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Concrete by Thomas Bernhard {Reviewed by THOMAS}
In a single wonderful book-length hysterical paragraph, Rudolph, Bernhard’s narrator, a middle-aged invalid both incapacitated by and sustained by his neuroses, obsessed with writing his great work on the composer Mendelssohn Bartholdy but of course incapable of even beginning to write, neurasthenically procrastinating and irritated, riven by every possible ambivalence, unable to write whilst his sister is visiting and unable to write unless she is present, hating his sister but dependent upon her, needing his home but stifled by it, rants about everything from making too many notes to the idiocy of keeping dogs. Bernhard’s delineation of an individual whose interiority and isolation has attained the highest degree is flawless, devastating and very funny. No sooner has Rudolph made a categorical assertion than he begins to move towards its opposite: after describing the cruelty of his sister towards him, we become increasingly aware of her concern for him and his mental state; no sooner does he attain the solitude of his grand Austrian country home (soon after the book opens he makes the categorical assertion, “We must be alone and free from all human contact if we wish to embark upon an intellectual task!”, a common fallacious predicate that one commonly inclines towards but which subverts one’s ends (he follows this swiftly with another self-defeating assertion: “I still don’t know how to word the first sentence, and before I know the wording of the first sentence I can’t begin any work.”)) than he is absolutely certain that he must travel to Palma if he is to write his book on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. Towards the end of the book, we learn that Rudolph did indeed go to Palma, where he is writing this account (instead of his work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy) after learning of the recent suicide of a young woman he had met there on a previous occasion following the death of her husband (who was discovered fallen onto concrete beneath their hotel balcony). Such was the isolation of Rudolph’s interiority that he was incapable of taking timely action to help the unfortunate young woman, though it was easily within his means to do so, incapable of making authentic human contact, stifled by his own ambivalences and self-obsession (the undeclared ironic tragedy being that he may possibly have returned to Palma in order to help the young woman but that he is of course too late, her suicide triggering the self-excoriation that comprises the book).
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A very enjoyable set of writing classes presented graphically, especially good for those who appreciate the cross-fertilising potential of visual and verbal creativity.
"Words connect the visible track to the invisible thing, like a fragile makeshift bridge cast across the void." Calvino explores what he regards as the cardinal virtues of literature: Lightness, Quickness, Multiplicity, Exactitude and Visibility (Constancy was to be the sixth, but Calvino died while writing this book). Very thoughtful.
"This book is a wry, critical friend to both writer and reader. It is filled with cogent examples and provoking statements. You will agree or quarrel with each page, and be a sharper writer and reader by the end." - Hilary Mantel
Cortazar's novels and short stories ignited a whole generation of Latin American writers, and had an enthusiastic following through the Americas and Europe. In this series of masterclasses he discusses his approach to the problems and mechanisms of fiction writing: the short story form, fantasy and realism, musicality, the ludic, time and the problem of 'fate'.
"Anyone who doesn't read Cortazar is doomed." - Pablo Neruda
Useful and fun, this workbook will help you think about your writing in different ways, and find ways to incorporate it into your daily routines.
In a story or a novel the "I" who tells this tale can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator but in nonfiction the reader must always be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth. How does one pull from one's own boring, agitated self the truth-speaker who will tell the story a personal narrative needs to tell?
"Karr is a national treasure-that rare genius who's also a brilliant teacher. This joyful celebration of memoir packs transcendent insights with trademark hilarity. Anyone yearning to write will be inspired, and anyone passionate to live an examined life will fall in love with language and literature all over again. " - George Saunders
Prompts! Exercises! Encouragement!
>> Podcasts!
Writing effectively is partly a matter of not making common mistakes and partly a matter of learning a few key skills.
On the use of collage journaling to prepare the mind for writing.
Doodle, daydream and discover your creativity - then write hard into the wild land of your imagination.
Young creative types can use this book to accelerate their ideas for stories, animations, graphic novels, films, books, &c (and have a lot of fun, too).
A very useful guide for writers, especially on the aspects of a work, such as structure, that should go unnoticed by the reader.
>> Read an excerpt.
"A master class in writing. Every sentence sparkles. A superb book." - Kirkus
"Matchless teaching from a master of the form—seductive, trustworthy and endearingly modest." - Helen Garner
Notable for its range of writing exercises devised specifically for those writing for children.
Fifty writing exercises and countless triggers. Great stuff. Includes contributions from Elanor Catton, Curtis Sittenfeld, Emily Perkins, David Vann, Elizabeth and Sara Knox, Dora Malech and Kirsty Gunn.
"An insightful guide to the stages of writing fiction and memoir without falling into common traps, while wisely navigating the writing life, from an award-winning author and longtime teacher.
A book-length master class." - The Atlantic
A pharmocopoeia of cures for writer's block, plotting and characterization issues, and other ailments writers face when completing a novel or memoir, prescribed by the director of creative writing at Ohio University.
Writing exercises, topics such as the personal and cultural threshold, the four forces that animate poetic language, tactics of revision, ecstasy and engagement as motives for poetry.
