nature of Yoshinobu’s time feels real and palpable for the reader. This is a period, after all, that is very far from ours, its customs often strange and alien. We don’t immediately understand the extent of the breach of protocol that allowing a council of advisers to smoke and eat sweets in the presence of the Shogun, for example, entails. The book (and Carpenter) refrain from explaining or telling us; neither do they offer us human interest stories to make the culture and its strictures more relatable to the modern reader. Shiba expects us to go with it, to understand it, if not the exact reason for the ritual, then the bare fact of it, the restricted and tightly woven nature of political and private acts. The frequent, odd praise is an excellent stylistic tool to achieve this. We don’t feel the restrictiveness as an alien, invasive force on our sense of privacy, this is not Arthur Golden nor James Clavell, after all, but we have a vivid sense of it, a sense that helps us understand, but that doesn’t evoke negative feelings or exoticist sentiments. It’s hard to describe, but the effect is interesting and helps balance the incredibly wooden writing which is the main problem of the book.

Not reading Japanese, it’s impossible to say whose fault it is, but the writing reads very translated, stiff, sometimes extremely awkward. Given the fact that Shiba was a popular novelist, one is tempted to assume that the fault is with the translator and her lack of writing skills in English, but it’s really too close to call. The result, however, hampers the reading of The Last Shogun, making it less evocative and sumptuous than it could be. This is a problem, because the book clearly banks on being a popular novel more than a literary masterpiece. The structure of the book is conventional and simple, completely chronological. The narrator is an omniscient third person narrator, moving the story along, contextualizing events and explaining Yoshinobu’s motivations. This is so simple, it feels almost rote, and depends for success in part on the language. The writing is never quite really terrible, and might not even have been as remarkable for its problems in an aesthetically more ambitious book. But in as simply structured a novel as this, the stiff style sticks out like a sore thumb. The complexities of the book are not aesthetic, they are political. As mentioned, Ryotaro Shiba writes in the tradition of such luminaries as Stefan Zweig, the Austrian writer who specialized in fictional biographies. Zweig was a highly political, strongly engaged writer who viewed the encroaching political darkness in Europe with great concern. An unwavering pacifist, he stood for the idea of an enlightened Europe, a Europe of thinkers, writers and artists, and took his own life when the horrors of WWII appeared to swallow the whole world. Shiba is just that kind of writer, and his depiction of Yoshinobu as a ruler with the heart in the right place (but the head firmly caught in feudal ideals), a pivotal figure who overcame his own inhibitions, his own flawed perceptions to sacrifice his political career and even his family fortune in order to allow modern Japan to rise from the war-torn feudal kingdom that was rife with intrigue and strife.

There is much to admire in the novel, despite its faults. There is the precision and spareness of its telling, the clear eye for salient detail, and, paradoxically, it helps us understand modern day Japan more than it helps us understand Meiji-era Japan. Like Zweig or fellow historians like Theodor Mommsen, the titan of German Wilhelminian historians, Shiba is concerned with the tensions in his own society just as much or more than with the subject he describes. The conflicts between pro-Western and nationalist warlords, between proponents of monarchical, military or democratic rule, between different religious sects and directions, all this were just as prominent concerns in Shiba’s time as in Yoshinobu’s. Reading The Last Shogun, I had to think of the fascinating books of Masao Maruyama, who was also concerned with the transformation of Japan into its present state. Yoshinobu, as Shiba depicts him, was not afraid to seem weak, to go against consensus and to change his opinion if history changed around him. In many ways, he is the ideal man (and Shiba, in this book at least, is extremely androcentric, another flaw of the book). His weaknesses, as his blind elitism, are pointed out by the narrator in order to show us how far Japan has progressed. The result is admirable, sweeping and very much worth reading. This book is not a masterpiece, but one is glad to have read it. I think we all have white spots in our reading of history and its narratives. I know I do. Empathy and grievously exotic narratives just don’t cut it, often enough, but writers like Ryotaro Shiba, and books like this one can help us fill them, not with knowledge but with a deeply felt, and brilliantly conveyed understanding about the fundamental soundness of human beings and our innate capacity to change the world into a better place. It’s a tragic book about a Shogun who reigned only two years and then resigned and disappeared from the public eye until he died in self-chosen seclusion. While The Last Shogun seems in part a defense of modern Japan against monarchist loyalists and nationalists, it is also a call not to ignore historical change, but to be a part of it. That it does this without declaiming its message from the rooftops, without turning into a cheap political pamphlet is yet another reason that The Last Shogun is such a readable and recommendable book. Yes, it’s a bit slight, yes it’s an easy and conventional read, but see if I care.

Paul Harding: Tinkers

Harding, Paul (2009), Tinkers, Bellevue Literary Press
ISBN 978-1-934137-12-3

Published in 2009 by the tiny Bellevue Literary Press, a press run by the NY School of medicine, Paul Harding’s debut novel Tinkers was undoubtedly the major surprise of this year’s literary awards when it first won the 2010 Pulitzer, out of the blue, one might say, and garnered its author a Guggenheim fellowship later on. Harding, an Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate, and a creative writing teacher at Harvard, has been inundated with praise ever since. After reading Tinkers, one can’t help but feel that part of that praise is not caused by the book’s brilliance but by professional critics’ guilt at overlooking this book, and at their delight at the narrative that its author’s rags-to-riches story lends to their pages and reviews. It seems fashionable to praise Harding, and the excessive praise seems a bit undeserved, which is regrettable inasmuch as Tinkers is a truly remarkable book, and its quiet qualities have been swamped a bit in the shouty acclaims of brilliance. To be honest, I felt a stab of disappointment a few pages in: I hoped that ‘small press’ and ‘lots of rejections’ pointed to an original, unusual, maybe even difficult book, but it’s none of these. What it is is a very competently written, very sentimental, very moving little book about a family history, a book about father-son relationships, about the mechanics of modernity and about the shock of spiritual enlightenment. It is a book that seems to appeal to everyone, from pensive teenagers to mellow grandparents. There is just the right note of formal rigorousness and theological thoughtfulness to keep it from becoming completely trite and banal. Tinkers, it must be said, is just an enormously likeable little book, tinged with melancholy and its heart in the right place. That’s all it is, but isn’t that enough, sometimes?

Harding’s novel is, one might say, nicely old-fashioned. With much skill and effort, he created an ars moriendi that could well have been written a few decades ago. There isn’t even a hint of self-conscious deliberation, of careful irony, and maybe that is one of the reasons for its broad appeal. Tinkers tells us of a family history with a melancholy seriousness, with Harding never once wavering from his project, never attempting to include the unsavory or the difficult. This is not to say that Harding’s literary skills are lacking. In fact, structurally and stylistically, there is much that is remarkable here, and much to suggest that he may be a better writer than Tinkers makes him out to be. The book may be sentimentally and morally straightforward, but Harding’s accomplished writing has led him to tell his story in a more fractured way, skillfully weaving three generations’ memories into a tapestry of personal histories. It’s very rare that you find books like this one, books that manage to employ the tools of modernist and postmodernist fiction with great expertise, but that are at the same time very easy to read and understand. In this you can see Harding’s profession and his educational history. Tinkers is always, above all, deliberate and effective, a realization which can cool down considerably the soft emotional warmth that Harding tries to evoke. One would think that a book which its author had spend years working on in his spare time, which he had been defending against a spate of rejections, that such a book would feel more necessary, more incisive, more interesting, but it merely feels cute and cozy and comfortable. So, yes, Tinkers is a sad feel-good book, the likes of which regularly make the reading group circuit (Kathryn Stockett’s The Help is a recent example). But on the other hand, potentially, Paul Harding is a better writer than that, and a more educated reader.

This is important: Paul Harding is less of a storyteller, less of an observer or thinker, and more of a reader. Tinkers is a novel that exudes the aroma of centuries of literary history, but it’s written by an author who spared little time to make creative use of that. Instead, Harding appears to have picked a couple of serviceable tropes and images and funneled the family history through them. Additionally, there’s an ill-advised attempt to write a pastiche or parody of 18th century tracts (as in excerpts from a book called “The Reasonable Horologist”), which isn’t creative, just inept. Actually, these pastiches are more than that: they are indicators that Harding’s reading of 18th and 19th century fiction is lacking a certain amount of insightful thinking. What thinking he does is almost exclusively focused on prose craftsmanship, whether his own or other people’s materials are concerned, which is why Tinkers is so good in that department yet so poor in others. The most obvious example of all this is his use of the clock as a central metaphor in the book, which is easily one of the most tired metaphors in all of literary history, having been used constantly throughout the centuries, in different cultures and different languages; and he’s really having at it: clocks are the obsession of George Washington Crosby, one of Tinkers‘ protagonists; they are also used in the traditional sense, with clockwork as a stand-in for the complexity of life. Lastly, the book’s preoccupation with the mechanics of clocks is additionally reflected in its complex (but not complicated) structure, where different periods, and different protagonists are taking turns etc. The book’s three protagonists are not all of them obsessed with or interested in clocks, but they are all tinkers, and Crosby’s clock-affinity is ultimately suggested to be a legacy of this odd family.

Tinkers is a novel about three generations of New Englanders. The book opens with an image of George on his deathbed, thinking about his life and remembering his father. His whole family, members of which are scattered all over the US, has gathered to accompany him on his final journey. The house is crawling with clocks but they have been silenced, to George’s chagrin. Harding doesn’t just latch on to a narrative method like Proust’s (which would result in too complicated a book for Harding’s liking anyway, one suspects, given how much priority he accords to cheap palatability), diving in and out of memory. Instead, the whole book is neatly cut up and compartmentalized. It consists of four chapters each of which tells one person’s story and intertwines it with another’s. This is quite significant: the memories that we learn about are not only or even predominantly those of the dominant narrator. Instead they often appear to be independently told pieces. In the first section, where George ‘remembers’ his father, Howard, for example, Howard’s pieces sometimes retell events that George cannot have witnessed. Other pieces are more straightforwardly connected to George’s memories. That first chapter is George’s, and sketches his comfortable situation, his friendly family, their patience with his illness, their loving care and attention. He lives in a house he built with his own hands, he had a good education, and worked as a teacher, teaching maths and mechanical drawing. His chapter tells us a lot about his life, although in bits and pieces, in small lists of information. It also introduces his father, Howard. Howard’s life is in direct contrast to George’s. Howard was a salesman, traveling the Maine countryside to sell and fix pots and pans, accessories and soap. With a wagon drawn by a mule (called Prince Edward), he spent all day in the open, often helping with a plethora of other tasks. Finally, the first chapter also introduces us to the problem of remembering and writing down one’s own life in a worthwhile manner.

In an early scene, George attempts to record his life onto tape, but he is put off by the way he sounds, “not very well educated”, appearing like “a bumpkin” who is asked “to testify about holy things”, but asked in mockery because “not the testimony but the fumbling through it” are the reason for his appearance. George’s disgust with this has him break off the attempt. In an ironic turn of events, Paul Harding’s novel itself sounds as if it were the product of a similar resentment, over-correcting the flaw and focusing on the sleek delivery and caring very little about the ‘testimony’, i.e. the content of the book. There is more to that scene than that, however. The failed attempt at autobiography I described leads consequently to George lying in his bed, wanting to remember, but not being able to do so in a controlled manner. Many of Howard’s pieces appear to be editorial insertions to provide a context and history for George’s impressions of Howard. The narrator appears to be a kind of literary executor of George, trying to make as much sense of George’s life and memories as possible, ‘tinkering’ with them, fixing them. This is the source of the aforementioned seriousness: for the narrator, George is Important, and his life deserves this monument. The book’s mechanics and narrative are then shown to be the means with which that task is undertaken. This is admirable, but it makes for very unsurprising and uninteresting reading. None of Tinkers‘ readers will have been surprised when they realized that George’s fixing of clocks and tinkering, building, repairing things is a reaction to his childhood, when he grew up with a ‘broken’ father, and, ultimately, a ‘broken’ family. The second chapter talks at length about Howard, who is suffering from violent epileptic fits, and whose lack of professional success appears to exacerbate this condition. He hides this illness from his children, but by and by, family life disintegrates.

The third chapter is narrated by Howard, and it is the only part of the book that is delivered by a first person narrator. There are well-wrought changes in the various third person narrators before and after that chapter, some personal, some not so much, but this chapter is the first first person one. This is significant in several ways. In this chapter, which tells us about Howard’s youth, and his own father, we never learn the father’s name. To young Howard, he is only ever “father” or Dad”. Howard’s father was a Methodist minister, that much we’re told, a profession which in the book serves to contextualize the errant wanderings and thoughts of both Howard and George. Young Howard’s family life, too, falls apart, and it, too, fails due to the family illness, one imagines. Although the fathers in Tinkers ultimately seem to leave their sons, the book has an almost foundational nature, telling its readers about an American family, with an American faith, living in New England. Accordingly, the countryside plays an important role. It is a rough rural landscape that seems to have strolled straight over from Thoreau’s rustic meditations. Harding does an excellent job describing the nature that surrounds his characters, the trees, lakes, the grass. Almost immediately, we have a feeling for the landscape, and just as quickly, we see how Harding’s descriptions of his characters tie in with that landscape. It’s a testament to his skills that he is able to conjure a whole world, complete with curious objects and a very peculiar atmosphere, in just a handful of pages. But these skills are not that of an attentive observer. Instead, Harding constructs his nature from the rich reservoir of American literature. His New England might be inspired by memories or observation of actual natural vistas, but the result is clearly not connected to reality as much as to descriptions found in the work of writers such as Robert Frost, Emerson and the aforementioned Thoreau, charged with an almost clerical faith.

Fevered visions of heads looking out of a lake, catching fish with their mouths alone, of teeth in trees and other oddities carry more than a whiff of a Christian literary tradition, with traces of Dante, Augustine and Milton disseminated over the small pages of Tinkers. But while these writers invested their work with some heavy-duty thinking and an enormous intelligence, Paul Harding, and this is the book’s major shortcoming, is merely a highly skilled version of Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt or Paolo Coelho, inasmuch as their opinions on life and death are concerned. This reader needed a break from the book whenever the author decided to wax lyrical in what seemed to be the most banal way possible, as far as the content was concerned; what’s worse, it gets more and more obtrusive and annoying as the book comes to a close, although the writing is excellent throughout Tinkers. Even as the neatness of the book’s layered structure, the power of its emotions, as these start to really impress the reader, Harding spoils it all by keeping to try and ‘meaningfully’ discussing the “unknowable” and describing preparations for the end while having his protagonist clean one of the damn clocks. I’m not saying it’s something he can’t do, because Tinkers gives off the impression of him not even having tried to invest his extraordinary writing with a modicum of intelligence.

Hidden in this book is a spare meditation about the burdens we inherit, about the power we have to start anew, hidden also is a fine, considered, traditional ars moriendi, with a dying man’s last thoughts, breathing a last, dignified breath. Hidden, too, is a book about the changes that Americans underwent these past years, about the role that acceptance and commitments play in the treatment of illnesses, and a book about the epiphanies of adolescence. All this is in there, but hidden behind a large smoke screen of likeable effects and cheap sentimentalities. It is downright depressing. Thoreau, in a letter to Emerson (July 8, 1843, if you must know), wrote

It is the height of art that, on the first perusal, plain common sense should appear; on the second, severe truth; and on a third, beauty; and, having these warrants for its depth and reality, we may then enjoy the beauty for evermore.

Harding took a shortcut. Instead of “severe truth” he opted for sentimentalities and instead of severe beauty he chose a hokum cuteness. I assure you, there is an excellent book hidden here behind the complacent, brainless tear-jerker that Tinkers turned out to be. Whatever its flaws, it is a nice read, and Harding, as a writer, is highly skilled, and his instincts are frequently excellent. This is not a very good book, yet it’s also not a bad one. It’s a disposable, but ultimately a moving book. It’s short, and a quick read, and imbued with the elegant serenity of Christian traditions. It doesn’t approach Aquinas’ claritas pulchri, but why should it have to. A very decent book, and miles above the tripe that Moore, Auster et al. keep publishing. You might point out that I read and enjoy a lot of tripe (watch out for a review of Twilight at this blog sometime soon), why am I so hard on a book that is clearly so accomplished? Because it could have been much better. Stephenie Meyer can’t write good prose to save her life. Tinkers is held back by a measured complacency, its author has actually remarkable skills and good instincts. This book, it bears repeating, could have been much better.  The result is artistically mediocre and politically problematic. However, the prizes awarded to this book are not a shock, as they appear to express a longing for the 19th century qualities Harding emulates, and his very modern, taut writing and structure, well-schooled and effective may just have clinched the deal. Why his mass-market-ready book was repeatedly rejected by publishers does puzzle me. The bottom line is: I wanted to like this book, I didn’t. Is is worth reading? Given the amount of extraordinary books out there, I have to say no. But if you look for a quick, competently executed, cute read, by all means, go ahead.

Frank Smith: Guantanamo

Smith, Frank (2010), Guantanamo, Seuil
ISBN 978-2-02-102095-3

Frank Smith’s 2010 novel Guantanamo is an odd little creature. It is a fiction based on 380 released formal interrogation protocols from the detainment facility in the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base. Guantanamo mirrors, reflects and projects some of those interrogations without every really assuming the character of a play or a drama. Formally, it consists of 29 short chapters of unequal length, each containing an interrogation, or rather, an excerpt from an interrogation; no chapter exceeds 6 pages, some take up only 2 or 3. Reading the book feels like perusing a portfolio of delicately wrought small dialogues (with the odd monologue now and then), although it is in fact composed of pieces or fragments: every reader knows a formal interrogation is a ritually rigid situation, with clearly marked beginnings and ends, the protocols of which, after all, are meant to convey to their readers (judges, intelligence officers, military officers etc.) a fully informed opinion of the particular interrogation in question, an impression that those readers can then base further investigations on. We, as readers of Guantanamo know that, although the book doesn’t tell us. It hides the official, rigid nature of many of these dialogues. In fact, the excerpts, as a rule, offer us no indication whatsoever where in a full interrogation a particular piece is supposed to be placed. These are, for all intents and purposes, fragments, but only implicitly, they are not marked as such. For the reader they feel like very concentrated doses of story. There is a certain disconnect, a lack of introduction, say; now and then changing voices can even cause a jolt to the reader, but the readers have to infer the fragmented nature from their own knowledge. After all, some familiarity with the general process of formal interrogations can be expected. In this sense, there’s a certain schizophrenic feel to the whole enterprise of Guantanamo, which vacillates between old fashioned storytelling and écriture engagée in the form of documentary drama à la Heinar Kipphardt. Come to think of it: ‘vacillates’ might be the wrong word: it marvelously succeeds in doing both.

The book relies so much upon shared knowledge between the writer and his audience, there is so much implicit, unsaid, blacked out, that the book, for the uninitiated, for the reader out of touch with current events and the broader implications of names, dates and events in the book, can seem a modern cousin of turn-of-the century short prose, in particular of books like Sherwood Anderson’s momentous Winesburg, Ohio, a collection of short, interconnected prose, less concerned with playing narrative games and more with exploring storytelling and the connections between the long and the short form. A similar effect is achieved by Edgar Lee Masters’ canonical collection of poems, Spoon River Anthology, which, despite the difference in genre, is perhaps even closer to Guantanamo. Books like these (and traces even of texts like Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood) come to mind, because the book’s basic impulse is to tell stories, in a simple but effective language. We as readers get to know an array of prisoners, and we learn of the way that they came to be arrested and incarcerated by the United States in the infamous detention facility on Cuba. With a story per (small) chapter, it could become repetitive due to the form of the interrogation, but the book as a whole has my rhythmic, musical feel to it; Smith plays with the ways to present dialogue. Some chapters are simple question/answer dialogues, written down like scenes in a play. Others keep the alternating rhythm of the interrogatory, but embed it in prose, adding words like “asked” and “replied”. This is the most common solution, as well as the most fascinating, fascinating because the subject of these sentences is invariably “on”, a French subject pronoun hard to translate into English. The best equivalent in English would maybe be “one” used as pronoun, in order to be a substitute for the pronouns ‘I’ / ‘you’ / ‘they’ / ‘we’. depending on the context. On seems to the speaker of French, like its German equivalent man, a simple, extremely common word, but its usage (cf. Le Bon Usage) is actually rather complex and the implications for Guantanamo infinite.

Without unpacking French grammar at this point, suffice to say that the word tends to mean something rather global. It is often used to subsume a group of persons under an umbrella pronoun, in the sense of ‘In Louisiana we like to dance’, or ‘In Louisiana, they like to dance.’ The use of it as an equivalent of ‘we’ is particularly common in colloquial language. This, like many other uses of the pronoun, ally the speaker with the action of the sentence or even with a group of people engaged in the action, but intuitively, one would expect that a pronoun supplanting the “interrogator” in the sense of “the interrogator asked…” would be equivalent to the English ‘he’ or ‘she’, for example. In a very strange way, this method achieves two objectives, it quietly dissolves boundaries between the two actors, and it makes us as readers complicit in the act of questioning, as well as in the process of being questioned. At the same time, it is a remarkably common word to use; no-one who regularly reads French would stumble over it. It’s not jarring, not difficult, not even particularly odd. It is quite astonishing how Smith manages to wring effect from simple means without having to highlight the effect, without forcing it on the reader. It is only when considering a translation that you start to weigh pronouns, that you notice how important and effective Smith’s use of language is. The ‘on’, arguably, is meant not just to provide a he said/she said structure. Instead it contains a suggestion as to who is speaking and who is spoken about, who is only relayed, read and perceived second-hand, and who is providing the first hand account. Guantanamo is quite obviously interested in providing not just stories, but it impresses on its readers how people come to be in such a prison, and what happens to their language within. The brackets, the constraints, the limits to the stories that detainees can tell, this is as important in Guantanamo as the stories they do tell. The short prefatory note already announces the distance of the detainees to open speech:

Nous allons vous poser quelques questions
afin de mieux comprendre votre histoire

Cut into two lines, it is three things at once: it announces the thematic focus of the dialogues to come, it suggests, through its almost epigrammatic nature, a certain amount of heightened artifice, and lastly, it introduces the dominating voice and interest, the “we”. We will ask you questions, because we are interested in your history.

This focus, and the lack of explicit condemnation, the matter of fact description, this allies Guantanamo with a select group of (mostly) mid-century documentary plays. At the same time, Frank Smith declines to arrange his small chapters into a strong narrative, one that is implicitly condemning at least, he does not do what so many other writers did: write a novel composed of voices but roughly following a plot or an ideologically motivated narrative. Reading an isolated chapter near the end seems as much of a reading experience as reading one from the beginning. It is, however, Smith’s achievement that the book, as a sequence, and as a poetical artifact, makes sense, without coherence being forced upon the reader by an overarching storyline. In this, Guantanamo differs strongly from those other documentary plays. Three particularly important and excellent instances of the documentary fictions I mentioned are Peter Weiss’ The Investigation, Heinar Kipphardt’s In the Matter of Robert J. Oppenheimer or Karl Kraus’ massive, violently apocalyptic masterpiece Die Letzten Tage der Menschheit (not translated into English, but available in French as Les Derniers Jours de L’humanité, translated by Jean-Louis Bresson and Henri Christophe). All three of them have one thing in common: their fragmented nature, their use of widely available sources as basic material, and their emphasis on human dignity and on the forces that endanger or destroy it. There is Kipphardt’s Oppenheimer, nuclear physicist, his voice borrowed from the tapes of McCarthy’s quizzical henchmen, who warned about the dangers of modern warfare. There is Karl Kraus’ Viennese public, vibrating with apocalypse as the first World War approached, and finally soldiers, journalists and others during the horrific darkness of that war, their voices and publicly recorded statements creating a smattering of tones and registers in one of the 20th century’s most epochal plays. Finally, there are the voices of witnesses, judges and defendants in Weiss’ play about the Frankfurt Nazi trials, where those responsible for Auschwitz were dragged into court. Weiss’ play is arranged in a way that has us follow him into a genocidal cascade, ending with the burning of the murdered Jews in Auschwitz’ ovens.

All three of these writers rely almost exclusively on public documents, but in each case the result is an almost symphonic indictment of outrages committed against humanity. War, genocide, cruelty. Their authors formed part of the public consciousness, and their books were as much an expression of a particular political rhetoric as they were well-turned works of art. Plays like The Investigation were meant to be performed in a way that highlighted the speech onstage, with few details, just a courtroom and the stark words of witness. The implication was that honest words were enough evidence, that they are convincing and powerful enough on their own, although in each case the authors clearly assumed that their audience needed a nudge or a shove to read the plays the right way, hence the narrative closure and structure of the plays. Since their time, however, witnesses, and the reliability and validity of their words have been called into question, most famously perhaps by Shoshana Felman’s and Dori Laub’s amazing work. The problems of trauma, and of the knotted issue of representation have made works like Weiss’ very rare today. Reality has retreated from the battlefield of mainstream literature, as we started to understand how much our perception of reality is filtered and processed, as we started to question the relationships between our convictions and our flawed, second-hand perceptions. Fictions started to engage with culture, literature and other constructs that influence perceptions and form and funnel our representations. At the same time, as Felman and Laub have made abundantly clear, despite what they famously called “a crisis in witnessing”, witnesses exist and are important and oftentimes our only link to historical truth. Many theoretical efforts have been made to interrogate our understanding of the process of witnessing, efforts that have been reflected in poetry and the visual arts. Fictional prose, however, often steps clear of these issues, rarely attempting to deal with them, and even more rarely succeeding at that task. Documentary fiction, as part of other genres, postmodern, historical or cut-up prose, has persisted, with great success, but the likes of Weiss, Kraus or Kipphardt have been few and far between. Guantanamo is an outstanding example of that kind of writing.

The very title of the book is the first indication for us readers as to what game Frank Smith has decided to join. The prison in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba has become a byword for inhumane and unjust treatment. Interrogation practices in Guantanamo have become the focus of tempestuous legal, political and philosophical debates, practices, that is, that have relied occasionally even on torture, something that most first world countries had thought to have banned and banished decades ago. The detainees have, until recently, not had the possibility of challenging their incarceration in civilian courts, and even military tribunals have only been instated upon intense public and political pressure. Criminals, soldiers and innocents alike have been herded into cages and had to submit to often degrading treatment. This is the background of Smith’s book, but only very rarely do the dialogues that we are offered touch upon these issues, not explicitly, anyway. I think it’s fair to assume that Smith presumes all of this as part of the shared knowledge of his audience, and so he does not need to engineer outrage: he can safely expect his audience to be informed about the topic and suitably mad at that abuse of military and political power. The major difference to, for example, Weiss’ play, is that Weiss wanted to teach his audience about the atrocities that happened. Germany at the time was trying to cope with a massive case of collective self-induced amnesia. He used witnesses to create new knowledge and outrage in his German audience that was governed, at the time, by a former NSDAP member, Kurt Georg Kiesinger. Similar motivations powered Kipphardt’s and Kraus’ plays. Their plays would have lost their evocative power had they considered the difficulties of witnessing, the aporias of historical knowledge, to paraphrase Giorgio Agamben. History was there to be uncovered, written down and declaimed on the stage. Frank Smith, composing the poetical artifact that is Guantanamo, didn’t have that freedom. He was restrained by the awareness, the doubt and other difficulties that have beset historiography between the 1960s and today. From these restraints, however, he fashioned a fascinating literary jewel.

So these are the two polar opposites between which Frank Smith’s book is arranged. Anderson’s fiction and Master’s poetry on the one hand, and Kipphard’s harsh plays on the other, but it’s more rigid, more strict and disillusioned than either. Work like Giorgio Agamben’s might explain many of the tensions, but this is not the place to elaborate upon Agamben’s Homo Sacer trilogy. It’s worth noting, however, that Agamben’s very focused upon the processes that one’s state in a legal system plays for one’s ability to form truthful statements. He is probably most famous for his declaration of a “state of exception” that people in extra-legal camps like Guantanamo and in Nazi concentration camps occupy. They are an exception because the law of the respective countries has a gap where these camps are concerned. It doesn’t really discuss them and their odd status. The Bush administration has created that “state of exception” by inventing a special status for the detainees of Guantanamo Bay: unlawful combatants, which put them out of reach both of US domestic law and international laws like the Geneva Conventions. Agamben’s careful discussion of what this means for people speaking of and about their experience in camps like these are interesting and very relevant for Guantanamo, which appears to have been written with the care of someone highly aware of the difficulties in writing about these topics.

His approach, which consists of formally innovative, but not intrusively difficult small chapters, is likely to be inspired by the work of William Carlos Williams, whom he quotes in an epigraph at the beginning of the book:

No ideas but in things

This very famous phrase is from a 1944 poem called “A Sort of a Song”, which was published in the collection The Wedge (you can find it in WCW’s Collected Poems (Volume. II)). In Williams’ “Author’s introduction”, he lays out his concept of poetry. He claims that formal invention creates meaning and illumination, “a revelation in the speech that [the writer] uses”. The greatness of Weiss’ work in his time, and Anderson’s, Masters’ and Thomas’ in theirs, derives not from the stories they tell, per se, but from the unique means they have employed to tell the story, to make their work of art. And in his own time, Frank Smith attempts to do the same. For such a small book, there is an enormous amount of thinking contained in here. We could talk at length about how he uses the reader’s entrenched suspicions, how he handles places in the small stories of peregrinations that the detainees tell us, how he makes us complicit in the public acts of mistrust that Muslims are so often subjected to, how he uses translation and language as vectors of speech. All this is in there and much more, but on the surface the book seems so humble. Part of that, again, may be Williams and his admonition that a poet should take “words as he finds them interrelated about him”. Smith uses simple words, imbued with a complex understanding of the ‘interrelations’ in them. On the other hand, how humble is a book that bears the title Guantanamo, thus announcing to the world that it discusses a timely and important topic? One can’t help but feel that the book is carried by a certain sense of importance. Well, that’s as it should be. It is an important topic and it seems to me that Guantanamo is an important book.

China Miéville: The City & The City

Miéville, China (2009), The City & The City, Macmillan
ISBN 978-0-230-74191-1

The City & The City, China Miéville’s seventh novel, is a well-nigh perfect work of literature. We all know Jarrell’s adage that a novel “is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it”; true to form, there are problems with Miéville’s book, as well, but the overwhelming success of the books as whole, the staggering originality of its ideas and the success in pulling the whole thing off, this lifts the novel far beyond many of its contemporaries. Like much of Miéville’s work, it displays a firm commitment to genre, but it’s hazy about the kind of genre that is foregrounded here. At the same time it’s a police procedural, a hard-boiled thriller and a fantasy novel, with links and allusions to science fiction (without every really becoming a SF novel), and it uses the advantages of each of these elements to their fullest, to create an insightful work of art that is too complicated, ultimately, to be reducible to a message or a simple resolution; the latter being its main flaw, by the way, but we’ll return to this. Suffice to say that I urge you to read The City & The City, even if (maybe especially if) you have not been able to take to Miéville’s work before despite the prodding by friends or literary critics. China Miéville, the only three-time winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award so far, shapes up to be the most dominant writer in the field of speculative fiction, and despite the fact that The City & The City is smaller in scale than most of his other novels, it is a great example why he is so important, so well-praised and so extraordinarily successful. He proves himself to be as adept a creator of original concepts, as he is an insightful reader of other texts. His texts, and The City & The City maybe more than the others, appear to be the result of what Emerson called “creative reading”, on the one hand, and a careful, aware and thoroughly critical reading on the other. The City & The City is not Miéville’s best book, but it is a masterpiece, and not a minor one, and China Miéville is a masterful writer.

Personally, in fact, I consider China Miéville to be one of the best living British prose writers. If you haven’t heard of him in these terms yet, it’s maybe because he’s primarily a writer of what we refer to as genre fiction. His work does not have the explicit and heavily theoretical slant of Samuel R. Delany’s 70′s and 80′s fiction, but Delany’s work is certainly part of the tradition Miéville built on; but Miéville is indicative of a larger phenomenon: I think we are currently witnessing among younger writers a renaissance of the kind of genre fiction Delany represents. I think these young writers are part of a resurgence of the energies and inspirations that fueled the New Wave writers in the 1970s and after, as recent high profile publications by Gwyneth Jones (Spirit: or The Princess of Bois Dormant, 2008) and Geoff Ryman (Air: Or, Have Not Have, 2005) amply demonstrate; Jeff VanderMeer notably suggested that some of them, Miéville and himself included, might be labeled as “New Weird”, combining “New Wave with other elements. Miéville’s kinship with Delany rests on more than just a similar critical awareness, care and concerns. From Delany’s wooden beginnings in Fall of the Towers (1963-65) to the sleek efficiency of Triton (1976) and the mysteries of Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984), he has always focused on language as an object in his genre fiction. For him, the writing itself is subject to the same care, deliberation and charged with the same intellectual energies, as is the story, the characters and the broader ideas. In fact, for Delany, writing is more than making use of words to tell a story; I’d say that writing for him means having ideas about language, that can tie into the broader concerns of the rest of the book (as they do in Babel-17 (1966)) but don’t have to. By and large, Miéville does the same thing, to an extent that is actually rather rare, even in these post-post-modern times. His work evinces both a meticulous attention to details and a knack for creating a cohesive, fluid fiction that does not, as Delany’s does, burden the reader with its philosophical preoccupations.

The City & The City starts with a murder and contradictory hints as to the identity of the perpetrator of the crime and his or her motives. Detective Tyador Borlú, police officer in the old city of Besźel, is called upon to solve the crime but as it turns out, the deeper he gets involved in the inquiries, the deeper he and his role, and his conventional ideas about how to handle the everyday playacting of being a citizen, are called into question. A similar impulse propels the narrative of Miéville’s latest masterful novel Kraken (2010) but unlike that novel’s protagonist, Borlú’s understanding of the world is not so much unmoored, confused and obscured, as sharpened, and brightened. For Borlú, the world doesn’t need to be explained, it hasn’t changed, his basic assumptions of agency, cause and effect remain intact throughout the book. What does change is his vision of it. His journey is not one of learning new things, of acquiring knowledge, nothing of the sort. Instead, it’s about learning to see, to evaluate. Borlú’s education in The City & The City hews close to Kant’s famous definition of Enlightenment: sapere aude! Dare to know! Kant’s exhortation to his fellow citizens to use their brains and the knowledge already in them is relevant in other ways, as well. Often overlooked are his contextual restrictions: while one should always think, it does not necessarily follow that one should always tell people about the results of said thinking. Some order is worth being preserved, even at the expense of freely speaking one’s mind. If your thought flies in the face of conventional order, and by speaking out, you violate your duties to that order, you had better keep quiet. There is a difficult tension between these two assertions, the one to think and the other to preserve order, and in The City & The City, Miéville recreates just that kind of tension: his novel vacillates between stasis and progress, between seeing freely and living in the bounds of established order.

Now, it’s quite impossible to explain in any detail how the concept of the two cities works without creating problems for the prospective reader. The blurb on my copy tells us that Borlú has to travel “across a border like no other” and that is both fitting as well as the full extent of information that you can impart upon an unaware reader without spoiling the book for him. Reading the book is like unwrapping a present: with an impressive deftness, Miéville manages to peel off the layers of Besźel order one by one, chapter by chapter without ever boring us. The concept itself is strange and adventurous but only slowly do we realize how thoroughly, really, it’s planned and executed. Details of how the world of the The City & The City is constructed keep coming up, and this stream of revelations (that get ever smaller, with the largest ones naturally in the very beginning) is one of the reasons for The City & The City‘s enormous readability. If you know how the two cities, Besźel and its neighboring city of Ul Quoma, work, the book will no longer be as enjoyable. It is no spoiler, however, if I tell you that both cities are modeled after a surrealistically heightened image of an old, large East European city. Many descriptions, names, places and even the odd phrase now and then, contain a mixture of languages and cultures such as Hungarian, Polish, Czech, Croatian and others. There is a constant sense of decay, especially in Besźel, which is the poorer of the two cities. The precariousness I mentioned earlier is not only due to the unique situation of Besźel, but also to the morbidity that oozes from the old battered walls of the city. Besźel feels almost claustrophobically small, and its citizens’ purview seems small and provincial as well. Miéville’s language is instrumental in creating this impression.

Unusually for Miéville’s work, the language in The City & The City is largely lean and spare, but the unmarked, quiet nature of the narrative voice is the perfect backdrop for the names and terms used. Instead of creating a slightly fantastical oddness, this method hammers home the East European setting, creating a very believable sense of place, and an authentic voice for Borlú, who is the protagonist. There is enough exoticism in the names and the concepts, so Miéville opted for a voice that is sober, elegant yet conversational. He doesn’t speak like someone translated, or with an unbelievable eloquence, he speaks like ‘one of us’, in a register and vocabulary that is carefully tailored to reflect a whole tradition of hard-boiled writing without lapsing into straight pastiche. The balance between the cities is thus reflected in the language of the novel, and vice versa, in its balance between exotic names and plain vocabulary, between sharp thinking and a fluid conversational quality in the writing. Additionally, the way that names and writing clash, this transports a strangeness, which is in line with the strangeness that exudes the two cities. Miéville knows very well how central language is to early 20th century pulp, how in novels by Hammett or Marlowe, the language is simple and visceral enough to keep readers hanging on, keep them reading, while injecting a certain, palatable amount of oddness into the work, thus creating yet another balance, hiding the complexities behind the dirt and the grime. It’s a tradition that has continued in excellent hard-boiled novels. But The City & The City is not, in fact straightforward hard-boiled pulp. Beside borrowing from the police procedural, bestselling thrillers and SF, it’s quite clearly a fantasy, and fantasy novels quite regularly strain for effect, for writing ‘high register’ prose. In cases like David Anthony Durham’s Acacia novels (2007 – ), it’s almost painfully inept, while for writers like George R. R. Martin it works like a charm. The pretension to offer something else to readers, a different world, yes, but also a different feeling for that world. Even Martin’s brutal, blood-soaked, disillusioned knights feel medieval, and his language is the main reason why.

In The City & The City, Miéville’s language supports no such pretensions (it’s different in his other prose) and in its precise rendering of incredible events and places, it’s close to Czech writer Franz Kafka. Kafka is one of a long list of writers mentioned in the novel’s acknowledgments, and the way that Kafka keeps his language clean, organized and careful, even while telling us brutal stories about cats and insects is indeed an important reference here. However, Miéville’s accomplishment becomes more evident if we consider another writer mentioned as well in the acknowledgments, Alfred Kubin. Alfred Kubin’s opus magnum is the 1909 novel Die Andere Seite (translated into English by Mike Mitchell as The Other Side, published by Dedalus Press (highly recommended)), a towering achievement of early expressionism, endlessly influential. Kubin’s novel tells of a married couple’s journey into a dream country somewhere between Europe and Asia, which promises to free the traveler from the turpitude of modern progress. It’s a land of uncertainty, but doesn’t at first seem anything except dreamy to the husband while the wife succumbs to fear and eventually dies. At this point a crazy war between an invasive American industrial tycoon and the lord of the dream country sets in that leads to the total destruction of the realm of dreams. The “other side” is a place where good dreams and fears coexist, a place that can be both dangerous and soothing, but a hazy, imperiled place, unable to withstand an outsider’s violent pressure. Kubin’s language is fanciful. It retells a feverish dream in an exceptionally wild language that carries the seeds of Alfred Döblin’s mad epics published ten years later. As the story gradually disintegrates into comic madness, the reader is afloat in the midst of it, because Kubin’s language is part of that whole stampede of crazy. Miéville has taken up this idea of the other side, and turned it into a Chinese box of otherness, tempered by a clean, yet popular language.

Kubin takes an outsider and has him witness the story in our stead, a narrator with our values and traditions, who can convey an impression of the place that would mirror ours. There is no such normative stance in The City & the City, where the meaning of being on ‘the other side’ keeps changing dramatically, without blurring the issues for the reader. The simple juxtaposition of dream as a place of ancient truths and submerged knowledge with reality as a harsh, violent voice, and modernity as a place of decay and sheer concrete both, it doesn’t quite work like that in Miéville’s book. Miéville’s focus is on the power of fear, of the “obedience reflex”, to shape people’s behavior and even their perception. The language is his tool to let us, his readers, see it too, shorn of the illusions of pretty writing. The formal clarity of a police procedural, which structures the whole novel, conforms to the writing and has us not only descover the murderer, the political reality in Beszel but also the import of the events for our world. At the same time, it’s all greased with dirt and ambiguity. One startling fact is that Borlú, contrary to expectations is shown to be consistently conservative and protective of the Besźel status quo. In Kubin’s book, dream and reality merge in a final showdown, as Kubin questions our daily priorities. Miéville also looks at daily life, but his novel suggests a precariousness to the roles we play. Ultimately, The City & The City seems like a plea for more awareness, not for rejecting our roles, but looking at them honestly, and assuming them, if at all, with full, honest acceptance. The illusions of pseudo-scientific hogwash to explain prejudice, or of necessity to explain violence and callousness, these, to Tyador Borlú, Miéville’s protagonist and narrator, are not acceptable. That the book manages to suggest all this without ever becoming preachy, without forgoing ambiguity, indirectness and uncertainty is no mean feat. He has used the destabilizing force of fantasy writing before, but in The City & The City precariousness co-exists with balance and order. He uses fantasy to tear his readers from their own conventions, and as their eye adjusts to the new world, they are made to see similarities. At the same time, it’s also a crime novel, as I mentioned befor, and much of its power (and its flaws) derive from this fact.

Reading Miéville often means reading a writer who displays an invigorating joy in the act of thinking. He doesn’t supervise or admonish his readers as much as involve them in his own mental peregrinations. The writing is by no means undisciplined, but his interests clearly diverge from the demands of straightforwardness and effectiveness now and then. The tools of plot and suspense can sometimes can slip from his grasp and create an odd disharmony. This, incidentally, is also the one major flaw of The City & The City: the ending is extraordinarily dissatisfying, so that we as readers feel almost robbed. However. the ending of a novel of suspense and mystery is, I’d argue, always a delicate affair, an extremely difficult task and most writers do tend to bungle it. Like them, Miéville also fails to deliver: in one single cataclysmic scene he attempts to wrap up and explain and contextualize a whole novel’s build-up of mystery, intrigue, of sabotage and murder. Almost predictably, he fails. The rest of the book does work well. Indeed, for the most part, The City & The City is genre fiction at its best: effective, well-structured, insightful, and utterly readable. The overall style is taut and concentrated on fully conveying the necessary details of plot and place, both of which are a bit complicated and not all that easy to understand. If you have read other reviews at this site, you’ll know that I consider it a great achievement to write and succeed in writing a literary novel that is a success as a genre novel and despite Miéville’s problems with the climax and ending of the novel, The City & The City is just that: a successfully executed crime novel.

The crime novel, whether police procedural, hard-boiled novel or something else, generally works predominantly with revelations, some of which are gradually imparted to the reader an/or the protagonist through their encounter with the place the book is set in, and the inhabitants of the place in question. There is a sense of epistemological closure to, especially, the ‘clean’ crime novel (like a regular detective novel or a police procedural), which, unlike many others, seizes places as objects, and looks inside, closing them off to the outside, like small criminal biotopes, squeezing them for information. There is a certainty in this kind of search, because chaos is always contained within the confines of time and place. The hard-boiled novel, on the other hand, is much less concerned with this kind of certainty. In fact, much of the violence and depravity often ascribed to hard-boiled novels is due to the fear of the unknown. These novels often have their protagonists work through their fears to achieve a result, often gyrating through an unfathomable world with obscure rules. Fear, anger, violence, sarcasm, and a hard-won common sense supplant clear knowledge and sober decision-making. This process, this journey through obscurity and confusion, paradoxically, often leads to a much clearer depiction of the actual forces at work (as opposed to the consensual, polite rules, the agreed-upon roles). In the regular, ‘clean’ crime novel, consensual order is often briefly knocked off balance by the fierce, destabilizing force of violence, with the authorities called upon to rectify this unacceptable change. In the hard-boiled novel, order is (or seems to be) perpetually off balance and no amount of gumshoeing will change that. Given this juxtaposition, it’s fitting that in The City & The City, Miéville has constructed a wholly new world, one that is not only normally balanced, but whose very existence is a realization of the idea of balance, which aligns his novel with crime writing and true to the hard-boiled elements in it, all spaces in the novel, the different balances, they are all constantly endangered. The novel is swamped with a dark precariousness, with uncertainties, but we as readers only learn this bit by bit, as Miéville, like a master showman, reveals his world to us, selling us his idea chapter by chapter.