Contributions from James Brown, Elizabeth Knox, Tina Makereti, Damien Wilkins, Bill Manhire, Charlotte Wood, Ashleigh Young and Hera Lindsay Bird.
Interesting and enjoyable considerations of storymaking from the author of 'His Dark Materials', 'The Book of Dust', 'Sally Lockhart', &c.
Take one small banal story about a man on a bus and a remark about a button, and rewrite it ninety-nine times according to different constraints, from sonnet to antiphrasis, from onomatopoeia to metaphor, from Dog Latin to double entry, from the gastronomical to the abusive, and you come up with a book that is inventive, erudite and very funny. Raymond Queneau is a verbal acrobat of the first order. Reading this book is to attend a circus of rigours - be prepared to be exhilarated.
Advice on writing, love, sex, suffering, writing (again) and the nature of advice.
“Who owns the words? Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do. All of us. Though not all of us know it, yet. Reality cannot be copyrighted.” At once iconoclastic and appropriative (most of the book is comprised of unattributed quotes from everyone from from Burroughs to Barthes, from Plutarch to Picasso, from Thoreau to Joyce), Shields maintains that actuality provides sufficient material for creative pursuit and that nothing needs to be (or can be) a game of 'let's pretend'. Shields is bored with the novel, he is fed up with the made up, he wants more immediacy, less artifice, more pace, he wants to be a ‘wisdom junkie’, he wants to feel really alive, he longs to escape his jaded state in the arms of the lyric essay or the memoir. Shields is against fiction (at least in the way it is generally understood), but he is ambiguous about 'reality', too: "There are no facts, only art." As an impassioned call for relevance, excitement and innovation in literature, Reality Hunger makes a challenge that deserves to be met.
A good overview of the purpose, qualities and potentials of a novel, with consideration of 101 novels from the entire history of the form.
A useful handbook for trimming the fat from your prose, leaving it lean, toned and fit for any purpose.
>> Is your writing flabby or fit? Take the test.
An excellent diary with deadlines, writers' events, tips and ways to keep yourself both motivated and organised.
NEW RELEASES
Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies. A wife refuses her husband's entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A sales assistant makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the dresses she sells. A woman's surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest.
"Carmen Maria Machado is the best writer of cognitive dysphoria I’ve read in years. " - Tor
"Life is too short to be afraid of nothing." - Machado
An alcoholic film-maker approaches an elderly woman for an oral-history documentary. The woman declines, but tells the film-maker that if she can stay sober for four days she will tell her a story, and other stories beyond that. What emerges is not just a personal story of heartbreak, but something much wider and deeper.
"Masterful. A meditation on storytelling itself." - Daily Telegraph
"A story about telling old stories again, and never quite settling the truth of a childhood long last. This is a delicate, beautiful novel, filled with tender details and sharply evoked, lyrical moments." - Spectator
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"The enfant naturel of Henry James's What Maisie Knew and Deborah Levy's Swimming Home." - Anne Korkeakivi
This excellent novel, set on the dges of the post-punk music scene of Lanarkshire in the early 1980s, displays remarkable resonance with that of New Zealand in the same period.
"Many of the chapters would work as brilliant standalone short stories." - Guardian
"I wanted to live in this book." - Kim Gordon
>> Read an excerpt.
>> A playlist of appropriate Scottish post-punk tracks.
>> And another (more 'easy listening') playlist.
>> Interview with David Keenan.
What are the root metaphors used by all cultures to impose meaning on the world? Why do we classify ad arrange and divide as we do? What do the ways we think imply for our capacity to face the challenges in what we might like to think of as our future?
An outstanding graphic novel on the miseries (and opportunities) of academia and the epiphanies of procrastination. When Jeanne is accepted on to a PhD course, she is over the moon, brimming with excitement and grand plans - but is the world ready for her masterful analysis of labyrinth motifs in Kafka's The Trial? At first Jeanne throws herself into research with great enthusiasm, but as time goes by, it becomes clear that things aren't quite going according to plan.
"This is a book for anyone who has ever laboured under a deadline, battled a stubborn pig of a boss, or half drowned beneath a wave of bureaucracy and paperwork. Put off what you intended to do today and go out and buy it, right now." - Guardian
Democracies die in three stages: the election of an authoritarian leader, the concentration and abuse of governmental power and finally, the complete repression of opposition and citizens. Following the election of Donald Trump in the US, the first stage seems fulfilled. How can the two following stages be averted?
About the Size of the Universe by Jón Kalman Stefánsson $35
A modern Icelandic saga, spanning the whole twentieth century, and kind of companion-piece to the Man Booker International short-listed Fish Have No Feet.
"Powerful and sparkling. Translator Philip Roughton's feather-light touch brings out the gleaming, fairy-tale quality of the writing." - Irish Times
"Stefansson's prose rolls and surges with oceanic splendour." - Spectator
Food and drink are only pretexts for the real business of a restaurant, which is a jostling for and display of social positioning, and a calibration of functional politics, both withing the staff and in relation to the customers. Ribbat takes us across the dining room and into the kitchen to disentangle the social functions of the restaurant.