The concept of the two neighboring cities reflects the closing off of a clean police procedural, and Borlú’s way of dismantling the cities in search of the culprit or culprits shows that he reads his own world as finite, as a closed system where all signs can only point inward, to places and people within, acting strictly according to the rules of the place. But Miéville does not lend him a hand in his endeavor, instead he continually undermines basic assumptions, ultimately creating a perennially open world which is in constant danger of slipping away into historical and cultural oblivion. The weak ending, too, seems to provide closure, but here, once again, we are led to believe that it is delusional. The last, ridiculously conciliatory paragraph of the novel reads, in the larger context of the book, like soothing words whispered into an oncoming storm of arbitrariness and violence. Thus, in a way, The City & The City seems like a black hard-boiled wolf stitched into the sheep’s skin of the clean procedural. Borlú never sheds his basic assumptions, the world doesn’t force him. But in the focus upon sight and the use of one’s own brains, it gave him a choice. In a way, Miéville’s decision not to commit to a clear position is the final validation of the book. I disapprove of readings of books that raise weak writing onto a pedestal if it potentially reflects weaknesses in the characters. I have had a few discussions with Auster fans who, desperately trying to defend the smoky-eyed Brooklynite, keep bring up this kind of hogwash. I think it’s lazy, but in the case of The City & The City, it’s tempting. However, even agreeing that the ending is weak, and seems forced upon the author by his commitment to genre and his wish to tie off the book without breaking that mode of writing, the noncommittal end has interesting implications for the rest of the book. A novel that seems so like fantasy, with an improbable scenario, it turns out to be a kind of realism. In fact, by handing its readers a concept that seems like an allegory of sociological ideas, it seems to capture reality far better than novels that use the conventions of what we call realism. The book, as a whole, is a kind of tantalizing hyper-realism, complex in its implications and references, a book that no other writer could have pulled off and that even Miéville may have trouble topping in the nearer future. As a reviewer, I must admit that it challenged me like no other book I have ever attempted to review, and the innumerable flaws of this review are in part witness to the difficulties I had to even attempt to do justice to a book like this. Do not let the review dissuade you from reading the book. Unless you have a strong aversion to the genres I mentioned, you cannot not read The City & The City.

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Lorrie Moore: A Gate At The Stairs

Moore, Lorrie (2010), A Gate at the Stairs, Vintage
ISBN 978-0-307-73942-1

A Gate at the Stairs, published in 2009, is only Lorrie Moore’s third novel, and it was published to great but not unanimous praise. Moore is one of the most highly acclaimed writers of her generation, one, however, who’s been silent for years now, publishing her last book of fiction (the story collection Birds of America), in 1998. Eleven years later, there is this novel, and I’m not sure it was worth the wait. It’s a surprisingly slight book, reading like a clever debut novel rather than like the work of an established wordsmith and recipient of a PEN/Malamud award, among several others. There is no indication that this writer has written and published several books, honing and developing her craft. The strengths of this book are strengths that you’ll be able to find in a great many flashy debuts. There’s no discernible routine in the way that characters, plots and developments are handled, nothing really works here, as far as the craft of writing a novel is concerned. A Gate at the Stairs has one big advantage, and that’s Lorrie Moore’s love for language and her incredible ability to write extraordinary sentences that are surprising, beguiling and consistently interesting. This is the oddest novel: the writing itself, the words and phrases used, this shows an enormous amount of care and instinct, there’s is dullness, too, or the occasional muddled thought that died in mid-sentence. It’s nonetheless true that you can open the book at random, and look even at innocuous sentences, and find pleasurably turned phrases, small inversions. The language seems thoughtful, using puns, allusions, and an enormous amount of brilliant images. But if you look at the broader picture, at the novel as a novel, it seems cobbled together quickly, with little care and less success. There’s nothing thoughtful about the characters or the ideas, all of which seem ramshackle. From the meager, disappointing evidence of A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore seems to me a poet manqué at best: and I see potential for this book in small, condensed portions. I’m willing to bet that could be an interesting publication. This isn’t. Not by a long stretch.

On its surface, A Gate at the Stairs appears to be a realistic tale of one girl’s coming of age in the Midwest. But it’s more than that, it’s a meditation about language and moreover, it’s almost a classic Bildungsroman, condensed into a very short period in the girl’s life, and like most novels in that mode, it’s more of a theoretical exercise than a strictly realistic one. That is one of the reasons why a reading of this novel as a plausible depiction of growing up in the Midwest is bound to be disappointing. There is little depth to any of the characters, even Tassie Keltjin, the protagonist, is a slapdash creation. As she suddenly stumbles into a series of tumultuous events, her actions often seem erratic, the reader could spend hours trying to unravel her motivations and finding a plausible impulse behind her actions. Those motivations are simply not to be had. Her actions and her behavior is necessary as part of the writer’s intellectual schemes, of Lorrie Moore’s attempt to provide a full, coherent and closed account of that crucial moment of adolescence, where we move from childhood to adulthood, in short, to show what she “leaned in college” (‘college’ being a cipher for the whole experience). The characters all seem interesting, and the story can be even moving, but it feels like a slightly skewered dream, an intellectual fantasy played in a literary key. It’s devastating, finally, for the book, that the intellectual foundations of the book are so weak, spineless, without substance, conviction or vision, since it so depends upon them. Like most classic Bildungsroman novels, the book’s protagonist is less like a chess piece moved on a board and more like the center of a web of meanings and allusions, a web that moves, turns and spins, with the movement of its protagonist. The elements of the book exist to accompany the protagonist into adulthood, they help them, test them and teach them. There are characters and events to educate, events to punish, and events to transform. In this case, however, the web is a bit wobbly, and the intellectual commitments sometimes seem as hazy and unclear as the characters’ motivations.

See, it’s not surprising that the characters lack distinctive voices, that the book seems glazed with just one unflaggingly, untiringly clever voice. The characters ceaselessly pun or provide quotable lines. The effect of the particular voice here is negative, however, since it presents the reader with an impression of a certain prim-faced cleverness. Tassie narrates the whole novel and she’s an insufferably self-satisfied little creature, a self-satisfaction fed by Lorrie Moore’s indiscriminate handling of means and events. There seems to be a lack of subtlety at work here. In crude brushstrokes, Tassie’s lessons are doled out, but unlike in most novels of this kind, it’s almost never the protagonist who suffers. People die, become terrorists, become orphans, suffer terrible pain, relationships break up and racist epithets are thrown around, in order for Tassie to learn her lessons. But Tassie herself suffers mostly in an affected, deeply Romanticist kind of way. She is an observer and suffers the exquisite pain of aesthetic disturbance. It’s her sense of superiority, her awful sense of being white, clever and very ‘aware’ that is somewhat assaulted. It’s an impression of an immense ennui, mixed with a delicate kind of Weltschmerz. All of this, naturally, wrapped in a truly extraordinary tortilla of language. This, for example, is a simple description of road-kill:

Walking home, I passed a squirrel that had been hit by a car. Its soft, scarlet guts spilled out of its mouth, as if in a dialog balloon, and the wind gently blew the fur of its tail, as if it were still alive.

And this is a sentence dealing with another visual impression:

It seemed now that the town had started to throw off the monochromatic winter to reveal its bright lunatic pajamas beneath.

This is startlingly written, a description that no other writer I know could pull off. In terms of writing, this is not just raw talent, this is true excellency. And it doesn’t stop there. One of the first things we notice, reading the book, is the obsession with names and naming, with the particulars of language. Puns are employed not just with relish and zest, but with a slow deliberation. The names of places are dismembered, interrogated, mirrored, twirled around. But it soon becomes clear that there’s no real thinking attached to these snippets of ideas. It doesn’t ever go beyond the clear interest and fascination in language as tool, element and object. But even if this aspect disappoints, it’s still fair to say that the book crawls with perfect and surprising images and descriptions. And since Tassie is the narrator, these are her excellent descriptions. The very title of the book is taken from one of her “waltzy ballads”. The whole of A Gate at the Stairs is basically a paean to Tassie Keltjin.

The novel is largely set in the “university town of Troy”, where Tassie is thrust into “a brilliant city life of books and films and witty friends”´. Tassie isn’t used to that, coming as she does from a farm. Her father is not your typical farmer, he raises and sells potatoes not for the mass market but for connoisseurs. In this past, Moore creates a contrast between Tassie’s peasant upbringing and life in the big city, without having to commit to the complexities that a truly simple home and a sophisticated education may create. Her father is better than other peasants, we are made aware of that, not just once, but time and time again. That’s why the fact that she despises the poor language skills “[b]ack in Dellacrosse”, for example, doesn’t lead to complicated tensions in the book. Instead, her education serves as a pulpit from which she pronounces her superior verdicts, as in this bit about their use of language.

Prepositions mystified. Almost everyone said “on” accident instead of “by”. They said “I’m bored of that” or “Wanna come with?” They pronounced “milk” to rhyme with “elk” and “milieu” as “miloo”, as in skip to my loo – when they said it at all. And they used tenses like “I’d been gonna.” As in “I’d been gonna do that but then I never got around toot.” It was the hypothetical conditional past […].

There’s a smirk hidden in these pronouncements and the final, happy coinage. The impression we have of her is that of a self-satisfied minor writer, critic or editor, with a narrow knowledge of grammar and linguistics, who nonetheless feels empowered to correct other people’s use of grammar. We all know these nitwits, and we all know that actual grammars and dictionaries mostly contradict their pompous judgments of what is ‘bad’ or ‘incorrect’ language, but we also know that they themselves tend to be incorrigible, huffy, self-righteous. That’s because their positions, while mostly shunned by actual linguists, are supported by a broad alliance of creative writing lecturers, English composition teachers with an ax to grind, or literary critics, tenured at universities led by their accountants logic. With the academic stamp of approval, these philistines stampede through our literary lives, dumping their nuggets of wisdom left and right. And here is the exact reason why this is relevant to A Gate at the Stairs, because Tassie, too, is empowered by college education. We the readers don’t know her outside of that intellectual frame. Empowered by the networks of knowledge and power, she doesn’t hesitate to lord it over those less privileged.

The failure of Moore to extract something meaningful from the raw material she’s amassed is even more stunning when we compare A Gate at the Stairs to two other American novels, Lisa Alther’s 1976 Kinflicks, and more to the point, John Williams’ extraordinary novel Stoner, published in 1965, and reprinted by the great NYRB imprint in 2006. The comparison to Kinflicks highlights the excess of satire that is inherent in this kind of set-up. Kinflicks, to this day Lisa Alther’s best novel, is like an incessant flood of satiric laughter that pools around more serious issues of the time depicted. It’s sobering to see how little humor runs through Moore’s book, and how it’s a dried up cleverness that plays not for laughter but for applause. There is undoubtedly a certain delight to be wrenched from A Gate of the Stairs, but it’s a harsh delight, a joy at watching mere technical prowess. The generousness that accompanies true laughter is completely absent from Moore’s mirthless pages. The contrast to Stoner is a different one. Stoner is the novel of a man, the eponymous Stoner, born into rural poverty, who decides to go to university and starts pursuing an academic career. In Stoner we find a convincing depiction of the contrast between poverty and ‘proper education’. Stoner’s very identity is on the line in all this, and the result of his own journey to adulthood is a troubled, conflicted personality. There is no self-satisfaction in the character of Stoner, who is genuinely attracted by knowledge, who is on a constant quest to do right by his ideals which are a mix of his parents’ ideals and his own, hard won ones. Stoner is a memorable novel, an insightful, well written affair that is so convincing one might call it necessary. A necessary work, serious about its subject, which is everything that A Gate at the Stairs is not. The utter obliviousness to the darkness, to the problematics of entitlement, that Lorrie Moore displays is frightful, and, I can’t help but emphasize it: surprising. Such a well-written book, the language of which easily surpasses both Stoner and Kinflicks, and yet such a blind, witless and annoying read.

The plot starts with Tassie Keltjin needing a job in order to support herself, and she finds an opening as a babysitter for a wealthy couple. The husband is a scientist, and the wife runs a gourmet restaurant, and when they hire Tassie, they don’t even have a child to be baby sat yet. In a series of scurrilous encounters and intriguing vignettes, the couple, with the help of Tassie, tries to adopt a black baby, which quest finally succeeds. But this success sets in motion a cavalcade of events that will ultimately shake the worlds of each one involved. Not the worlds of Lorrie Moore or the intellectual house that Tassie Keltjin built, though. Here, everything is in place, although, as I mentioned, the commitments are a bit off, and the thinking hazy and muddled. The couple serves as a representation of the arrogant NY elite. They are rich, they are Atheists and they are do-gooders, filled to the brim with ideas about the perniciousness of racism. Regularly, they meet with other parents of adopted black children, and fill the room with phrases that Tassie is quick to recognize as empty and vapid, about diversity and dichotomies, yadda yadda. But the funny thing is that the talk, while consisting less of thinking and more of fashionable talking points, is not wrong. The content is not inherently ridiculous, but the book takes great pains to make it seem so, by means of exaggerations, by caricature and by branding some that take part in this discussion as hypocrites. Attacking a speaker’s moral fiber doesn’t invalidate his points, but Lorrie Moore, I take it, disagrees. I think that this attitude is one that has also led to the broad renunciation of ‘political correctness’. Reactionary linguists such as Steven Pinker, and talk show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh have perfected this rhetoric, which banks on the idea that people are what they are and no amount of perfumed language will change that. Pointing out that white, able-bodied males such as themselves are the main beneficiaries of political incorrectness may be petty.

However, while the basic ideas, sketched straw men rather than elaborated, are not ridiculous, the form context and the setting are indeed problematic. There is, indeed, a hypocrisy in the whole set piece, and its is the fact that Moore shows us privileged people indulging in acts of appropriation, of bodies, minds, and cultures. We know that writing can be used for oppression, and speech can be used (and mostly is) to govern the speechless. This insight, however, is beyond Tassie, and her depiction of a Muslim boyfriend she momentarily acquires, proves to be just the same kind of defining, dominating, governing speech. The depiction I mentioned is that an odd, almost unexplainable one, that of a young man, a fellow student with a darker skin, who turns out to be not just a Muslim, but a fellow traveler of terrorists. This book is set shortly after 9/11, in a time when suspicions towards Muslims and Arabs were rising steadily, and in Moore’s book there is only one man of Arab descent, and he’s both a Muslim and a sympathizer with the goals and means of terrorists.

This episode is the nadir of the whole sorry book. Nothing in Moore’s novel really coheres, which reads like a hastily edited manuscript created by pasting in small snippets of fictional ideas, but this last episode is mind-bogglingly nonsensical, unconnected to the larger whole of the novel and ridiculous in almost every single way. It caps a novel that is so complacent and self-absorbed as to be completely irrelevant. Its handling of characters is largely incompetent, so much so, indeed, that you need to stop following characters and plot and just take things as they come. But, as I said earlier, even if we allow for the fact that this is not a realistic novel but a novel, so to say, of ideas, the outcome is less than satisfying. Both ideas and narrative possibilities are tossed into the air either to be forgotten or to be tied off untidily at the end. It gets so bad that at one point I thought maybe the book was a satire, satirizing Tassie Keltjin, her point of view and those who share her point of view, but even this, ultimately, didn’t pan out, because the book wraps up in one great conciliatory movement. It situates the book firmly among other coming of age tales, and confirms the book’s utter mediocrity. A Gate at the Stairs is one severe disappointment, a gaudy empty box that smells a bit funny. Do not read this book.

Jakob Arjouni: Happy Birthday, Turk!

Arjouni, Jakob (1987), Happy Birthday, Türke!, Diogenes
ISBN 9783257215441

[English translation: Arjouni, Jakob (1994), Happy Birthday, Turk!, No Exit Press
Translated by Anselm Hollo
ISBN 1874061378]

From Raymond Chandler to Georges Simenon and Jean-Claude Izzo, the hard-boiled detective novel and the noir both have occupied an interesting place within literature. Their clean brethren, police procedural, regular mystery or detective novels are, at best, highly entertaining reads, cleverly structured maybe or elegantly told. There is a reason, however, why critics, even snobbishly inclined ones, are more likely to accept noir or the hard-boiled detective as Literature (note the capital ‘L’) than their less dark or gritty cousins. I think that these genres capture an idea or a feeling for a certain section of society, and manage to create a competent and cunning image of problems troubling the whole of society. The best books written in these genres can provide an impressively accurate idea of the socioeconomic tensions that run through the society of their time, whether it’s Chandler’s Californian wastelands, Simenon’s post-war France or Izzo’s sweaty, bitter Marseille. Instead of using a figure of authority as a way of handling a story, they tend to pick criminals, or private investigators who are little better than criminals and frequently resorting to criminal means. The connection of sexual and political deviation with life as a criminal is probably most often associated with Jean Genet’s magnificent novels, but in the best of hard-boiled detective and noir novels, it has always been present. Thus they often manage to furnish a sharp commentary on the current situation in their countries, via the dark underbelly of the society’s sinners, those who serve as scapegoats and victims, sources of exploitative practices and thought. This is what makes these genres endure, what turned their writers into literary legends and influential figures even within the mainstream literary canon after a while.

During these writers’ lifetimes, their work is often seen as merely entertaining, however, which is one of the reasons why writers like Jakob Arjouni are not fêted and showered with prizes for their genre writing. After all, Arjouni, who is a bestselling writer of genre fiction (although he’s increasingly been publishing more blatantly ‘literary’ books), writes work that is often as perceptive and incisive as that of political writers and literary giants like Heinrich Böll or Günter Grass. His 1985 debut novel, Happy Birthday, Türke! (translated into English as Happy Birthday, Turk! and into French as Bonne fête, le Turc!) is the first of, so far, four books modeled on Chandler’s novels about private eye Philip Marlowe. It remains as vital and interesting as it was the very year it was first published. But despite the fact that Happy Birthday, Türke provides as cogent and focused a comment on the state of Germany in the mid-1980s, as regards race, sexuality and history, as any other book written that decade, Arjouni’s book and its followup volumes are primarily perceived as “great reads”, “pleasurable”, “intriguing entertainment” or “suspenseful”, to quote randomly from reviews. One of the reasons for this is the fact that the books are crammed with adventure and violence. Happy Birthday, Türke is chock full of stuff, full, of fights, exposures, sex, and an awful lot of drinking. There is little thinking, events just keep piling up, people get punched, stabbed and shot, conspiracies are uncovered, people are blackmailed, gassed and run over by cars. Prostitutes and pimps, policemen and drug dealers, Turks and Germans, all play a role (or several) in this eventful little book. Arjouni wrote it at the tender age of 22, and the speed, the impulsive, playful, angry quality of youthful writing streams from every pore of this book and is one of its strongest points.

Less strong is the actual writing, although it’s more correct to call it less literary. Happy Birthday, Türke! is written in a wild melange of voices. There are different dialects, various registers, all warring for domination and there is no narrative voice that is careful and literary enough to tame the diverse sounds into one coherent soundscape, into a hierarchy of sounds. This aspect is perfectly fitting for the lack of hierarchies and authoritative instances in Arjouni’s novel and is one of many instances where his choices as a writer are surprisingly spot-on for such a young man. Happy Birthday, Türke! is set in Frankfurt, the capital of the German state Hessen, in west-central Germany, and he does a great job of conveying the local dialect to his readers. Arjouni, who went on to write plays as well as novels, seems to have a knack for finding the right register, the right tone for each of his characters. He rightly recognizes that even regiolects are indicative of diastratic varieties and the moment a character, no matter how minor they might be, opens their mouth, we have a clear sense of their place in the social order of 1980s Frankfurt. There’s no need for Arjouni to spend hours explaining histories and contexts to his readers: by grabbing his characters by the tongue, so to say, he nails down their situation in an uncannily precise manner. That said, the language isn’t perfect or even particularly great in the book, despite Arjouni’s instincts and insights. One problem, and this is not a small one, is that he seems, far too often, stiff and artificial when rendering dialogue that does not contain regiolects. As many, many other German writers and reviewers, Arjouni, too, seems incapable of rendering colloquial language in a lively and believable manner. That need not be a strong disadvantage, but his book relies so much on the descriptive and narrative power of colloquialisms that a lack of skill in that department is an enormous problem for the book.

Another problem has to do with the fact that the book’s narrator is its protagonist, the private detective Kemal Kayankaya. He is Turk “by birth” but, orphaned early, he had grown up with German parents, went to the Gymnasium, and then, for fun, started his private eye business. He doesn’t speak Turkish, and he is untouched by other aspects of Turkish culture, as well. His horizon, as far as culture and education is concerned, is that of a moderately well-off German, who has recently fallen on hard times. That conflict, between the level of education, his current standing in his society and a clear wish to be somewhat cool, produces his language, which is the only constant voice in the book. It is itself, however, not ‘constant’. The uneven flow of his voice is oddly uncomfortable. Cheap jokes, hard-boiled asides, reasoned remarks and observations and a generally uncouth attitude are taking turns in Arjouni’s book. Except for the fact that he never lapses into local dialect, his voice seems less his own, than a mixture of other people’s voices. This impression is exacerbated by the fact that there are few deliberations, a decided lack of sentimentalities or interiorities, in keeping with the genre of the hard-boiled detective novel. As readers, we are often left with what feels like a patchwork of quotes, pastiches and homages to Chandler, Hammett and much lesser writers. The very character of Kemal Kayankaya himself is less of an autonomous character and more like a new coat of paint on an already very familiar model. All this, while interesting in concept, can make for slightly annoying reading, because, no matter how fitting, how smart or well thought-out that kind of language is, it’s always teetering on the brink of trash. Quoting and paraphrasing trashy writing, as Arjouni frequently does, has the downside of introducing that trashy quality into one’s own pages. Arjouni’s decision not to use a dominant and overarching artistic frame or narrative means that the trashy writing, irregardless whether its quoted or not, keeps jostling its ways to the forefront of the book.

As I already mentioned, the titular Turk, Happy Birthday, Türke!‘s protagonist Kemal Kayankaya is a paint-by-numbers hard-boiled detective. He drinks a lot, is not hesitant to beat people with a fist, random objects or his hand gun, he keeps his cool with girls, with such a tried-and-true mixture of condescension and flirtatiousness that we almost expect him to call them ‘dolls’. He is tough on the outside but has a hard of gold, hidden somewhere in his battered body. Because not only does he hit people a lot, he also gets hit a lot, in the face, in the stomach, on the head and elsewhere. For most of the book he is nursing the bruises from the first beating he receives in the course of this investigation, reminding this reader of Jack Gitte’s injured and bandaged nose. Like many heroes from the books and movies that served Arjouni as inspirations, Kayankaya is fully engaged, with his body, life and, in a way, his whole existence, on the line. This has always been one of the most interesting differences between the dark and the light kind of mysteries. Despite the occasional threats to regular detectives and police officials in the light mysteries, these are easily categorized threats, usually reducible to one specific hostile party. There is never that utter, tantalizing precariousness of noir and hard-boiled detective novels. Even Marlowe, white and male, with the confidence and swagger of the privileged prick, is balancing there. The fears of the privileged, sexual, violent and political, which often form literary subtext, are palpable, endangering forces in these works. It’s Arjouni’s genius that his protagonist’s very identity is informed by such a balancing act. Culturally, he is a (white) German male, but the Other, which in Germany is more often the Turkish immigrant than Gilroy’s blacks, is also part of his identity, since his outward appearance betrays his Turkish ancestry.

This is Arjouni’s innovation, this is what he added to the long tradition of the hard-boiled detective novel. In 1985 Frankfurt, we learn, Turks are despised even by street hookers, traditionally viewed as pretty low on the ladder of social hierarchy. Turks, Kayankaya’s interlocutor’s often assume, can’t speak German, are stupid, criminal, greedy, or sexual perverts. He is an outcast, often literally, as his skin alone is reason enough to have himself thrown out of various houses and establishments. He is paid to investigate the murder of a Turkish worker (the plot, convoluted though it is, is just as hard-boiled-by-numbers as the protagonist himself), and is soon almost submerged by a wave of hate. The racism, both popular and institutional, is mind-boggling, and makes Happy Birthday, Türke! often an especially dark read. The language and the narrative is so quirky and often at pains not to dwell on the dark aspects, but the Kafkaesque nightmare of living in a city the main inhabitants of which despise you because of how you look, often breaks through. As the book progresses, we quickly find that the cheap jokes and puns are often stabs at gallows humor. In only two quick, almost unremarked, asides, Arjouni points to the historical continuity of all that hate, by having one retired policeman help Kayankaya, a policeman who had occasionally disobeyed orders during the Third Reich, as well, in order to help Jews. The vision of Germany here is unremittingly bleak, but what shines are Arjouni’s instincts. Arjouni himself is German, his real name is Jakob Bothe, he’s the son of Hans Günter Michelsen, a reasonably well-known German playwright. The novel shows us that he’s marvelously aware of the problems that writing from a privileged angle involves and all the evasive, non-dominant aspects of the novel suddenly appear to be geared to create a writing that can narrate a Turkish story without exploiting, exoticizing or Othering Turks or foreigners in general. The protagonist’s voice itself represents a retreat from narrative privilege. That does not usually make for better reading, but it does add layers of intrigue to the whole book.

That level of awareness and conceptual clarity is rare enough in experienced writers, but in a 22 year old, it’s wondrous. As is the longevity of his insights into German culture and politics. Today’s resurgence of racism is similarly patterned, although it’s often coated with claims of ‘religious criticism’. The same thing that appears to power politics in southern US states, where Chicano studies have to battle absurd accusations of anti-white racism, is slowly taking over discourses in Germany as well. For a few years, resentment at the difference of Turks has been mounting. Germans expect Turks to not speak with a dialect, to not speak Turkish, to dress properly, and be quiet with their religious beliefs. Germans have settled into a feeling of resentment, whether towards Turks or Jews or other minorities. For decades, this was complicated and tempered by a slow-burning guilt over the Third Reich and its atrocities. This has changed. Germans are now expecting those who aren’t German to assimilate, to come to heel, and any kind of cultural or ideological independence is viewed almost as an act of treason. The atmosphere, and the rage that fuels it, has an almost Wilhelminian (the Second) air about it. Arjouni’s novel, published 25 years ago, manages to provide such a cogent vision of the dark underbelly of the Germany of its time, that its implicit conclusions and indictments are still valid, still bleak and the book is still worth reading. This is a crime novel that demonstrates why that genre is so vibrant, powerful and important, to this day. With hesitations, with caveats, I nevertheless recommend this short and harsh little book.

A short personal note. As I am trying to finish two manuscripts and getting back into reviewing books, I have a hospital bill to pay off, which means all kinds of issues for me. If you have a buck or two to spare, I would be more than thankful. There is a paypal button on the right hand side of this page. That’s just in case you feel charitable. As it is, I am happy enough about every single one of my readers. There are more of you than I ever expected, even through the dry months in the past year, and I am thoroughly humbled. Thank you all.

Peter Carey: Theft: A Love Story

Carey, Peter (2007), Theft: A Love Story, Faber and Faber
ISBN 978-0-571-23150-8

It’s quite frightening to hear that Peter Carey’s 2006 novel Theft: A Love Story is not his best work. It is frightening because it is such an extraordinary success on almost every level. Theft manages to do so much in so few pages and yet it succeeds in never sounding convoluted or dense. It’s is a funny, suspenseful read, a book sure to appeal to almost every reader. In it, Carey manages to craft a story steeped in Australian history and culture, in art and art history, a book that tells a fast, noir-ish tale, and is linguistically sophisticated and inventive, reaching as far into theory as Deleuze. Sure, there are slow moments in the book now and then, but they are an exception. Sure, too, it lacks plausibility in many places, but despite the realistic varnish and the noir genre borrowings, Theft isn’t supposed to be awfully plausible (in terms of verisimilitude) anyway. There are other minor flaws, but the good aspects dominate the reader’s impressions of Theft.

Among these, two achievements in particular stand out. The first is Carey’s treatment of othered speech, by which I mean the speech of a character marked as “slow”. The speech and the character attached to it are finely tailored to convey to the readers the complexities of having a mind that is regarded as deviant by your compatriots, without lapsing into exploitative and exotic exaggeration. The second success in Theft is Carey’s thorough and inspired discussion of art, originality and forgery. One of his protagonists speaks of art at great length, delivering several long rants. Peter Carey is not afraid to be precise and explicit about the techniques of creating and selling art, yet we never feel lectured to. Theft is evidence of impressive insights into art, artistic inspiration and the accompanying frustrations. The result of all this is a book that I’d easily recommend to anyone interested in the topic, or, well, anyone, really. Theft: A Love Story is a very, very good novel.

The basic story revolves around two brothers, Michael and Hugh Boone, also known as Butcher Bones and Slow Bones, who get involved in an elaborate, and ultimately murderous, art scam. As Hugh has it: “Phthaaaa! We are Bones, God help us, raised in sawdust, dry each morning.” The change from ‘Boones’ to ‘Bones’ is one of several absorbing, meaningful details. For one thing, “Bones” invokes a child-like, fairy-tale setting, a children’s story, which is a genre where aptronymns are quite common, where names are tailored to fit themes of the story and to suggest elements to come or destinies to be fulfilled, they also tend to add an additional layer of characterization. Changing the name of the Boones to “Bones” is relevant to the book’s major topics in still more ways: since part of the central theme of Theft is Australia, especially in relation to other countries, I’d suggest that “Boone” is an oblique reference to Daniel and Squire Boone, two famous historical figures connected to the myth of the American Frontier. In contrast, Hugh says “[w]e are the nation of Henry Lawson”, a realistic writer, often credited with dismantling the myth of the Australian Bush.

This possible reference to Daniel Boone is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg in Theft. The amount of Australian references that even I was able to catch suggest that a reader more knowledgeable about antipodean literatures and history than me would unearth multitudes. As is, I felt sometimes a bit shortchanged, bewildered by names and places that Carey just assumes the reader to understand and contextualize. Some are explicit, like the mention of Lawson, but one suspects quite a few others lurking in place-names and other nooks. This is not a significant problem, however, since Theft is written with a very clear and precise sense of place. Carey constructs a version of Australia, Japan or the United States that works like a charm even for provincial, untraveled readers like me. The reader understands what any given place is supposed to signify, how it works within the story and how it interacts with the characters.

The plot is, typical for noir fiction, very convoluted and dense, relying strongly on revelations and twists. Much of it reminded me of Michael Frayn’s exhilarating and taxing 1999 novel Headlong. Some passages and plot elements in Theft contain such strong parallels to Headlong that it’s hard to imagine Carey not having had Frayn’s novel, shortlisted for the 1999 Booker prize, now and then in mind. In Headlong, Frayn’s protagonist is an art historian, who believes to have uncovered a Brueghel painting heretofore unattributed to the great Flemish master. In his manic attempts to prove his theory and acquire the painting without letting its owner find out about its supposed great value, he entangles himself in a web of lies, deceit and crime. There is no happy ending in the cards for Frayn’s protagonist, which the author lets us know early. The whole of Headlong pretends to be the protagonist’s own account, including an introduction and an afterword ‘written’ by him.

This is not the case in Theft, although Carey’s novel is similarly transparent as a written artifact. None of the Bones explicitly mentions the writing process, but they both narrate the book (first person narrators, both) and Michael ‘Butcher Bones’ Boone for example frequently employs literary techniques such as foreshadowing or flashbacks, cleanly recognizable as such. The difference between these two set-ups, despite their similarities, closely corresponds to another difference between the two books. Headlong is about art history, it’s a novel as much concerned with the interconnections of archives and memory as with the actual art. Frayn’s readers are treated to extensive lectures on the history of Flemish art, and are offered art as an object, something that you look at from a distance, something to be contextualized. The art history in it is not imaginary, it largely contains knowledge that the reader is also privy to, that he may even know. Departures from that common knowledge and the inventions are meant to create a contrast to the archived bits.

In contrast to that, Peter Carey’s approach is different. He invents everything, the artists, the relevant sections of art history and so on, but more importantly, his protagonist Butcher Bones is not an art historian, he’s an artist, one who used to be quite famous, actually. Released from prison after serving a sentence for burglary he is content to get back to being a painter. His crime was having broken into his old house, now inhabited by his ex-wife, and Butcher Bones attempted to forcibly retrieve some of his own paintings, since “my own best work [...] had been declared Marital Assets” (italics his) and had been lost in the ensuing divorce. This crime, as happens a few times in this dense and interlaced novel, already contains in nuce the tensions and questions that preoccupy the whole book: what is the economic and historical relationship of an artist to his work? What happens after a painting is finished, how does it end up in other people’s hands? How does this tie into questions of authorship, ownership and originality? One of the strengths of Theft is that it doesn’t present answers, merely suggestions.

In a patron’s house in a rural area in northern New South Wales, Butcher Bones sets up shop, builds a studio, nails a canvas to a wooden frame, buys colors and starts painting. This whole process is told in admirable detail. Butcher tells us about the types of colors he uses, about the types of nails, screws and wood utilized in his endeavors, but we are never overwhelmed. Instead, he involves us in his art, lets us be part of the small world he constructs in the house he doesn’t own. It’s a bit like listening to the protagonist of Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist (my review here). Unlike Baker’s lonely poet, Butcher’s not alone, he never is, Hugh always accompanies him. Hugh is a bit slow, hence his nickname ‘Slow Bones’. He is obsessed with chairs and quick to wreak violence, with a special predilection for biting fingers. He has trouble reading or understanding maps and is very quickly lost in any kind of urban setting. But his apparent slowness and supposed mental deficiencies are much less pronounced in the book than they seem in this summary.

This is because Hugh and Michael narrate the story in alternating chapters. The chapters don’t overlap, there’s no cute ‘alternative view’ of events. Turns out, Hugh’s part of the narrative is not more obtuse or simple-minded than Michael’s. It’s different, but not in a “slow” way, if anything, it’s more complex and nuanced. Michael’s narration is maudlin, self-obsessed and a bit depressed. He uses low and high brow language both, equally at home in talking about art, talking to buddies or relating “shitty stuff”. These chapters do most to advance the story because they are conventional and told in a linguistically lean way, quickly stringing together events, except for the occasional monologue. Hugh, in contrast, uses a more sophisticated language that contains insights about art, about personal relationships as well as blunt retellings of events. Michael, exasperated over his brother, exclaims once “[w]ho could explain the dark puzzle of Slow Bones’ folded brain?” This sentence, meant to disparage his brother, to show impatience with his being too slow, not functional enough, is, however, revealing and helpful in understanding Hugh and through him, much of Theft.

See, Hugh’s language is much more careful than his brother’s, it displays a much greater awareness of words and syntax. Instead of relating linguistic platitudes like Michael, common in conventional speech, he tends to quote platitudes, not by using inverted commas or other markers (although he does capitalize words now and then, a fact that emphasizes the ‘written’ quality I mentioned earlier), but by speaking/writing in a pastiche of the person, book or statement quoted. Hugh’s chapters are the most fun to read, they are open and almost without guile. Evil and suspicions are quoted, distanced, looked on askance. Now and then he displays cunning, but its never terribly clever. Yet a comparison of Hugh’s and Butcher’s credulity shows us two people almost equally likely to be duped, made fun and taken advantage of. Hugh’s cunning, his naivete and wisdom are not that of how we often suppose the mentally impaired to be, but that of child’s literature. Personally, I’ve long considered the best prose work written for children to have qualities that approaches very good poetry or the work of a writer such as Samuel Beckett.

In all these cases one is likely to find a certain delight in words and an independence of simple conventionalisms, as well as a mixture of lightness and bleakness, which in Beckett’s work is often mistaken for absurdity. I think it’s a paying of close attention to the cog wheels of language, thought and of the structure of images and an awareness of the difficulty of unmooring our actions from conventional patterns and a false implicitness of common sense judgments. Much of that kind of thinking is implicit in those of Theft‘s chapters which are narrated by Hugh. Butcher’s difficult brother has, as Michael said, a “folded brain”. To most readers, this will immediately recall Deleuze’s concept of the fold, elaborated upon specifically in the marvelous book-length essay Le Pli: Leibniz et le baroque (1988) and his book on Foucault (1986). Hugh’s narrative is actually the revealing, clear one, in it you can find the outside and its sounds and shouts folded into his own meandering ruminations. The end result of this is a narrative that seems at times like adult child’s patter, straight out of some strange, slightly surreal tale.

The fact of the matter is, Carey puts quite a strong emphasis on the genres of folk tales, fairy tales and child’s literature. Evidence of this is, for example, his foregrounding of Norman Lindsay’s classic children’s book The Magic Pudding (1918). Several characters in the book self-identify with characters from the book. Hugh especially uses other people’s knowledge of The Magic Pudding as an indicator of their soundness of character and taste, and it should have been a warning to him (and us) when a new acquaintance expresses sympathy for the book’s villains, the pudding thieves. The Magic Pudding is a book about three friends who walk through the world, dining each evening and each morning on a steak-and-kidney pudding which is not only alive, but can also never be depleted. Regularly they are set upon by a pair of pudding thieves, who manage, with the help of trickery and cunning, to steal the pudding a few times. The three friends manage to get them back due to the fact that one among them is equally cunning and devises clever plans to steal the pudding back. The other two then proceed to punch the thieves “on the snout”.

It is significant that Hugh is adamant that he and his brother are “like Barnacle Bill and Sam Sawnoff”, the two punchers of snouts. Clever people around them tend to outwit them and it is pure strength and stubbornness that propels the Bones forward through all the complications, the crimes and the occasional bout of misery. But, unlike Headlong, Theft never really gives in to that misery, the darkness of the noir genre. The subtitle of Carey’s novel is “A Love Story” and, in an oddly satisfying way, it is, in fact, a love story. The love interest here is Marlene, an art connoisseur who’s married to the son of the widow of a famous mid-century artist. In the time-frame of the book, the artist (Leibovitz) is long dead, so is his widow Dominique. Her son, Oliver, has inherited precious little, but one important thing he does own: the right to authorize Leibovitz pictures. He has the right to say which picture is a ‘real Leibovitz’ and which isn’t. The twist is this: Dominique proceeded, immediately after her husband’s death, to hide unfinished canvases, and doctored them later on to make them more expensive. Marlene, an ambitious but provincial woman with a criminal record, refined Dominique’s methods and acquired connections to art dealers all over the globe.

She meets the Bones when she visits the countryside to try and steal a Leibovitz original from one of the Bones’ neighbors. A nimble weaver of intrigues and tricks, she quickly draws the Bones into her machinations, seducing both of them: Michael sexually and Hugh emotionally. As she drags them into her plans, plans that finally result in murder, we can’t help but be fascinated by this amazing woman. Like the pudding thieves, her resources seem endless, her energy and dedication to the task is undeniable. Marlene is not a criminal who happens to do art scams: after decades of doing what she does, she has become a lover of art and an expert not just of the work of Leibovitz, but of modern art in general. Marlene is a self-made woman, an incredibly strong female character and while both narrators have limitations and weaknesses, fixed and slowed down by the narrative attention and tasks, Marlene glides through the story, stronger, and far more magnificent than either of the brothers.

On the one hand, Theft belongs to books like William Gaddis’ momentous The Recognitions. Its treatment of art and originality is rather similarly inspired and strong. There are similarities, too, to noir art tales like Headlong. But the heart of the book is staggeringly different from either of the book. These elements are additional elements on a dish that has a very peculiar, unique taste, because, when you get down to it, the Bones brothers, simple, and successful due to sheer patience and endurance finally seem to represent Australians. Not because Australians are necessarily simple or patient or stubborn, but because at the end, their art is shown to endure. It doesn’t triumph, it doesn’t vanquish other art, but it is equal to other cultural productions. In a way the book mellows out at the end. The first half throws ideas, references and places at us, but as soon as we catch our breath and have caught up with the book, it kind of peters out, but not in a bad way. Peter Carey wrote a book with an Australian story, with Australian means and references, but it’s a book that takes place all over the world, a world that accepts the odd antipodean couple into their midst.

The book (published in 2006) is set in the 1980s, and this historical purview, this gesture towards the archival dimension suggests a broader significance of the story. How far off the mark would it be to read this book, in a way the story of a convict redeeming himself through his own hard, original work, as a metaphor for the rise of the Australian nation? That may be going too far, I don’t know, but fact is, the book’s power is such that this kind of reading might just be possible. Peter Carey is an amazing novelist, if this book is any indication. With a frightful ease he weaves different, disparate threads together to weave a distinctly Australian story that has meaning and relevance for all his readers, and his prose is never less than superb and controlled. Read this book.

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Mark Millar: Kick-Ass / Wanted

Millar, Mark; JG Jones, Paul Mounts (2008), Wanted, Top Cow
ISBN 9781582404974

Millar, Mark; John Romita Jr. et al. (2010), Kick-Ass, Titan Books
ISBN 9781848565357

This isn’t the first time, nor will it be the last, that I confess my admiration for Mark Millar’s work. I consider Millar’s books to be among the best published in comics these days, although at least half that admiration is owed to his artists. His comics have pencils by major artists as J.G. Jones (Wanted), Brian Hitch (The Ultimates) and John Romita Jr. (Kick-Ass). I try to read as much of his work as possible, even when, as in Ultimate X-Men, it appears to be slightly sub-par. In books like Kick-Ass or Wanted, it isn’t. Mark Millar is known to publicly overemphasize his importance and brilliance, but sometimes, his material just works perfectly. On the other hand, Millar keeps bothering me in different ways. In comics, the fact that every character and action comes with its visual representation, the fact, too, that you can’t bury essentials in pages of text, can create problematic depictions of various issues. Many comics touch upon some of these issues,, and Millar is no exception. However, while a lightweight series like Y: The Last Man provides a quietly reactionary soap opera, Mark Millar, clearly enjoying his role as provocative writer, dishes up a densely narrated drama in his books, where all the elements are so well posited and constructed that they heighten the importance of each individual element, including the troubling ones. The Ultimates, for example, is a clever and sparsely told disquisition about military power and its relationship to basic elements of culture, from the treatment of women, to chauvinism, racism and much more. Every character, every line, every panel in the comic seems to be designed to work that angle. The Ultimates is almost flawlessly executed.

Both great writers like Grant Morrison and bad ones like Jeph Loeb tend to use the serial nature of mainstream comics to write expansive, associative work. There’s a line threaded through a series of books like Morrison’s fantastic run on the New X-Men, but images and characters tend to touch on many issues and moods. In comparison, Millar is uncommonly obsessed with the same topics and ideas within one book or one run. Although Millar’s run on the Ultimate X-Men pales beside Morrison’s work with more or less the same characters (more in a few weeks on this blog), it’s still strong, and most of all: it’s a taut, concentrated genre exercise. Millar reconstructs the X-Men from the bottom up, he re-introduces them and their themes for a new audience; in their case it makes for a certain dullness, because we know the X-Men by now, we’re familiar with their themes. Additionally, his X-Men work was largely penciled by Adam Kubert, who, despite his fame, is clearly not a very good fit. Millar, as the X-Men stories, or, to an extent, his work with the Fantastic Four has shown, is a writer with a limited palette. He’s excellent in what he does best, but remove a few of the variables, or change them, and his work can quickly seem dull and uninteresting. But if the artist, the material and the setting is right, as in the aforementioned Ultimates, his writing is incredible: it’s hard to deny the perfection of The Ultimates. On the other hand, two of his more original graphic novels, Wanted and Kick-Ass, seem very divisive. In my opinion, both of these books compare well to the best ‘regular’ literature I’ve read this year, but their highly violent content has not gone over very well with all their readers.

Kick-Ass is especially violent, both in terms of actual, depicted violence, and in terms of emotional violence. It’s a borderline-surreal tale that seems to be premised on the idea of what super heroes would look like ‘in the real world’, but, as any closer look will immediately reveal, is anything but that kind of book. Kick-Ass and Wanted are books soaked with decades of superhero (or supervillain) history. Not just the history that surfaces in explicit and implicit references to canonical works, but the whole idea of superhero comics, their iconic and intellectual function in our cultures. Not even Morrison is so obsessed with the minutiae of comics and comics references alone. Millar’s books seem to have soaked up heaps and heaps of comics and internalized them, and seem to develop their ideas further and further. Millar’s work on The Authority is similar to The Ultimates, grappling with similar themes, but it lacks the incredible polish and concentration of the later work. Plot-lines and concepts seem to complete or prolong questions raised in the earlier work. In the same way, Kick-Ass, while not a regular superhero comic, is a continuation of an earlier Millar book, and is best read in that context, I think. That earlier book is Wanted, published in 6 issues between 2003 and 2004. Wanted is the story of Wesley Gibson, a frustrated young white man, who finds out his father was an extremely talented killer and takes up with a gang of super-villains. Given that the main character is a super-villain-in-waiting, its not surprising that the comic deals with hate a lot. The narrator is the protagonist, who, in the fourth panel, complains that he’s “taking shit from my African American boss”.

The word “boss” is helpfully printed in bold to point out Wesley’s incredulity at having to take flak from someone who is not as nicely white as he is. This line of thinking continues throughout the comic, which glories in mass shootings, rape and other distasteful actions. Apart from calling him a villain, the book never once breaks through that mood, effectively providing an appraising account of one of the least likable characters in fiction. At the end of the book, Wesley turns even on the readers of the comic, accusing them of weakness. The penultimate panel has, however, a striking image. While telling us that we’re “going to close this book and buy something else to fill that big, empty hole [they]‘ve created in [our] life”, we see the hand of a customer buying a couple of comics. One of them is an issue of Wanted. I’d argue that that image short-circuits the book, inviting us to read it in terms of comics and iconicity. J.G. Jones’ clear and highly detailed art creates an extremely realistic world that houses an fantastical story. The contrast between the narrative, characters, the voices, and the visual representation of them turns a ratio upside down that tends to dominate graphic novels. If we take, for instance, Vaughan and Guerra’s Y: The Last Man, we find a regular Science Fiction story, clearly intent upon finding out “what would really happen” if all men died, and “what really could have caused it”. Vaughan, as in much else of his work, strains to find a believable voice, and dialogue that sounds “real”.

Pia Guerra’s pencils, in contrast, while depicting a realistic setting, indulge in iconicity. Every depiction of humans is extremely idealized and refers not to a sketch of an actual person (however they were actually created) but to a culturally developed idea of a shape. The female form, the depiction of pregnant women, of militant women, of black women, all the details of the eponymous man: this is superhero comics material, just without the spandex. JG Jones’ far more sophisticated work aims for more realism while reflecting a discussion of issues of iconicity in countless details of the depiction of the characters. Jones’ art is so detailed it slows the story down, scattering it into a series of tableaux. There is a tension between the superhero aspects, like the glossy poses that many of the uber-cool villains assume, or the odd, surreal accessoires they wear, and the wrinkly realism of the artwork itself. The results are intriguing, and absolutely stunning. While none of this is Millar’s art, he did write the content for Jones to fill in, and the very choice of Jones (who is, after all, famous for his style, cf. Greg Rucka’s Wonder Woman run) as artist was inspired. In a book like Wanted, which, as I pointed out, thrives off the kind of tensions that mark J.G. Jones work, nothing seems off. Everything here fits like a glove. The problem with this is, from a reader’s perspective, that it naturally reinforces any troubling issues raised in Millar’s script. However, Wesley is such an exuberantly bigoted character that the book makes more sense in a reading that assumes it to be a satire, than a reading that takes the opinions and ideology of its characters at face values. It’s a satire, and a sharp-tongued one at that, drawing on more than just media criticism. In a time-honored comics tradition, from the Skrulls to Morrison’s and Moore’s masterpieces, it questions conventional narratives and perceptions.

There is still more to it, though. The criticism it contains isn’t really new or spectacular, following lines established by the comics I mentioned and movies such as Natural Born Killers. Millar’s dense and focused way of telling and constructing his story is fairly rare, however. Additionally, at least for me, it’s hard now to disregard Kick-Ass when reading and commenting upon Wanted, which is much enhanced when assuming that it is part of a narrative or intellectual trajectory that includes Kick-Ass. On a surface level, the two books couldn’t be more different. Kick-Ass‘ art is almost the exact opposite of Jones’. While Jones did both pencils and inks in Wanted, John Romita Jr. only did the pencils in Kick-Ass. Its inks are handled by Tom Palmer, and one feels an odd disconnect here. This is worth noting, since Palmer is one of the most legendary inkers in the business today. His inks in Byrne’s X-Men run (although I’m not partial to Byrne’s pencils) are nothing short of stunning, for example, and his influence in the industry is hard to overestimate. But in Kick-Ass, his work and Romita Jr.’s are a bad fit. The point is that J.G .Jones’ art is of a piece and hits you straight in the face. It overwhelms you, lets you examine the world of Wanted in full dark detail. None of that here. It’s not just the inks, however. Romita Jr.’s art is low on details, and the few panels that contain many can seem almost sloppily done. In Romita Jr.’s art, objects and people merge, and objects in different states of matter (liquids, gases, solids) start to resemble one another. The effect is both disconcerting and cartoonish. So, on the level of the art, you have a focused, detailed, fully coherent book, and a book where the different elements don’t quite fit, where the art in general is always slightly out of focus. But the connection is, of course Millar. The two novels’ art is similar in the sense of perfectly fitting the writing. The changes in the art correspond directly to the changes in the narrative.

Instead of reveling in super-villains, Kick-Ass looks at super-heroes. Wanted‘s super-villains were created as amalgams of more traditional villains, with references hidden in slogans, details in costume or bearing. The villainy was established by creating a vile protagonist, and making his fellow super-villains even worse. The writing told us what to look for, and the art scattered hints and clues all over the gorgeous pages. Kick-Ass is different. It’s reference to comic antecedents is far more specific and less playful. It doesn’t allow us to distance ourselves from the writing and its implications. A few lines earlier, I called some of Wanted‘s panels “tableaux” – the implied act of leaning back and contemplating a panel or a whole page, this doesn’t quite work for Kick-Ass. The art doesn’t ask you to stop and look, instead its completely immersive, attracts you into its haze of idealism, fear, anxiety and hate. Hate is one of the things that you’ll notice very early on. The narrator doesn’t vocalise his prejudice quite like Wesley, but the art draws your attention to a similar mind-set. In Wanted, the narration needed to be fueled by hate, because the art, due to its detailed realism, suggested impartiality, showing things as they were. Romita Jr.’s art doesn’t even pretend to be impartial. Instead you get sucked into the maelstrom of the protagonist’s teenage mind from the very first panel. Like Wesley, the eponymous Kick-Ass (his mild-mannered name is Dave) moderates the first few panels, telling us what we’re seeing. Unlike Wesley, he abandons narration rather quickly. He doesn’t need to keep it up, however, because the art is clearly doing it for him now. Hate is less expressed and more implied. For instance by the fact that all the villains of the book, and I do mean one hundred percent, are non-white. Latinos, African-Americans, Italian-Americans (for the whiteness of Italian- and Irish-Americans I recommend reading select works of Whiteness Studies (Roediger and others)). The protagonist, on the other hand, is blond. What’s more, he’s ethnically unmarked. As in his best work, Millar uses everything to full effect. We’re never in doubt about the ethnicity of people in the book. Language, color, clothes, all adds to the basic impression: a white blond boy, constantly victimized at school, and, by extension, in his world as well, has enough and fights crime.

Fighting crime in Kick-Ass means fighting all the ethnically marked rabble. There is a plethora of critical writing on superhero comics that addresses this question of marked and unmarked actors, and the use and import of wearing a costume, as well as the racial and sexual fault-lines in a tradition that focused on and even expanded notions of masculinity and manliness. Dave is a perfect representation of the fear and anxiety of white males in this new century, afraid to lose privileges and calling frequently for an emancipation for men and accusing people of being racist towards white people. Phenomena like the American Tea Party movement are symptoms of that growing feeling of being threatened by a wave of otherness. And Dave is fighting back. Brilliantly, Millar creates an ambiguous motivation for his protagonist. Dave is beset both by local and global fears, and the local fears are mostly connected to his being a teenager and grappling with the process of growing up. There isn’t enough bile or strength in him to call the adults out, calling them ‘phoneys’. Instead he retreats first into his imagination, and then into violence. In his imagination, as a scrawny comic geek, he learns the symbolic language of comic which works largely through displacement and metaphorical representation. The rhetorical flourishes of right wing attacks, constructing scapegoats, using ideas of purity and evil, Dave has learned all this from comics, in short: he’s perfectly equipped to be a small hateful thug with ideals. There isn’t a patchwork of allusions and references here. There is just one big paradigm in Kick-Ass: it’s Batman. Mostly Frank Miller’s Batman, but Millar uses small details that suggest other Batman-related characters, too. Dave corresponds in many details to the Batman in Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One. The trajectory, from the unsuccessful first bout with criminals which ends with the superheroes-in-waiting bleeding profusely, to the successful second fight and the subsequent establishment, is similar, but what’s more important is that the criminals and the heroes conform to a normal/other dichotomy.

The other canonical Miller text on Batman relevant here is his masterful The Dark Knight Returns. In this book, Batman has turned into a hateful muscled old man, disdainful of political correctness and leniency towards criminals, and largely dismissive of democracy. In Kick-Ass, Millar creates the characters of Hit Girl and Big Daddy to reflect that side of being Batman. Like the Cassandra Cain-incarnation of Batgirl, Hit Girl was trained by her father (as Cassandra was trained by hers) to become an excellent killer at a very young age. The rigorous and excessive training has produced a killing machine without many social skills. Without even blinking, Hit Girl slices through hordes of criminals. Neither she nor her father care whether someone is actually guilty of a crime. Being a criminal means being guilty by association. So they kill not just a drug dealer, but also his mistress and all his friends. The utter disdain for human lives and the violent, bracing righteousness connect these two to Miller’s old Batman. Between David, Hit Girl and Big Daddy, Millar has gathered many of the facets of Gotham’s crime-fighter. He has picked up on Miller’s reading of the character as a reactionary, fascist madman, and made a book that reflects that attitude. There is no lee-way in Kick-Ass that would allow for a critical or satiric reading. On the contrary: Mark Millar has, as he does in the best of his books, created an incredibly focused book where every detail is put in the service of one idea. Here it’s right wing hatred. Not criticism of it, but depiction of it, with a clarity and assiduity that makes it almost an anatomy of that attitude. Nothing here is extraneous, everything, the art, dialogue, and the story is extremely focused on one thing and one thing only. In fact, I think that Kick-Ass might well be his best book, because despite the strengths of his other work, this one might just be the most focused and densely told of all his tales.

This is not to deny that his method has its problems. Depicting hate and violence, without even attempting to contain or criticize it, is a risky business and just as The Dark Knight Returns affirms its protagonist’s reactionary values, so does Kick-Ass provide an apology for the dark dreams of Dave. In his review of Haneke’s US remake of Haneke’s own Funny Games, New York Times critic A.O. Scott writes: “voyeuristic masses are implicated in the gruesome spectacle of senseless cruelty. Are we, though? What if the guilt trip never takes off? Or, even worse, what if the American audience, cretins that we are, were to embrace Mr. Haneke’s vision not for its moral stringency but for the thrill of, say, watching Ms. Watts, bound at the ankles and wrists, hop around in her underwear? Who will be implicated then?” This moral ambiguity is characteristic for much of Millar’s work, and while reading him is always an awesome experience, his readers may feel increasingly uneasy. The divide between being a moral writer and an excellent craftsman is not often as wide as it is in Millar’s case. Millar’s work is often problematic and often difficult to stomach, and if we look at the way his oeuvre develops, it seems that there is much more to come. His clean work with the Ultimate X-Men eventually lead to the fascist ambiguities of Civil War, his playful game with hate and villainy in Wanted turned into unfettered racism and violence in Kick-Ass. I am both excited and afraid of what’s to come next from Mark Millar’s busy pen.

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Tell me I’m an idiot

Today a commenter on my blog, in response to my review of Hwang Sok-Yong’s “The Guest”, wrote

Did you really read this book? The christian characters in the story are protestants, not catholics, and this has a very important significance in the korean historical context.

THis is an exceedingly stupid mistake to make, and a huge one at that. I have not, I think, made mistakes of a similar magnitude before, but since I write most of my reviews from notes, with the books not at hand and my poor memory as sole guide, I am prone to make mistakes like that.

So here goes: if I’m being an idiot in my reviews, please tell me. You win…something. I’m asking this because I know that some people have read the review in question and read the reviewed book. I would really appreciate a head-up next time. I’m an idiot. I need your help.

For really helpful comments I offer used books. Good ones, too.

As for this review, I’m waiting for my sister to return me my copy and I will then rewrite the whole review. Until then, it stays, shameful as it is.

J.P. Donleavy: The Ginger Man

Donleavy, J. P. (2001), The Ginger Man, Grove Press
ISBN 978-0-8021-3795-1

J.P. Donleavy is an excellent writer, but a comparatively badly known one. His extraordinary early novels, published in rapid succession in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, received a moderate (but decent) amount of attention when they came out, but there has been precious little of that attention in the decades since. Unlike other writers of with a similarly miserable quality/attention-ratio, there has been no Donleavy revival. With Johnny Depp tipped for taking the lead role in a movie adaptation of one of his novels, that could change, though. The book (that may or may not be filmed) is The Ginger Man, Donleavy’s debut, and still his most famous novel. The Ginger Man is a major achievement, not just one of the best books I read this year, but one of the best American novels I’ve ever read, period. The plain facts are these: in The Ginger Man, Donleavy manages to create a book that uses and comments on the music and language of a literary tradition, all while inventing a very original, singular use of language. His originality is not jarring, not difficult. On the contrary, reading The Ginger Man is like watching a virtuoso have fun with the tools of his trade but with the added pleasure of being immersed in an intoxicating narrative stream. A funny, wild obsession with death and life, it’s both clever and stirring, and should be a staple at universities as well as on the shelves of avid readers. The fact that it’s neither is disappointing, and should be corrected as soon as possible. Buy this book and, if you have the opportunity, write about it. In the trajectory of American canonical prose, Donleavy is a singular writer whose role and importance has yet to be fully recognized. But most of all: read it, read it. It may fill a gap in you that you didn’t know you had, and its protagonist, Sebastian Dangerfield, will never again leave your imagination.

I’ll just say it: in the character of Sebastian Dangerfield, John Patrick Donleavy has created one of the most stunning characters in modern fiction. Donleavy draws on many sources, voices and registers, but the fact of the matter is that Dangerfield is at once a bitter everyman, das ewig Männliche, so to say, and a finely tuned individual character. Dangerfield’s choices, his attitude, they distinguish him from characters that might seem similar, such as Henry Miller’s scabrous portfolio of protagonists. He’s a multifaceted character, who invites identification, derision, humor, sadness and revulsion. Despite the sheen of realism on his actions, he seems to have fallen out of time: Dangerfield is not a historical character, representing a time long gone, nor is he properly of his time, which would be the 1950s. Actually, The Ginger Man was published in London and Paris in 1955, but not until 1965 has Donleavy seen a publication of an unexpurgated version of his marvelous novel in the United States. That delay mirrors in a way two levels within the novel, its overtly Irish setting, and its American sensibility, if one can call it that; two layers which seem to come naturally to a writer like Donleavy, an American who has lived most of his writing life in Ireland, an American with Irish roots to boot. It may be that specific genealogical mixture that creates the high level of believability in the book. Notwithstanding the fact that The Ginger Man is highly artificial, Donleavy appears to completely inhabit his material. I already mentioned the musicality of the book, and reading The Ginger Man, we have the impression of a folk or blues singer, reaching deep into tradition, into the voluble core of culture to extract an essence that he then turns into his art.

Sebastian Dangerfield, his wife, mistresses and friends, appear to be realistic creations, faithful to observed and artistically cleared reality. The plot of The Ginger Man is easily enough summarized. Dangerfield, an American, is, at the beginning, a married man, living with his English wife Marion, whom he married for her impressive bosom and her fashionably bucked teeth, in a squalid apartment. The fact that the house they live in is adjacent to an abyss (and slowly dropping into it) might even be read as a minor symbolical fancy. Subsequently, the small family will move into two other houses, eventually even taking in a boarder, until Marion leaves her insufferable husband. Dangerfield is a horrible husband to have: he sleeps with every woman that would have him, is out drinking almost every night, and incurs debts in order to finance his vices. He doesn’t work, in fact, he expresses horror at the idea of working regularly. Instead, his small family lives off the small check from the G.I. Bill that arrives weekly; what’s more, Dangerfield’s father is rich, and Sebastian hopes for a substantial inheritance that will wipe out all his debts and allow him to live comfortably. Marion is reticent, no match for Dangerfield’s vigorous libido and his gluttonous ways, and it’s not until the last third of the book that Dangerfield takes up with a woman who is just as mad and wild as he is, he, “the wild / Ginger Man.” All this seems straightforward enough, but it’s hard, really, to describe the book without giving away the symbolic and metaphorical underpinnings of a great many aspects of the novel, or of its use of cultural and literary cliché. In fact, this reader had the impression that every seemingly realistic aspect of The Ginger Man could be footnoted and referenced.

Donleavy, born in 1929, is, ultimately, a writer of exile, greedy for the voice and feel of his new Irish home, with the eye and ear of a poet or musician. He writes with the heart of an exile, lacing his symphony of sex, violence and religion with just enough distance, thinking and commentary. See, overall, I think, there’s a tension in The Ginger Man between form, or maybe artifice, on the one hand, and the basic music of the book on the other. It’s in his role as a novelist, that Donleavy seems to me a very American writer, best read in a group with writers such as Robert Coover or John Barth rather than with writers such as James Joyce or Joyce Cary, although the voice in The Ginger Man owes a lot to the Joycean model. Donleavy navigates between these poles with such a deftness of hand and sureness of mind that it’s actually rather stunning that The Ginger Man could be his (or anyone’s) debut novel. It’s so fully formed, finished and powerful an achievement that many writers would be hard pressed to produce anything of comparable quality in their whole life. The most impressive and stunning aspect of The Ginger Man is its language. I would argue that J.P. Donleavy is first and foremost a creator of language. Ideas, characters, references, structure, they are all second to the actual language employed by this extraordinary writer. Or rather: his control and use of language is such that it creates the web of ideas and especially the character of Sebastian Dangerfield as we find it in the pages of The Ginger Man. The impoverished ideas (if we can even call them that) of recent critics such as David Shields would be blunt and useless tools when dealing with a writer and a book like this.

The Ginger Man, though the work of an American writer, is peppered with English and Irish phrases, mimicking the melodies of both languages, and, as with almost all its details, reflects its artful use of dialect, linguistic variation and slang in the plot. Dangerfield is a classic ne’er-do-well, up to his ears in debt, but constantly racking up new debts and liabilities. His puzzling success in doing so, his apparent ability to always continue whatever nocent habit he happens to have acquired, are shown, in the book, to be only vaguely connected to his winning personality or his rhetorical skills. Instead, it’s his versatile use of various dialects of English, whether Irish English, RP/Queen’s English or American English, Dangerfield makes able and ample use of them all, depending on what effect he hopes to achieve. We as readers follow his tongue down these wild alleyways, spellbound by his music as his various lovers are, and the merchants, barmen, and landlords, of course. But the actual dialogue isn’t even the best or most fascinating aspect of Donleavy’s use of language. The narration is sometimes third person, sometimes first person, but it’s always personal, focusing on Dangerfield, channeling his voice. Donleavy stretches and shortens syntax at will, littering his writing with ellipses, skillfully controlling speed and melody of the story that is being told. At times we find almost a Joycean stream of consciousness, as actions, observations and emotions vie with each other in the bubbling cauldron of Dangerfield’s story. This invokes an immediacy that underlines the perennial hurry, the progressive push that is evidenced in Dangerfield’s character. Whereas Joyce’s work used that same intimacy and immediacy, gained through its use of language, to make a meaningful observations about day-to-day life and its mythical underpinnings, Donleavy’s interests lie elsewhere.

The forward thrust of the language pushes through the chronotopical boundaries of modernism, although, as a novel, the book is closed, rounded, a text that is as much about beginnings as it is about endings. Like many old texts, in the manner, for example, of Bashō’s Narrow Road to the Interior, Donleavy incorporates small poems within the text or, more often, at the end of a chapter. These small poems are, like Bashō’s, dense little bullets of meaning, and are part of his overarching formal and intellectual structure of the novel. They provide both a link to the modernists, as well as to the Beat movement that was influenced by many Asian poets, including Bashō. They also create a distance between The Ginger Man and Joyce’s Ulysses. While Joyce, in the end, passed up the opportunity to name his chapters in the printed text, and added the famous table of symbols and references that structure his novel not until after publication later, Donleavy’s text explicitly insists upon its artificial nature. The inserted poems and letters as well as the recurring poetically distant paragraphs ask the book’s reader to see the book more as an object: it is this method that makes the stream of consciousness visible. Instead of a retread of Joycean language, it uses it as Joycean language, as a connection between the Irish setting and the ‘Irish style’. It is an artfully struck note that Donleavy knew would resonate with his readers’ memories of Joyce, but at the same time, he never limits the Joycean register, boxes it in or restricts it in any way. There is no attempt to sunder the reality of Dublin (which feels very real and is probably accurately described) from the literately mirrored images of Dublin.

Instead, Donleavy lets all these aspects coexist, as several worlds within the same book. The book doesn’t force its reader to decide upon any one reading, any specific, ‘true’ frame. This postmodern ambiguity is also evident in the images and symbols used and evoked in the novel. The Ginger Man carries associations to the gingerbread man from the fairy tales (chased by a hungry crowd of peasants and animals, escaping them all, only to be, woefully, eaten by the fox), as well as, loosely, to the figure of Jesus Christ (after all, Dangerfield frequently assumes the pose of savior, and his seduction of women often takes the form, almost, of a conversion), and to various traditions and tropes of satire. Between the surreal, fantastical setting of fairy tales and the strict, harshly melodious structure of the Catechism, Donleavy spins a tale that seems to aim for radicalism, for an obscene modernity, but is actually far more inclusive. Yes, The Ginger Man is a satiric work, taking its cue (and the protagonist’s hair color) from such antecedents as Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth or Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, where it says that “[i]t is observed that the red-haired of both sexes are more libidinous and mischievous than the rest, whom yet they much exceed in strength and activity.” In its depictions of the material limitations on life in Ireland, its descriptions of the strictures and sorrows that poverty means for those who suffer from it, Donleavy uses the sharpness and precision of image and metaphor that distinguishes most acute satire, but as a whole the novel lacks the intellectual discipline or the focus of good satire. Instead, satire turns out to be yet another of the many notes woven into in the musical tapestry of The Ginger Man.

It is impossible to do justice to the many complexities of The Ginger Man, but I should mention the morality or immorality of the novel, since it’s not an unimportant aspect of a novel that has been banned for immorality and that still has to stave off accusations of immorality. Sebastian Dangerfield is an awful person. He abuses his women, is disloyal and unfaithful to all his friends and all the women he sleeps with in the book. And there is not a shred of regret in him, not an ounce of repentance. Dangerfield just continues on and on and on. The novel makes no attempt to stop him, explain him or disapprove of him. In fact, a case of abuse at the end turns a difficult situation in his favor, and overall, he’s maddeningly successful. It is to the use of religion that we must look to make sense of this, I think. Ireland, which “has a great capacity for hatred” is “not a place for women”, a character exclaims. In his sexual exploits, Dangerfield makes use of established patterns of behavior of the people around him. Just as he knows when to appear American and when Irish, so he can manipulate women by deciding upon the correct use of force. The society he lives in is one that repels him, alienates him and the cold application of implicit rules is his reaction to that society. We don’t have to like him, but his hurt and harried soul is something that many people will recognize in their own heart.

Dangerfield is frequently beset by a nostalgic yearning for the rural landscapes of his home, which come close to epiphanies, causing him to mutter “God must be female”. At one point he says about Ireland “this country is foreign to me.” He wouldn’t, however, every really return home, because home is his father’s country. The alienation he feels is the conflict with a male-oriented culture, that he can’t escape within or without his self. The language slows down, becomes careful, tender and languorous only (but not always) when describing sexual acts or other acts of intimacy with women. There isn’t an all-out attack on fathers in the book, after all, Dangerfield is not only a father himself, but an alpha male to boot. On the level of language and reference, too, this is not the modernist impulse of ‘making it new’, with the Freudian impulses described in Harold Bloom’s only good book; its attitude towards patriarchy is similar to the one that manifested itself in canonical American prose works such as Robert Coover’s The Public Burning, John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor or Donald Barthelme’s The Dead Father. That last book is maybe the most relevant comparison. The alienation Dangerfield feels isn’t one between the world and him, it’s caused by the fact that he represents much of the world outside within him, and its dying off is mirrored in his own prolonged process of dying. In one of the best of these small poems he tells us: “my heart / twisted / with dying”. With his life at stake, its a small wonder that he flees into life, procreation, intoxication.

Hence, Donleavy’s irreverent, even blasphemous use of religious references is not a simple satiric attack on religion. It reflects rather an unease with a certain form of religion, because Dangerfield’s pursuit of happiness is strongly religious. The fear of death that permeates even the funniest pages in this hilarious novel is not a Freudian or existentialist fear. It is a religious fear, fueled by closeness of the Dionysian abyss. God isn’t dead, he’s a deus absconditus, an absent, a hidden God. In this reductive, but (I think) correct reading, form, and language become parts of ritual. This seems to be an oddly heavy note on which to end a review of a light, funny, wild novel, but the vastness, the rich nature of Donleavy’s spectacular debut invites readings like this. It is a book of countless treasures, but primarily, it provides a ride like few others can. If you trust me, read the book.

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William T. Vollmann: Whores for Gloria

Vollmann, William T. (1994), Whores for Gloria, Penguin
ISBN 0-140-23157-9

William T. Vollmann has acquired a reputation for writing thick, elaborate novels with an broad historical scope. Writing Seven Dreams (starting with The Ice Shirt,1990), a series of 7 novels about American history, and Europe Central (2005), a novel about art and the second World War, focusing on figures such as Dimitri Shostakovich, Roman Kamen and General Paulus, has been a large part of that. In these, as in other books of his, Vollmann’s purview has always been enormous. He’s not content to muse about violence, for example, instead he writes a seven volume dissection of the phenomenon (Rising Up and Rising Down, 2003), the same applies to his reports from the fringes of the world, whether it’s Afghanistan (An Afghanistan Picture Show, 1992), the borderlands between Mexico and California (Imperial, 2009) or the down-and-out life as a hobo (Riding Toward Everywhere, 2008). Vollmann’s work, whether in short stories, novels, nonfiction books or short essays, is remarkably consistent. The line between fiction and nonfiction is blurred, mostly, I think, because Vollmann’s interest in nonfiction isn’t analysis or clarity, it’s storytelling and rhetoric. In his fictional work (as in most fiction) we find strong characters, strongly molding the world in accordance with their perception of it. We see things through their eyes, and the same applies to nonfiction where Vollmann, far stronger than journalistic practice usually mandates, sets himself up as a character, a narrator for the world he shares with us, although he never segues into gonzo journalism.

Beyond facts or analysis, Vollmann’s work, through storytelling and rhetoric offers us a feel for a topic, an indelible impression of a landscape or the people in it, and his strong moral concerns further buttress our understanding of them. In those respects and several others, Whores for Gloria, originally published in 1991 as Vollmann’s third novel, is fairly representative of his work. Its length is the only aspect of the book that makes it stand out among his oeuvre, given that it is a remarkably short book. The similarities of Whores for Gloria to Vollmann’s general aesthetic are perhaps most significant where the book’s attitude to fiction and reality is concerned. In the short first chapter, the author informs us that the contents of what follows are “fictitious”. However, he goes on to tell us, “all of the Whore’s-tales” in the book “are real.” This is beyond discussions on the nature of reality and fiction, or on the amount of truth that an invented tale can carry. Discussions like these are well known by now and can frankly be somewhat tiresome. Like many excellent writers, Vollmann manages, in all his books, to hand us a sliver of truth, an impression of it, seen through the vapor of his admirable passions. There is an insight, if not into reality, then into the workings of certain coherent world views. We see how elements of knowledge, and a perception of the hard cobblestone groundings of reality can congeal to a kind of certainty, perceptual and moral. What we as readers learn is how things could be connected, what connections are possible, and how we might arrive at an understanding of them.

Seeing connections, listening to others’ making sense of the world, enriches our own understanding of it, or so I always thought. Learning, to me, means listening, and puzzling, and bumbling our way through the oddities of our environment or of texts, images, sounds. But here, we are not talking about these common elements of reading. Vollmann’s claim here is explicit and must be read as part of the text, it’s hence to be taken with a large grain of salt. There is even an informative appendix to Whores for Gloria, which, while seeming to support the nonfictional elements of the book, the essentially journalistic parts of it, the parts that “are real”, are curiously readable, soft-bellied profiles of “the Tenderloin street prostitute”. Lists of “Street Prices for Hair, Sex and Other Things” are similarly best read as enhancements, elements of style, filling in blanks in the tapestry of his fiction. We know that this is the case because the stories that make up these profiles are scattered throughout the novel, and within the context of the plot, we see how the stories adapt to the circumstances, how they mirror aspects of the narrative as a whole in general and the listener’s situation in particular. Its impossible not to assume the same for the stories told in the appendix, because there is, within the stories themselves, no marker that differentiates one kind of “Whore’s-tale” from the other. This is significant, because it adds an important element to the reading of the narrative, a bracket, so to speak.

The author’s persona, visible already in the first chapter, becomes a visible and meddling presence even in the rest of the novel which seems to be wholly restricted to the protagonist’s point of view. In a novel that charts a search for meaning in a darkly violent world, Vollmann’s persona is staged as another seeker for truth and resolution. This is not to dismiss the protagonist and apparent third person personal narrator. Although the Vollmann persona adds a subjective level to the book’s structure, this is not, while reading Whores for Gloria, the predominant impression, or the world-view that most preoccupies the reader’s imagination. That is the role of the protagonist, Jimmy, a Vietnam veteran, who spends his SSI checks in the dirty streets of the San Francisco quarter called “Tenderloin”, in the company of pimps and prostitutes, moving from bar to bar and from whore to whore. In Jimmy, Vollmann has found a way to talk about veterans from the war without engaging in a long and sentimental discussion of their problems and issues. In what’s a typically meta-fictional hint, Vollmann includes a character called Code Six, who has been so broken by the war and its aftermath, that he now lives on the street, having lost everything else. Code Six is a stereotypical, though marginally moving, character; the likes of him fill shelves full of books and movies. I take his role, in part, to be a suggestion where Jimmy, as a character, might have ended up, in the hands of a different writer. The contrast between Code Six and Jimmy is a kind of bragging about the fictional subtleties Vollmann is able to pull off.

It is not until the very last chapter and its very last sentence that the importance of the Vietnam war background of Jimmy’s biography and the connections he has to Code Six become crystal clear and obvious. Just as with the appendices, we need to wait until the end of the book to be informed about a conceptual structure spanning the whole of Whores for Gloria. While reading it, we’re following just one long conceptual arc, Jimmy’s search for Gloria, who, we are led to believe, is an old lover or girlfriend of his, maybe a whore, maybe not. I think the book is, intentionally, less than clear about this. Jimmy himself doesn’t have a strong concept of who Gloria is. Gloria, to him, is more like a phantom, the ideal girl, and his search doesn’t involve a scouring of his world for a trace of her bodily presence. Instead, he has several prostitutes, some of whom he has sex with and some of whom he hasn’t, tell him stories from their lives, their childhood, their experience on the streets of the Tenderloin, hawking their bodies for small amounts of cash. Listening to these stories, taking them in, and shuffling the different stories and his knowledge of the world as well as his fragmented memories of Gloria, he revives her, to an extent. He creates a vision, a disembodied presence of her, which, for him is enough. He imagines her with him in his rooms, with him in his bed, he is happy imagining her with him, but this is a fleeting illusion, one that needs to be constantly fed by the stories the whores tell him.

Jimmy can be sexually fulfilled without engaging in a sexual act: that’s how strong this illusion is. He will tell others about Gloria, he will share details of his illusion without making it apparent to others that it is actually not true. But then, for him, the illusion is true. He is living a lie, but it makes him, whenever he manages to create it, happy or at least content, for however short a while it lasts. Jimmy, unlike Code Six, is relatively healthy and strong, his body is fit, while his mind is broken. But in many ways, Whores for Gloria is a ballad of broken bodies. Despite the copious amount of sexual intercourse that is described in the book, none of it is enticing, nor is it meant to be enticing. Nights spent with Gloria, presumably sensual encounters, are not described. We don’t know how immersive Jimmy’s illusion is, and whether it manages to fake a sexual act for him, but the fact of the matter is that this, the only potentially positive sexual act, is not described. All the other sexual encounters in the book are harsh, exploitative, brutalized encounters. With a sure eye for the exact detail, Vollmann describes the horrendous conditions of life as a Tenderloin street prostitute, and the unappetizing circumstances of sexual services rendered on those streets. There is a dark loneliness, a deep need that Vollmann suggests to us to be the main motivator to have sex with a hooker on her grimy floor. Granted, Jimmy himself isn’t driven, not explicitly, by lust, but his observations of the prostitutes he consorts with show how unpleasant a sight these whores might offer to a prospective customer.

Their bodies are riddled with needle marks, they are either bone thin or ridiculously fat. This passage exemplifies the tone and visuals of the novel’s descriptions of its prostitutes

There were three pimps or dealers sitting on the steps by the garbage can and Peggy said to them would you mind taking a little walk while I do my business? When they left, Peggy pulled her dress up above her waist and knelt down in the filth of the street and stuck her ass out with her cunt bulging down beneath it as if only its matted and sticky hair kept it from bursting out between her legs; that stinking bush of hers really resembled a black spider lurking there and clinging here, and Peggy’s legs were covered with dark ovals and boils and there were scabby bumps on them as satisfying to the touch as the pleasure-dots on a french tickler, the sorii on a fern-leaf, and Peggy raised her ass high and dry to make it easy for Jimmy to get into her cunt and she buried her face in her crossed arms on the highest step. (…) When he was done, Peggy wiped herself (.)

Sex on the street is a constantly improvised act, the book tells us, and while there is a kind of hostility to matters of the body, as the extended allusions to the Plague show, Jimmy detects and reports a certain attraction to ugly details. The body as an object regulated by society and its invasive and often violent norms is replaced here by another body: the body as a serviceable entity where function is bother over- and under-emphasized. Additionally, there is a strong role that transsexual prostitutes play in the book, who are refereed to both by male and female pronouns, blurring distinctions. Although bodies are there to fuck and be fucked, the book has little in the way of restriction in the form of norms, such as heteronormativity. When Jimmy rejects the advances of a transsexual, whose erection is visible and obvious, he does so by invoking taste, not his putative heterosexuality. Although the idealized relationship at the book’s center is (presumably) a heterosexual one, it’s also an illusion and ultimately doomed. This profound ambiguity on matters of normativity and sexuality reflects one of Vollmann’s biggest strength, which his best work displays: to use observations, stories and literary tools to create ambiguous scenarios, dissolving easy oppositions. In his weakest works, like Europe Central, he opts instead for moral simplicity and narrative clarity, simply reproducing traditional oppositions and narrative trajectories.

That clarity in Europe Central is achieved in part through his use of short chapters, shuffled and arranged like stories. These short chapters are a kind of trademark in Vollmann’s work which he also makes use of in Whores for Gloria, but they do not always serve the same narrative goals. In the book under review, instead of enabling clarity, the short chapters emphasize the fragmented nature of the story offered to us. They also underline the heavy debt owed to the work of Lautréamont. What we find in these chapters is a smattering of stories, not arranged hierarchically. While the strict arrangement in books like Europe Central puts an emphasis on order, Whores for Gloria opts for careful disorder. Jimmy’s story is told chronologically, but his fantasies, things he may really have experienced, and the whores’ stories are mostly given their own chapters, taking away, to an extent, the reader’s ability to tell fact from fantasy. There isn’t a privileged narrative. The white male Jimmy comes to listen to the stories. Although he takes notes, we don’t get to see them as written documents, they are integrated as voices into Jimmy’s story, itself a voice. Jimmy doesn’t put a spin on the stories, and they, not he, begin to shape the image of Gloria. Although earlier, Jimmy insists that a particular story can’t be Gloria’s “because he wasn’t in it”, this presumptuous attitude leaves him as his quest continues. Truth, for Jimmy, isn’t up to him, but up to the whores and the extent to which they cooperate with the narrative frame he would like them to adopt.

From this precarious balance of narrative power, various complex implications arise, complexities that are exacerbated by the persona of the author, which reflects this discussion on the novel as a whole. The status of this novel as an artifact worth creating or reading is questioned, as is the integrity of Vollmann’s voice and the accuracy of his reports and facts. Indeed this cuts both ways, creating an ambiguous situation, balanced between doubting journalistic accuracy and pointing out inequalities in narrative voices. The book is, I think, not providing us with a suggested solution for the non/fiction truth quandary, but it does put a great emphasis on individual voices and stories. Hence I think, as mentioned earlier, that listening, hearing the gospel truth, that this is what Vollmann projects as an ideal (an odd ideal for a writer maybe). This ideal is, however, affirmed by the epitaph for the book, drawn from Loyola, which, from the start, asks us to read Whores for Gloria as a perverted kind of doxology. Gloria as a character thus becomes an angelic presence of sorts and the book as a whole comes to tell us not just Jimmy’s quest for the vanished whore, but, at the same time, the author’s quest for epistemological certainty. As Roland Barthes points out in the marvelously readable Sade, Fourier, Loyola, it isn’t until the advent of modernity that seeing was privileged over hearing, and modernity brought more ambiguities, more insecurities to accompany that change. The firm, unwavering clarity of pre—modern beliefs, the strength of religious, philosophical and scientific faith, this is what the author’s persona in Whores for Gloria pines after. The result, however, is a small masterpiece, a brilliantly executed, searching novel, often strikingly beautiful and sad. It’s regrettable that the mind behind the book has spent the following decade accruing more certainty and abandoning doubt in favor of a secular, moral faith.

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John Wray: The Right Hand of Sleep

Wray, John (2001), The Right Hand of Sleep, Knopf
ISBN 0-375-40651-4

There are so many books around that most of the time we barely manage to read what we really feel we should read or have to read, and reading a book for a second or third time is often just too much. At least that is my stance, and the reason why I rarely re-read books. In some rare cases, a second reason enters the picture: if I’m afraid a book won’t hold up, won’t be as good or interesting the second time around. This was the fear that I had upon re-reading John Wray’s debut novel The Right Hand of Sleep after reading and reviewing his excellent most recent book, Lowboy (my review here). Now, I was right about one thing at least. It really is not as good a novel as Lowboy, but I was wrong about everything else: it’s a very good book, a very smart and clever one, too, and a moving work of art. The Right Hand of Sleep is a very, very good novel and an astonishing debut. It radiates assurance, and displays a rare comfort and agility with the tools of fiction, but even this description feels inadequate. In his debut, Wray introduces here many topics that will resurface in later books, but they have a disturbing, haunting quality here that they don’t have elsewhere. Haunting is maybe the best word to describe this book, which occupies an odd place between memory and history, between an emotionally wrought tale of a village in decline, and a clever play with history and narrative. Its chief fault is a certain lack of decisiveness. In his debut, Wray is too often content with sketching something, hinting at it, instead of developing it in a more satisfactory fashion.

This is in part, certainly, because the topic and the setting is infinitely rich; in The Right Hand of Sleep, Wray is basically trying to tell us three to five stories at once, but at the same time he’s writing a very tight, controlled, technically impressive novel. These two aspects of it, the sprawling, wide, sumptuous fabric on the one hand, and the well-ordered, scintillating strictness of literary craftsmanship on the other, clash and struggle to cohere. Ultimately, craftsmanship wins the day in The Right Hand of Sleep, but the final result is too magnificent, too well made a novel to complain. I understand why some readers have criticized the book for being boring, too conventional, uninteresting, even, because it is really a very conservative book, written under the banner of traditional narrative. In those parts of the story that are set in a nostalgic, sentimental version of a rural Austrian valley, there is no parody, no irony or other postmodern devices to break up or challenge traditional notions. But Wray is a subtle writer and adds other kinds of layers that move beneath the surface of the narrative, tectonic plates beneath a seemingly placid ocean. The Right Hand of Sleep is a book that only seems easy to categorize, easy to assign and confine to a place on the shelves of genre. I am under the impression that the book withdraws as soon as you scrutinize it, that in place of clear and unambiguous stories, it leaves our hands full of paradoxes and tricky situations.

However, it’s hard to imagine any novel written by a competent writer that would be set in the period and place Wray chose and not be full of tricky situations. This comes with the topic. The Right Hand of Sleep is the story of a man called Oskar Voxlauer, who returns home to his village in Austria after decades of exile. The year of his return, 1938, is a year of changes for Austria: its fascist leader, Dollfuss, had been murdered four years earlier and the current dictatorial chancellor, Kurt Schuschnigg, under threat of violence, basically agreed to a takeover of Austria by Nazi Germany on March 11th . The next day, when German troops marched into Austria, they were greeted by joyous Austrians, who, the day before, had celebrated the announcement of the takeover in a tumultuous fashion, which led Carl Zuckmayer, a major German playwright, to refer to the public displays of national socialist hate and rage as a veritable “Witches’ Sabbath of the mob.” On March 15th, tens of thousands cheered Hitler as he gave a speech on the Heldenplatz in Vienna. That day and the horrendous public reaction to what happened have been re-told and recounted multiple times, most famously by Thomas Bernhard in his play Heldenplatz. Its a curious fact about Austrian post-war history that Austria, a fascist state long before Hitler´s takeover, has always seen itself as an innocent victim of German aggression, on a par with France and Poland. It took writers like Bernhard or Innerhofer in the 1970s to destabilize that national narrative.

Both Bernhard and Innerhofer are important references here because, even though occurrences such as the one described by Zuckmayer and the Heldenplatz speech took place in Vienna and other large cities, these two writers were fascinated by and obsessed with the rural life, the ugliness in would-be bucolic landscapes. Bernhard’s first published novel and many shorter pieces that followed examine the cold, the heartlessness, the violence and mob-mentality of the rural population. Innerhofer’s disturbing debut, Beautiful Days (1974), does something similar. A book about a boy raised on a brutal farm it coined the expression “Bauern-KZ” (~ Peasant Concentration Camp). There is opportunistic behavior, emotional apathy and unthinking and vicious brutality and neglect and this is just a small sample of the issues with which Innerhofer confronts the myth of a bucolic rural Austria. In Wray’s invented village, Niessen (possibly modeled on Friesach, where his mother is from), we find a similar mob mentality and similarly ugly thing happen or are hinted at, but Wray doesn’t develop any of these in detail. However, he clearly relies on our reading of Niessen as a hateful small backwater village, where a crowd of citizens stands by or takes part, as enraged Nazis demolish a restaurant owned by a Jew, but he also mentions and makes use of other, more interesting nuances. Voxlauer is returning home, but he isn’t the only one to do so. Nazis are returning, too, and I’m not talking about the German troops.

In his brief dictatorial reign, Engelbert Dollfuss (and his successor Schuschnigg) strove to destroy any left-wing opposition by means of raids, incarcerations and murder, they encouraged and tacitly supported Antisemitic violence, but they also tried to eradicate any National Socialist movements in Austria. Austrian fascism was modeled on Francoist Spain more than anything, and a revulsion of Hitler’s mobs fueled not just Dollfuss’ opposition to the Nazis, but also that of other famous antisemitic fascists like Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg. With some justification, the Dollfuss regime saw the Austrian Nazis as subversive and dangerous elements in their state, a danger that needed to be curbed as quickly and thoroughly as possible. When a group of Austrian Nazis tried to overthrow the government in the so-called “Juliputsch” in 1934, this fear was vindicated, but too late for Dollfuss, who was murdered. Many Nazis were banished or had to flee in these years of upheaval only to return triumphantly after March 11th,, 1938. In The Right Hand of Sleep Wray makes use of the fact that these individuals are a mixture between being victims and being perpetrators, of being persecuted by a dictator, but originators of a different, worse dictatorship. As we see them return to the village and its environs, we see how estranged they are to what used to be their home, as well. Simple inside/outside dichotomies, useful to describe the narrative behind antisemitic rallies and hate in Germany, don’t work here.

The Jewish inn-keeper, at the receiving end of discrimination and violence, is a native, he is from the village and part of the village in a way that neither Voxlauer, nor the Nazi who develops into a kind of antagonist of Voxlauer’s, Kurt Bauer, are. Questions of blood and heredity, so central to the National Socialist narrative, are subtly subverted by an association with inbreeding on Bauer’s part, and a sterile sexuality on Voxlauer’s, just as social hierarchies, “the architecture of things” are upset by similar associations. And in the midst of this, Wray places the local landscapes. His powerful evocations of nature, the use of amazingly precise metaphors, they establish nature as something independent from humans and their stories. Voxlauer, who., upon returning, is offered the job as a gamekeeper, never really does what he is paid for. He’s an awful hunter and a perennial drunk, stumbling through the wildness like a harmless, vaguely vegetarian animal. Fittingly, the only thing he does shoot is himself, by accident, halfway through the book. And when some riled up villagers rough him up, break his ribs and try to kick his head in, he’s as helpless as the animals he’s paid to hunt. This helplessness, though, isn’t new to him. As a young soldier in the Kaiser’s army in WWI, he was just as help- and hapless and when he, almost accidentally, deserts after being forced to murder another deserter, he drifts through Eastern Europe like a leaf in the wind, or a lost animal. This we learn in the frequent flashbacks.

Structurally, the book consists of the main story, which follows Voxlauer’s experiences in Neißen between March, 4th, 1938 and October the same year, with flashbacks added. First flashbacks of Voxlauer’s own experiences as a deserter, and then flashbacks of Kurt Bauer’s past. These back stories are not written like historical accounts; they read like feverish visions of two person’s troubled past. Both are guilty of something and both feel the guilt weigh heavily upon them, I’d say, although Bauer appears to be somewhat sociopathic. What’s more, these visions or accounts are shot through with dreams and hallucinations. Not all of them visible and clear as such, but historical truth or accuracy is certainly not the aim of these sections. What they are meant to accomplish is twofold. On the one hand, they need to place the story of Voxlauer and Bauer in a broader historical context, and on the other hand they do the same for Neißen as landscape and lieu de mémoire. Taking a different tactic than Nora, Wray focuses less upon buildings and other man-made monuments to shared memories. Instead, he has Voxlauer stumble through a European wildness, over fields, through woods and end up at a Ukrainian farm. Subsequently, he falls in love with the farmer’s widow, is denounced as a kulak and lands himself in a Soviet camp. At this point he is a Communist or shares at least the basic emancipatory ideals with them. Fear, disappointments and the harsh daily life leads him to drop his “belief in things”.

The Voxlauer who returns to Neißen is an empty shell of a man, hollowed out by guilt, loss and sadness. The landscape is the only (or last) reliable thing for him, it doesn’t require his belief, it is content with the fact of his body. In Neißen, an odd love story develops, but it draws heavily upon clichés and seems, within the fabric of the book, less important than Voxlauer’s education. Yes, education, because Voxlauer, returning, re-learns the world. Lowboy‘s protagonist is haunted by his body and his problems with reading the world, which makes the most sense to him when he’s confined in the well-ordered world of the underground tunnels of the subway. Voxlauer’s predicament is similar, not just in this respect. Like Lowboy‘s Will, Voxlauer isn’t mentally completely sound, and as in Will’s case, this runs in the family. The oddities of memory, and the vicissitudes of violence create, here and there, an interesting discourse about the limitations of the body and of the mind. Voxlauer’s body and mind don’t work as he wants them to, they work in starts and fits, and they capitulate not only before the onslaught of fascism and nature, they are also inferior to the limbs and brains of people of comparable strength. Voxlauer’s main limitation is his unwillingness to take action, not even to run away. He bides his time, while the world as he knew it, crumbles around him. His last action was the murder of an innocent man, as sick of the war as himself, and this crime he cannot forgive himself, and it blinds him to the ethical and political necessities of the present.

The development of Wray’s protagonists, from the apathetic and guilt-ridden drunk Voxlauer to the idealistic, driven, resourceful Will is fascinating, especially in light of the fact that Voxlauer’s crime (desertion) has consigned him to the margins, while he was actually born in privilege. Will’s situation, of course, couldn’t be more different. Kurt Bauer’s memories, meanwhile, place him at the center of world history. I’m loath to divulge more but Wray has used one of the less well known parts of history, and adapted it to his purpose, exchanging names and characters, swamping the scene with references en masse. For a book set where it is, many of these references, in this scene or in others, intended or not, are pretty obvious, like Joseph Roth or Thomas Bernhard. Others are more sly but important ones, such as Camus’ famous novel L’Étranger. The connection of Voxlauer’s inaction with that bible of secular existentialism adds one more layer to an already rather complex book. If anything, this is its main fault. The book, while technically taut and controlled, is philosophically indulgent, it’s filled with ideas and it points in many directions at once, without allowing the plot to reciprocate. That we don’t feel this failing as readers, that we still enjoy this book, is due, most of all, to Wray’s fantastic writing. More elaborate than in Lowboy, Wray completely dazzles his reader.

In an almost arrogant display of skill, Wray shows us that he can do anything. He slips into German and out again, slows down and speeds up his syntax at will, makes it bulky in one place and sleekly efficient in others. The way he can retard meaning in a paragraph by using a sluggish, slow syntax, mirroring German constructions, is extraordinary. There’s nothing in here that doesn’t work, and so the evocation of a country at the abyss, of a continent about to plunge into one of its darkest periods, is pitch-perfect. The plot and the characters are not yet as fleshed-out, believable and palpable as in his two other books, but The Right Hand of Sleep gets so much right, that it’s hard to dwell on the things it doesn’t. Highly recommended.

Pyrite: Why you shouldn’t read Ingo Schulze

Anybody reading this blog will know that I have little love for Ingo Schulze, whom I tend to refer to as the “curly haired hack”. During the past months I have received a couple of emails (~ 10, which is half my readership) inquiring about my frequently communicated dislike for a writer they keep hearing good stuff about. I answered two of these emails personally, but am too lazy to keep it up. Well, here are the goods:

Ingo Schulze must be one of the more famous living German writers. He sells well domestically, has won a wide variety of prizes and every new book is sure to receive broad attention and a nomination for one of the major German literary prizes. Additionally, he’s also widely translated into different languages, and has received positive write-ups in Anglophone and Francophone newspapers. In a climate where many readers and critics are concerned about the lack of attention accorded to translations and translators by major journals and publishers, writers like Schulze are a success story. And he’s the best examples that they shouldn’t always be, because Schulze is a deeply mediocre writer, and the attention he receives arguably takes away time and space from better contemporary writers in German, whose voices should be heard, like Thomas Stangl, or Clemens J. Setz, or Reinhard Jirgl.

While its true, and quite sufficient to point out, that Schulze is quite simply a pretty bad writer, on many levels, it should nevertheless be mentioned that, first and foremost, he fails on the level of the actual writing, his style. This is a failure that isn’t just due to a lack of talent, but part of a broader malaise in Ingo Schulze’s writing. It’s actually quite often true that style cannot be divested from content. Brilliant writers with a careless style like Philip K. Dick (my apologies to fans of Dick’s writing) are the exception. More often, a lack of care, attention or sensibility to the rhythm, music and depth of language is revealing of other defects as far as the structure, thinking or characters of the particular piece of prose are concerned. True, great writers are born with a certain modicum of talent, but I am convinced that everybody, with enough care and effort, can be good. Reading is about encountering minds, good writing isn’t tethered to a specific level of intelligence. Every writer can be decent.

Why bad writing is often so frustrating is that bad writers, I think, in order to be bad writers, need to be less than attentive or careful about their writing, something that you can see in all or most aspects of their work. With a good enough plot, interesting enough characters, sentiment and a subject matter that is either politically pleasing or controversial, one can hide mediocrity well enough. Paolo Giordano’s problematic, but oddly well-received bestseller The Solitude of Prime Numbers (my review) is a case in point. This lack is least easy to hide in the actual writing, the style. This is why I stress Ingo Schulze’s execrable writing so much. This defect may not be as perceptible to Americans, who get to see him through a distorting lens (though after having spent some time with Helen Lowe-Porter’s crude manhandling of Thomas Mann, I can’t muster the energy to criticize any competent translator, whose work is difficult enough), after all, Portuguese friends assure me that even Coelho is much, much worse in the Brazilian original, and is saved by his translators in other languages.

To best describe Schulze’s stylistic deficiencies, it’s appropriate to say, I think, that there’s a kind of linguistic complacency in his style, it’s more than just bad writing, and what’s more, it had not always been as bad and complacent. Schulze’s best work of fiction, for several reasons, is his 1995 debut, 33 Augenblicke des Glücks, indebted as it is to E.T.A. Hoffmann and even more, I think, to Leo Perutz. In this book, Schulze delights in his writing, like these two role models, he delights in the mechanics of literature, delights in using his own voice. But in his first book, Perutz is the stronger influence, I think. Unlike Hoffmann he is very reluctant to be overtly political; his work is also more open to violent images, and stark contrasts and conflicts than Hoffmann’s subtle prose. There is a youthful power in this book, Schulze constantly playing to his strengths. In an ill-advised move, Schulze will, in the further trajectory of his career, move away from Perutz and toward the Hoffmann of Meister Floh or his masterpiece The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr (my review), without offering as much thought, brilliance or generosity as the Prussian genius.

33 Augenblicke des Glücks, translated by John E. Woods into English as 33 Moments of Happiness, is not great literature, but it’s quite entertaining and not embarrassing, something that is increasingly less true as his work develops. Schulze is and remains competent, but has quickly become complacent and weak. His first book won the Döblin Förderpreis, and if you didn’t know that, I’ll tell you that the Döblin Prize and the Büchner Prize are the two German literary awards most worth monitoring. When he published the book, Schulze was primarily a journalist, writing for and founding several newspapers. There is an energy in that part of his life, and an intelligence that stayed, diluted, with him. After his debut, Schulze was accepted more fully into a literary mainstream, publishing, to date, 5 books, among them two novels, Neue Leben (2005) and Adam und Evelyn (2008). His past, however, never quite left him.

On the plus side, the Döblin prize was, as he himself kept stressing, strangely apt for Schulze’s burgeoning poetic sensibilities. Schulze’s best book in any genre, is his 2009 collection of essays, Was Wollen Wir? (~ What Do We Want?), collecting essays written over the course of several years. It’s not good literary criticism, not good political journalism, Lord knows. What it is is a wonderful memoir in fragments, and Döblin and his work is front and center in it. There is no influence of Döblin on Schulze’s writing or his commitments or the quality of his thinking, but as Schulze continued writing, moving from stories to speeches and novels, it’s clearly Döblin’s specter who was behind the changes, whether it’s Schulze’s increasingly odd characters, the influx of political pathos or the grandiose literary gestures, complete with gargantuan 18th century narratives (Neue Leben), vague mythical underpinnings (Adam und Evelyn) and Hoffmannian satire (Handy, Neue Leben)

The obsession with Döblin, plastered all over Was Wollen Wir?, isn’t flattering for Schulze’s work, since the reference invites comparisons, and apart from his debut book, his work just doesn’t even remotely measure up. So while Döblin has expedited Schulze’s artistic development, this development has actually moved Schulze away from him who was arguably, with Jahnn, the best German novelist of the 20th century. Responsible for this discrepancy is the other remnant from his past, his training as a journalist. A few paragraphs ago, I started into this disparagement of Schulze by citing his stylistic awfulness, calling it ‘complacency’. To be more exact, his style’s weaknesses correspond to a kind of writing that has taken over German journalistic writing sometime in the 1990s, with the advent of women’s and men’s magazines (titles like Amica or the German Men’s Health come to mind), characterized by a curiously assertive use of language, an intense quirkiness, so to say. The point seemed to be to convey an insouciant, slightly erudite, individualism. This kind of writing was instantly recognizable, and eminently mockable.

It developed so quickly and completely, sprung upon German readers like a tasteless Athena, in full, talentless armor. What is annoying, but also entertaining in journalist writing, seems little else but sloppy in fiction and it was there where it stuck and developed into full bloom and convention. In the late 1990s it stopped being ‘journalese’ and started to be a hallmark of mediocre, careless prose. There are certain turns of phrases, narrative structures, stereotypical characters which can be directly traced back to the peculiarities of this journalistic style. In my reading experience with regard to contemporary German fiction, this kind of writing almost never turns up in bits here and there. It’s usually an infestation with it, an either/or situation. This writing is an easy way out, recognizable, and relying on a certain consensus among the reading public. To use this style is to appeal to the lowest common denominator among a vaguely educated readership, and it’s indicative of other sub-par literary decisions. The work of many writers who decided to go down that path bears witness to the inextricably joined level of content and style.

Thankfully, many writers remain who refrain from writing this way. Ilija Trojanow would be one of them. Even in his weaker books, such as his dystopic SF novel Autopol (my review), he stays clear of it, but many others can’t. There is this year’s winner of the Leipzig book fair prize, Georg Klein (although his prize-winning book, Roman unserer Kindheit (~Novel of our childhood) is a departure of sorts), or the author of last year’s sensational surprise hit Paradiso, Thomas Klupp. Schulze, however, is worse, because in his case the stylistic complacency corresponds to an intellectual one. Like Paul Auster, Schulze uses complex narratives without any stylistic or intellectual backbone, but while Auster’s work is like a reader’s digest of postmodern theory, amusing and quite harmless, and mostly not particularly political, Schulze’s purview is larger- he aim for both the political and the historical, which makes him much more insufferable than his competent and incompetent co-hacks. His major topics are the German reunification and its fallout in the private and public lives of Germans.

Schulze writes about these topics as if he were pressed for time, under pressure to produce an anniversary op-ed. The complexities and problems of the situation, raised time and again in countless excellent German novels and novellas, barely make a dent in his lukewarm sentimental hodge-podge of platitudes and truisms. Open any popular news magazine at random, find a story about the particular topic at hand, and there you’ll find Schulze. I’ve talked to young journalists, some of whom have spent time at university with me, and they tell me that you can’t afford to alienate your readers, that you need to write for them. If you challenge them, you also need to flatter them in return. They need to be motivated to buy your paper once a day or once a week and spend a considerable time reading it, so you need to give them a narrative for political events that they can accept. A novelist has more liberties. But Ingo Schulze seems to have decided, at one point in his career, to not use these liberties.

So his work reads tediously unsurprising, like the gloss of a pamphlet. It’s really dull in its own right, as all the magazines and newspapers who perpetuate the same thin narratives, are. But it’s when I remember that he’s a writer of fiction, one who sees himself in the line of Döblin and Hoffmann, that I have least patience with his childishness. His work suffers most when compared to books like Günter Grass’ Far Afield, a novel that draws both on Grass’ heavy polemic streak, on Hans Joachim Schädlich’s acidic and powerful novel Tallhover and on the continuity of the Grotesque in bourgeois realist fiction in Germany. Its politics are odd, but gloriously so, it delights in its literariness and doesn’t shy away from taking risks. Grass, by the way, is one of the most vocal and most able heirs of Döblin in post-war German fiction. An heir of Brecht, and writer of several books that make Schulze look bad by comparison is Volker Braun, especially, with regard to the topic of the German reunification, his collection of stories/novellas Trotzdestonichts (my review). A third book that provides a unique (and masterfully written) account of the complexities of these turbulent years in Germany is Marcel Beyer’s 2008 novel Kaltenburg (my review), which shows that even contemporaries of Schulze can and do rise far above him and that’s just the parts of it that deal with the upheavals and the changes.

There is another aspect to his work, the east/west relationship, i.e. the relationship between the two Germanies. Again, Schulze comes up short, again, he fails to rise to the possibilities, well established by writers such as the great Uwe Johnson, whose books like Das Dritte Buch über Achim (~ The Third Book about Achim, 1962) or Zwei Ansichten (~ Two Points of View, 1965), helped create an interesting and complex discourse about this topic, one further developed by writers such as Reiner Kunze or Günter Kunert. I realize that it might be unfair to compare Schulze to great writers, but the sad truth is that neither Kunze nor Kunert are, in fact, great writers. But both have put a lot of thought into their works and both developed a distinct idea of how these issues work. Schulze hasn’t really. He riffs on sentimentality. His satiric streak took over during the early 00s, and his writing, modeled on Döblin but influenced mainly by Hoffmann, at this stage in his work, never achieves the level of insight, and acidic analysis that most great satire manages. There is a seriousness even to the light late works of E.T.A. Hoffmann, a seriousness of purpose that drove him to write satires that endangered his livelihood and even, arguably, his life, in a repressive climate. In a far less repressive climate, meanwhile, Schulze, the former NVA (the army of the GDR) soldier, takes no such risks, politically.

He does, however, feign literary risks by writing Neue Leben (translated by John E. Woods into English as New Lives) an enormous slab of a novel, mimicking in style (partly) and structure the great epistolary novels of the 18th century. I said that good writing is about care and attention. Great writing, however, is about risks. Attacking great writers for diverging from grammatical conventions, for using a style that departs from the norm that we would teach in creative writing workshops or encourage as editors, is utterly beside the point and borderline moronic. This Schulze understands completely and every page of Neue Leben screams out: yes, I indulge, but I am an artiste, I am a great writer. I am Döblin, Hoffmann and Thomas Mann rolled up in one. Only, he isn’t, of course. The followup novel (with a forgettable collection of stories sandwiched in between the two) Adam und Evelyn is dominated by dialogue, and half-hearted references to myth and religion. As a reader, there’s a certain morbid interest in following Schulze’s career, which has turned into a wild romp, drunk on Romanticism and Modernism, without a thought to spare for the history nor the language he is abusing here. His writing has, by now, reached an all-time low; a level that, however, he was effortlessly able to sustain for his last two books. Neither of these are Schulze’s main failings, though. It’s rather the fact that the books bank so much on being perceptive and insightful that the revelation that they aren’t, almost completely destroys them.

The book needs a reader who is comfortable with reading the watered-down, palatable version of his own history, a reader who doesn’t care about style and who is thrilled that he’s reading a writer who writes ‘daringly’ elaborate and cerebral books that suggest Thomas Mann-ian literariness without actually having to read Thomas Mann. He needs a reader who will proudly produce an unread, but creased copy of Berlin Alexanderplatz, but has a lot to ‘say’ about the book, because he is so educated. This, in a nutshell, is Schulze’s audience, and he’s lucky that German critics (see my rant here) are happy to provide just that for him. He’s the prince of mediocre literary writing. Understand this: Ingo Schulze isn’t really a terrible writer, just a terribly mediocre one. However, there are so many great writers writing in this language (I have mentioned 8 writers in dire need of translation here and here) that it’s quite a shame that his work gets a spot in the limelight (and I’m not happy about Andreas Maier’s being translated, either), especially since his main job is to gently caress the egos of vaguely educated Germans who don’t like their writers or their thinkers to drag them out of their comfort zone, so a weak, derivative and complacent writer like Schulze has snatched a spot near the top of contemporary writers, one he doesn’t deserve, while even we forget writers like Thomas Strittmatter (who’s also been translated into English, see my review), and many others, like Dietmar Dath (excellent thinker, bad stylist) or the great, great Reinhard Jirgl (my review) never get translated.

But the worst thing, by far, about Schulze is that he was able to convince an Anglophone readership, who are naturally less well informed than natives as regards German history, that he is, in fact, the real thing, that there is something to learn or an insight to be gleaned from it, when that isn’t actually the case. Schulze in English borders on misinformation. He has, most recently, started to place himself and his writing at the crossroads between tradition and a new writing. He subtitled Handy, his hardly bearable collection of stories “Dreizehn Geschichten in alter Manier”, an explicit reference to 18th century fiction as well as to Jahnn, his protagonist in Neue Leben is called “Türmer”, an undisguised reference to the tradition of the Bildungsroman in general, specifically to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister novels. This suggests more substance to his work and thought than there is. History and culture is important, and buffoons like Schulze shouldn’t be relied upon to spread knowledge of it. There is so much unmined gold in German literary fiction. Don’t waste your time with Schulze’s pyrite. (ISBN)

Brandon Sanderson: Mistborn

Sanderson, Brandon (2007), Mistborn, Tor
ISBN 978-0-7653-5038-1

The speed and quality of fantasy writing is quite notorious. Fantasy writers are expected to crank out thick, brick-sized books, in remarkably brief periods of time. Remarkable novelists, such as Patrick Rothfuss, whose last novel had been published in 2007, and George R.R. Martin, whose last novel of his celebrated “Song of Ice and Fire” series had seen publication in 2005, have had to defend themselves against the ire of impatient fantasy fans. Brandon Sanderson, on the other hand, has kept, so far, on the good side of his fans, publishing more than one new book per year, ever since debuting with the standalone fantasy novel Elantris in 2005. Since then he has not just released a trilogy of fantasy novels starting with Mistborn (2006), and continued with The Well of Ascension (2007) and The Hero of Ages (2008), but also another standalone novel called Warbreaker (2009) and he has written, from Robert Jordan’s notes, The Gathering Storm (2009), one of three projected sequels to Jordan’s “Wheel of Time” series, and is due to publish the second of them this year. This is an incredible amount of writing, but what’s more surprising, to be honest, is the quality of the resulting output. Mistborn is not on par with George R.R. Martin or even Rothfuss, but is still an above-average achievement, a smooth, smart novel that fuses literary, genre, religious (Mormon) and mythological inspirations to produce a great read. Nothing more but also: nothing less.

Fantasy fans have very specific expectations, and they fall, I think, into one of two camps these days. There are more traditional fans, grown up on a steady diet of Terry Goodkind, Robert Jordan, J.R.R. Tolkien, Terry Brooks or Dave Eddings. They (a gross and unfair generalization, I’ll admit) enjoy books with swords and magic, orcs and elves, and an very clear set of roles and rituals. Whether it’s Goodkind’s Ayn Rand-inspired penchant for S/M-style sexuality, Tolkien’s Catholic sense of order, or just Jordan’s rank misogyny and elitism, these writers’ attitudes to power and class can be described, euphemistically, as traditional. The other camp contains writers like Martin or Rothfuss, who play with the elements of their genre, introducing a gritty realism (Martin) and even a careful consideration of class (Rothfuss). Mistborn doesn’t really belong to either camp or rather: it belongs to both, but doesn’t excel in either mode of writing. Neither Sanderson’s tepid realism, not his slouching use of the epic fantasy order is really fully convincing. This in-between nature of the book is probably its biggest problem, opening it to criticism from both camps. However, structure, original ideas and the heavy religious inspiration endow it with a very specific, unique feel, and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys epic fantasy now and then. It’s on the strength of Mistborn that Robert Jordan’s widow approached Sanderson, asking him to finish her late husband’s unfinished series, and we can easily see why. Jordan’s main problem wasn’t his ideology. It was the terminal dullness that the books developed after a short while.

With a finite amount of authorized notes and ideas, Jordan’s widow needed a writer able to develop a plot quickly and satisfactorily, with effective and quick characterizations, yet with enough originality not to simply write a pastiche of Jordan’s style. Sanderson possesses all of these qualities in abundance, as Mistborn demonstrates. It’s rare for the first book of a sequence of fantasy novels, no matter of what length, to have a satisfying ending that isn’t at best a cliffhanger, wetting readers’ appetites for the next novel. The exasperation that fans feel with Martin and Rothfuss has, in part, its roots in the fact that they have offered no closure, the stories are in suspension, open ended. This is true for a great many writers, but not for Sanderson. As we finish Mistborn, we have been granted closure. The main story seems to be finished, almost all the open threads have been tied up and almost all questions answered. Within one book, Sanderson has told us the story of a rebellion against the Lord Ruler of the Final Empire, who appears to be God or at least God-like, he has, in deft strokes, introduced us to a wealth of characters, and sketched the history and culture of a whole new world, without any orcs or elves and with a very original, very interesting system of magic. His characters are so well sketched, so believable, that, as we pick up the second volume, The Well of Ascension, to enter a radically changed political landscape, and end up, almost directly, in an action-packed fight, we immediately recognize the characters from Mistborn. These are people we know, and due to Sanderson’s skills: people we know well. Sanderson does not, however, escape the trap of cliché in his depictions of both the characters and political machinations.

The hero of these kinds of books is often a young man, with the mind of a teenager and the budding skills of a medieval superhero. Vin, Mistborn‘s protagonist, is a woman, a teenager, with the budding skills of a medieval superhero. Oh, I exaggerate a bit, but not much. The one change here is significant and interesting, yet it also displays the full extent of the timidity of Sanderson’s realism. The story about (young) male heroes often turns around questions of heroism and masculinity. Stephen R. Donaldson’s cynical and arguably cowardly Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Robert Jordan’s trias of heros (exemplifying three facets of male adolescence and early adulthood), or “the Fool”, Robin Hobb’s fascinatingly glittering character from her two trilogies focusing on Fitz Farseer, are cases in point. Any change or departure quickly becomes part of this discussion. Whatever changes are made to the almost inevitably male hero, are just that, changes that reinforce the main template. Female heroes do turn up in number, though, especially in more recent years, but the context of their appearance is subtly (or not so subtly) different. Robin Hobb’s excellent Liveship Traders trilogy is a great example. Her heroine, Althea Vestrit, doesn’t get to be a heroine in the sense that the male heroes are. Her story is connected to female tropes, starting with water, to a very interesting communion with (some) living but (usually) inanimate objects. The focus is on questions of intuition, care, and fertility, rather than on discussions of power, violence, and strength. Even in Hobb’s able hands, these questions are channeled through and resolved by the still male characters. The same applies to Mistborn‘s Vin, although Brandon Sanderson goes further than Hobb.

Impressively, Vin’s story is largely a very masculine one. She is quietly belligerent and the way she resolves problems is through seeking controversy and fighting her way through it. Through her use of magic she’s stronger than most men, and throughout most of the book, the only other person we know possessing this power (apart from the evil Inquisitioners and the Lord Ruler) is a man, modeled on the typical male hero. This may not sound like much, but it’s extraordinary, really. So much so, that Sanderson uses additional elements to weaken his heroine in other ways. Not only does she turn into a stereotypical little teenage girl as the book progresses, head over heels in love with a a mysterious and handsome young man, who softens her mistrust towards others. She also starts to wear dresses, going to balls, and enjoying the whole ladylike lifestyle. As if to ram the tedious point home, Sanderson has her defend ‘her man’ against another woman (possessing the same powers) in what feels uncomfortably like a catfight (though it is a fight to the death). Political power, meanwhile, is still elusive to women. It is debated and decided by men, all the important offices are held by men and all the planning is made by men. In fact, Vin (and the woman she fights) is the only noteworthy woman in the whole book. To Sanderson’s credit, however, she doesn’t become a stereotypical sorceress, queen, or mother at the end of the book. The usual fate of strong female characters, which sidelines them into the nooks and crannies of narrative, is spared her. She stays a fighter, soldier, assassin. She is and remains the strongest fighter in the book.

This to and fro as regards Mistborn‘s attitude towards gender runs parallel to other instances of indecision on Sanderson’s part, such as his use of realism and originality. World-building is often considered one of the main tasks of speculative fiction: the invention of a world, distinctly different from ours, with magic, religion, science and, preferably, language newly invented or adapted for this new world. One of the predecessors to this kind of expectation is Tolkien, who invented a completely new language, elaborate mythology and history for his stories. In fact, by far the majority of his writing deal with mythical and historical stories, fleshing out the hints and allusions in his two main works of fiction. Sanderson’s approach is careful. He uses a well-known template, a simple medieval setting, he uses a generic understanding of roles and rituals (Vin is an exception), but he is also very inventive. His two main invention is his system of races and the kind of magic used in his world. In Mistborn, we only learn about two or three basic races. The Skaa, humans and Terrismen. Now, most of us remember China Miéville’s trenchant observation that no writing is innocent, not even fantasy writing. In our use of races such as orcs and elves, we don’t invent something out of the blue. Instead, we draw on stereotypes and images that we already have in our language and our cultural reservoir. Miéville asks us to be careful, to consider what the subtext is of using humanoid races like orcs, who are slow, big, and usually, with gnomes and goblins, the only non-white characters in books. Sanderson does not need such admonishment.

His races are, although I’m not sure about Terrismen, not necessarily racially different from one another. That racial difference exists in the heads of the occupants of Sanderson’s world, but we soon find that race in Mistborn is a signifier of class lines, so that humans are all noblemen, and Skaa are poor people, for example. The ability to use magic is hereditary and runs only in Noblemen, but not all Noblemen are able to use magic and any progeny of Noblemen and Skaa might be able to use magic, too. In a very deft move, Sanderson has found remarkably precise metaphors for racial and class tensions in our world. He also manages to anchor his magic in the earthly, bodily parts of his universe. They are not the amorphous weavings of Jordan’s Aes Sedai. In order to use magic, one needs to ingest metal and then ‘burn’ it. No metal – no magic. This dependance upon both the bodily process of digestion and the resources of the earth is laudable and quite unique. It’s quite saddening to see all these good ideas in a mind that isn’t able to put them to full use. Just as gender differences, on a deeper level, remain intact and problematic, so are questions of hierarchy and power affirmed in a traditional manner. The latter half of the book is infused by a deep mistrust of the common people. A people’s revolution is shown to be inevitably a brutal, rag-tag affair that will plunge the world into chaos. The people can revolt, but they need an authorized, upper-class leader to shape their anger into a politically sound result. This is what ails other instances of realism and originality, too. Sanderson’s take on a magically endowed thieving crew bent on overthrowing the empire eschews cliché depictions of ‘hard criminals’, so much, indeed, that this lack of grime has been criticized a lack of realism.

I think it is an attempt to be more realistic, open, and humorous, but this doesn’t quite work, for one simple reason: Sanderson is a horrible writer about people. His mistrust of ‘the people’ translates into an unhealthy distance to them. Any decision to forgo cliché needs, I think, to be balanced by a strong alternative idea of how human beings behave, an idea which Mistborn severely lacks. Make no mistake: the characters themselves are believable, but their interactions and motivations rarely are. This is why the book so frequently feels lukewarm and a bit flabby. Too much of Mistborn feels conceptual without the sternness and consistency that good conceptual writing depends on. The concepts are partly the metaphors and structures I mentioned, but there is one other important pillar that they rest on: Sanderson’s Mormonism. Like many Mormon (and Catholic) writers, Sanderson’s religion heavily influences his writing in more than spirit. The most famous and popular Mormon writer, who leaves ample, obvious and specific traces and references to her particular religion (as opposed to a general Christian attitude) is probably Stephenie Meyer, the best one I know of is Brian Evenson. Brandon Sanderson, who teaches at Brigham Young University, is yet another one. Without attempting a thorough analysis, there are a few things especially that have a ring of Mormonism to it. The godliness of the Lord Ruler, specific basic properties of his magic and the “Well of Ascension” in particular evoke associations to LDS concepts such as the exaltation (actually, its hard not to read the three volumes as the three stages of theosis, but exaltation is a similar concept). Joseph Smith taught that “God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens.” Through exaltation, we can all become ‘gods’. The Christ-like martyrdom of one of the book’s main characters adds an other layer to this.

Finally, a catastrophe in the Mistborn universe that happened a few centuries ago, destroying many of the Terrismen, who are priest-like keepers of stories, history, religions and other knowledge, carries echoes of the Mormon doctrine of the “Great Apostasy”, which is a very particular version of a doctrine that many Christian churches teach. These specific references and allusions add a salvational urgency to Mistborn‘s narrative, which smoothly ties into the generic epic character of the story, but endow it with a more original power. As a whole, however, and despite all the specific changes and ideas that Sanderson brings to the table, there is an enormous amount of generic elements in his book, the worst of which is the actual writing. Without dropping to the abysmal lows of Terry Goodkind, his writing is at best serviceable, at worst dull, repetitive and, well, generic. He also displays the waste of spaced typical of his genre. While novels in other genres can describe a city, town or world, plus a set of full, believable characters in under 300 pages, many fantasy novels take twice as long without delivering twice the content. George R.R. Martin, who packs every page with action, intrigue and important observation is the exception here. More often than not, we are faced with page after page of ruminations, written in a laggard style and not serving any reasonable purpose, apart from helping to fill pages.

Still, at the end of Mistborn, lots of things have happened, and the reader has been swept away by the tide of events. It is, despite its faults, a very readable book, at least if you happen to like the genre of high fantasy. This is not one of the books that will appeal to those who dislike fantasy, but if you enjoy this sort of writing, Sanderson is a safe bet. He is an enjoyable, reasonably original and prolific writer who I very much look forward to reading more of in the months to come.

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Tobias Wolff: Ugly Rumours

Wolff, Tobias (1975), Ugly Rumours, Allen & Unwin
ISBN 0-04-823117-7

When Tobias Wolff, the acclaimed short story writer and memoirist, published a novel called Old School in 2003, the publisher and many reviewers referred to it as Wolff’s ‘first novel’. In fact, it wasn’t. Ugly Rumours, his actual first novel, had been published in 1975. That same year he won a creative writing fellowship in Stanford, and only a few years before this he’d returned from his tour in Vietnam. There has been only one edition of Ugly Rumours, and it was never mentioned or discussed in promotional material issued by his publisher, all this at the author’s behest. Tobias Wolff repudiated the book, telling interviewers in recent years that reading portions of it made him ‘cringe’, and this disdain meant a slow fall into oblivion for Ugly Rumours. To this day it stays out of print and there is no notable interest in this book, even a search in academic databases comes up empty. A shame, really. Ugly Rumours is not a waste of time, although it’s certainly no masterpiece. It’s neither very innovative, nor particularly well written. Furthermore it’s indulgent, frequently complacent and derivative, curiously noncommittal for an autobiographically inspired work of fiction, and harsh in its moral conclusions. But it’s still interesting, it’s a smooth, quick read by what’s clearly a very talented young writer, with the right instincts and considerable skills. If you are interested in Wolff, especially if you’ve read This Boy’s Life (1989) and In Pharaoh’s Army (1994), his two volumes of memoirs, this book is worth reading. It’s certainly not worth the obscene prices that it fetches on the Internet, but if you can get your hands on it (e.g., through libraries), you might want to give it a try.

Ugly Rumours is not groundbreaking, and honestly, there isn’t much ground to break these days, as far as its setting and topic is concerned. Movies, novels, even video games about the war in Vietnam have become ubiquitous. From Things They Carried to Tree of Smoke, from Apocalypse Now to Good Morning Vietnam, we had our fill, and it’s become hard to entertain us, to tell a new story about this war that we seem to know so well. And in this light, it’s not terribly astonishing that Ugly Rumours doesn’t shock or surprise. But the real problem is elsewhere: Tobias Wolff’s debut novel lacks an energy, drive, and a feeling for the described situations. The novel can be described as almost mannered, distanced. Wolff focused on its odd sense of humor rather than upon the war that serves as a setting for it. And while the brutality of war (and the difficulty of describing it) has forced many writers to create books that are innovative of form or powerful in language and imagery, Ugly Rumours appears to stand aloof. Every page tells us that Wolff is a very talented writer, but one who doesn’t look eye to eye with his subject here, turns away, pushing jokes, and wooden dialogue between himself and the subject matter. The reader, even if he or she hasn’t read In Pharaoh’s Army, can’t help but feel the effort involved in this evasion. This is why the book, although it often aims for laughter, never feels light or fresh. When we laugh, it’s a stifled, affected laughter, and one which sucks all the life from the book. The book feels like a walk through a dimly lit, dusty house. It’s very well constructed, and there’s much to admire, and you may even enjoy your time there, but you’ll be glad to be out again.

All this means that if you come to this book with the expectations that its subject matter evokes, you’ll be disappointed: in many ways, Ugly Rumours just isn’t the kind of novel that one would expect from a war novel, nor from an autobiographically tinged book. In spirit, I think, it owes more to books like Catch-22 and movies like M*A*S*H than to fellow war texts like Michael Herr’s Dispatches (1977) or O’Brien’s novels. In Ugly Rumours, Wolff shows himself less concerned with the details of warfare, with blood, murder, tactics and the jungle, than with his two protagonists who do not really ever see battle. Instead they drink away their nights, joke around, get laid, cheat, scrounge and talk. They never wanted to fight or be endangered and so they bribed their way into a situation that would keep them safe in one of the least safe places for an American soldier in those days. And when we do see battle, gore or mayhem, we find that Wolff hasn’t yet found the language or structure to properly deal with this. The stark brutality of the situations in question does shine through each time but I think it can’t help but do so in a vaguely competent hand. The fact remains that Wolff seems intent on keeping us away from the action, offering us a glimpse, but moving away again swiftly. The problem is not the length of these scenes: in these small situations, we can already see the nascent short story master, with his ability to compress a lot of meaning and feeling into one, almost emblematic, scene. But this early in his career, he hasn’t yet overcome a distance and a stiffness that hurts the emblematic quality; the violence and shock doesn’t work as you feel it should or could.

You can, however, see that these scenes are very well-constructed and reasonably well-placed in the book, and no matter how disappointing these passages are, there is raw talent that keeps shining through, and a glittering intelligence. This is true for the whole book. I’ve already mentioned part of its plot, but it’s worth mentioning that it doesn’t all take place in Vietnam. We are actually introduced, in a slow and considered manner, to the two central characters, Christopher Woermer and his friend Stanley Grubbs. Grubbs is a big, tough man, who “liked people to say what they meant.” He used to be a criminal teenager, until he was taken in by a priest, who encouraged him to use his talents. In the army he met Woermer, who is the main protagonist. Not only does Woermer have a name of Germanic origin like Wolff, his vita also conspicuously mirrors many elements in Wolff’s own life. Readers of This Boy’s Life will recognize “Toby/Jack Wolff”’s stepfather Dwight in the descriptions of Woermer’s stepfather, but they might also be puzzled at the cold treatment of Woermer’s past history. We learn that Woermer’s stepfather had a profound influence on the way Woermer lives his life, but this is empty, uninvolving information. It could have been used to bring Woermer, as a character, alive, by introducing a biography that unites all his odd traits and preoccupations. Instead, it serves as just another one of his odd qualities.

Woermer feels awkwardly constructed. He is an opportunistic character, one who likes to put on a show, wear a clean and ironed uniform to impress men and women alike. He would wear forged medals if he didn’t fear to be exposed. Being a soldier, for Woermer, is all about the reputation that you’ll have afterward, about the mysterious and heroic air that someone, returning from their tour abroad, can put on display. On the other hand, it is his stepfather’s drills and discipline that made him into what is actually a quite able soldier. He can shoot, make his bed, and organize the personnel on a base when disaster breaks out. He just doesn’t like it much. There are many strange contradictions in Woermer’s character. On the one hand, he eschews authority, trying to push against the rules as much as he can, offending superiors, stealing jeeps and bribing his way through life. He’s a scrounger, an imp of sorts. On the other hand, his vanity, and the fact that he knows where to stop, that, indeed, he has an uncanny sense of when to stop, suggests a man who has no real issues with authority, who, in fact, reaffirms and supports it and its associated values at every turn. He is slow to make friends, but a raucous and chummy person. He is a ladies’ man but doesn’t appear to take much delight in the actual fucking. There’s nothing in Ugly Rumours that really connects all these traits, no narrative that explains the logic underlying these contradictions. The fact that Woermer’s biography could have been such a connectional narrative becomes clear if we consider the complexities in This Boy’s Life, which shows that Wolff is, in fact, able to pull off the kind of characterization that is sorely missing from his debut novel.

It’s moot to unravel all these contradictions here, but one among them is remarkable in still other ways: neither Grubbs nor Woermer are womanizers. In many respects, Woermer is a ladies’ man, he knows how to impress women and invests quite a bit of time and effort into achieving just that, yet the actual sexual intercourse seems to disgust him or leave him, at best, indifferent, although he “tried his best to simulate interest; passion was beyond him.” Granted, the women we know him to have sex with, do sound a bit icky, but we only see them through his point of view, and his disinterest in the fairer sex could well color his perceptions. There is a homoerotic tension throughout the book, and even his fights and scuffles with authority often come down to a kind of teasing of his superior officers. Woermer, one might say, is a flirt. There are no actual homosexual acts in Ugly Rumours, but with an admirable consistency, Wolff creates an ambiguous perception of all the inter-male dealings in the book. This is something that is threaded through many books dealing with male cultures, and usually its not consciously done, but Wolff achieves a fascinating balance between making this outrageously obvious, thereby foregrounding something that is at best a subtext in other books, and lapsing into camp. Ugly Rumours is never campy, although I daresay it comes close sometimes. Its hard to say how the homoeroticism is supposed to work here, the use of father figures, the cultural context of army and church, one can’t help but see a potential that is wasted here, because Wolff’s novel is helplessly disparate, distant and cold. The artistic commitment, conviction and vision that usually makes novels like these cohere is largely missing.

Instead we get an assortment of motifs and tropes, although they are usually very well crafted. Perhaps the largest trope is the one suggested by the title. Despite the occasional awkward or wooden dialogue, any act of communication in the novel feels purposeful and replete with meanings, especially if writing is involved. Often we don’t quite know whether something is reliable, although Wolff switches the focus of his novel between his protagonists, and although we know or suspect that Grubbs and Woermer have been fed contradictory information, Wolff doesn’t opt for an easy exposure of errors. The vast majority of doubtful facts remains just that: doubtful, rumors. Newspaper articles and reports are skewed, but any kind of communication in Vietnam is suddenly problematic, unclear, bound to involve misapprehensions and confusions. It’s quite apt that near the end, an important message is not sent directly to the person who is meant to see it. Instead its pinned to a message board, in the hope that it will, after all, reach the right person, like a message in a bottle. The unclear quality of communications is reflected in the shadowy relationships between many characters. Although, sometimes, Wolff seems to reference the criticism of wartime bureaucracy and scheming of Catch 22 and books like it, Ugly Rumours lacks the lucid descriptions of the best of these books that keep the absurdities from collapsing into chaos. In Wolff’s novel there isn’t chaos, but he also toned down the criticism and the satire, which leaves the reader with what feels like an weak in-between effort, but this quality is part and parcel of the mistrust of communication that pervades the novel everywhere. To reproduce this trope on so many levels is very impressive, but doesn’t, necessarily, make for good reading.

This mistrust may be due to a personal mistrust of Wolff vis-à-vis autobiography. One can’t shake the impression that the autobiographical inspiration was both hampering and helpful. Helpful in the conception of the book, but hampering in the execution. In his actual memoirs we’ll see a writer who has perfected both the impulse to be truthful about his path and to be artistically flawless. His memoirs are so well written, structured, and arranged that they read like great fiction, and the artfulness of it all seems to have liberated Wolff to communicate fear, hurt and terror in a much more open fashion. Ugly Rumours is caught in a net of shame, not just shame about writing one’s self, but also shame about the things one did in the war. In his fine debut, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (1973), Tim O’Brien writes “Do dreams offer lessons? Do nightmares have themes, do we awaken and analyze them and live our lives and advice others as a result? Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories.” Wolff isn’t ready yet to “tell war stories”, which we see in what develops as the main moral fiber of the book: Grubbs is quietly berated by the priest (whose creation seems inspired by Victor Hugo’s Monseigneur Myriel) that merely not doing harm, by doing nothing, is not enough. “I’m glad”, the priest, Father Cavanaugh, writes, “to hear that you’re in a position where you don’t have to hurt anyone else. Just be sure in your own mind that doing nothing means that you’re not hurting anyone. Sometimes the only way we can be sure of that is to get out and help them.” There’s a suggestion here what being morally good means, a suggestion that, as the protagonists find, is certainly hard to follow, especially since we’re always happy to believe that doing nothing is good enough, and resisting to do a bad thing is sufficient. Ugly Rumours, to its credit, bears out Father Cavanaugh’s suggestion, summoning an immense amount of guilt and resentment until the dramatic finish.

In this moral line of thinking, Ugly Rumours is harsh on its characters, uncomfortable for its readers and harsh on its author. This is perhaps the most admirable thing of them all: a book powered by moral doubt and shame, not seeking easy resolutions, not needing to shock or devastate the reader through violence. The downside, however, is that the shame may have kept Wolff at this point in his career to come into his own as a writer. The book appears cobbled together, it keeps the reader at arm’s length and is very unevenly written. Some pages are tortuously dull and awkward, but now and then sentences shine with an intense brilliance. As a whole, it shows a writer who doesn’t have the breath and scope to make such a long narrative cohere, nor the ear to make dialogue work. Small wonder he found his voice when he wrote short stories and novellas. Even books like In Pharaoh’s Army consist of smaller pieces, each structured not like a chapter but like a proper short story. This is certainly an interesting book, and a reasonably entertaining read, as well. Read it for the instinct, the signs of craft, and the insight into the beginnings of a great writer, whose hand and voice is visible here already, if through a veil. In its best moments, there is a great pathos in Wolff’s words and we witness the gifted awakening of an uneasy literary spirit. For this alone, it’s worth a peek at least.

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