Good.
A very interesting account of a transformative time spent as a border control officer on the Mexican-US border.
"This book tells the hard poetry of the desert heart. If you think you know about immigration and the border, you will see there is much to learn. And you will be moved by its unexpected music" - Luis Alberto Urrea
>> "This is work that endangers the soul."
>> "Caught up in the deportation fight."
Political Tribes: Group instinct and the fate of nations by Amy Chua $24
Do our group identities matter more to us than any political issue? Is tribalism a better model to understand both the successes and idiocies of recent political situations than any overarching theory of historical development?
"A beautifully written, eminently readable, and uniquely important challenge to conventional wisdom." - J. D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy
On Trust: A book of lies by James Womack $28
Poetry is often regarded as a confessional medium, conveying deeper 'truths' about the poet and their experience. This collection playfully destabilises this preconception, severing the 'I' of a poem from the 'I' of the poet, and assailing such lazy concepts as reliability, sincerity and authenticity.
Long-listed for the 2018 Dylan Thomas Prize.
Do our group identities matter more to us than any political issue? Is tribalism a better model to understand both the successes and idiocies of recent political situations than any overarching theory of historical development?
"A beautifully written, eminently readable, and uniquely important challenge to conventional wisdom." - J. D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy
Poetry is often regarded as a confessional medium, conveying deeper 'truths' about the poet and their experience. This collection playfully destabilises this preconception, severing the 'I' of a poem from the 'I' of the poet, and assailing such lazy concepts as reliability, sincerity and authenticity.
Long-listed for the 2018 Dylan Thomas Prize.
Young & Damned & Fair: The life and tragedy of Catherine Howard at the court of Henry VIII by Gareth Russell $28
A reassessment of the life and role of Henry's fifth wife, from their marriage in 1540 to her beheading less than two years later following one of the more outstanding scandals of Henry's reign.
Fun fact: The night before her execution, Catherine Howard spent many hours rehearsing laying her head upon the block.
Becoming Unbecoming by Una $48
This graphic novel is an indictment of sexual violence against women in all its guises - from the 12-year-old protagonist's classroom to the Yorkshire Ripper case on her television set.
How Money Got Free: Bitcoin and the fight for the future of finance by Brian Patrick Eha $27
Is Bitcoin the way in which the libertarian right will achieve their goal of collapsing the state?
This graphic novel is an indictment of sexual violence against women in all its guises - from the 12-year-old protagonist's classroom to the Yorkshire Ripper case on her television set.
Is Bitcoin the way in which the libertarian right will achieve their goal of collapsing the state?
If cognitive enhancement, smart drugs and electrical stimulation can increase our mental performance, just what is intelligence?
Can You Die of a Broken Heart? A heart surgeon's insight into what makes us tick by Nikki Stamp $33
What is the relation between the physical and metaphorical function of the heart?
The Three Rooms in Valerie's Head by David Gaffney and Dan Berry $40
Serially unlucky in love, to feel better Valerie imagines that her previous boyfriends are dead and that their bodies are kept downstairs in the cellar in a strange, mummified state. Every day she brings them upstairs and speaks with them about what went wrong. Funny and sad.
“One hundred and fifty words by Gaffney are more worthwhile than novels by a good many others.” — The Guardian
Lyla by Fleur Beale $19
The Christchurch earthquakes and their aftermath as seen through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old student.
The Only Girl in the World by Maude Julien $38
Subjected to dreadful ordeals (such as holding an electric fence without flinching) by her fanatical and controlling father, who was convinced his daughter would be an exemplar of a new order of humanity, Julien love of nature and, particularly, of literature somehow enabled her to remain sane.
Mechanica: A beginner's field guide by Lance Balchin $27
A steampunkish selection of robotic animals constructed at the end of the 23rd century to replace the lamented ex-fauna of Earth.
Is This Guy For Real? The unbelievable Andy Kaufman by Box Brown $35
A graphic biography of the actor and comedian who made a career out of making himself contemptible to his audience.
Winnie-the-Pooh: Exploring a classic, The world of A.A. Milne and E.H. Shepard by Annemarie Bilclough and Emma Laws $60
Full of facsimiles of artwork and early editions, and giving an understanding of how the books came into existence.
What is the relation between the physical and metaphorical function of the heart?
Serially unlucky in love, to feel better Valerie imagines that her previous boyfriends are dead and that their bodies are kept downstairs in the cellar in a strange, mummified state. Every day she brings them upstairs and speaks with them about what went wrong. Funny and sad.
“One hundred and fifty words by Gaffney are more worthwhile than novels by a good many others.” — The Guardian
The Christchurch earthquakes and their aftermath as seen through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old student.
Subjected to dreadful ordeals (such as holding an electric fence without flinching) by her fanatical and controlling father, who was convinced his daughter would be an exemplar of a new order of humanity, Julien love of nature and, particularly, of literature somehow enabled her to remain sane.
A steampunkish selection of robotic animals constructed at the end of the 23rd century to replace the lamented ex-fauna of Earth.
A graphic biography of the actor and comedian who made a career out of making himself contemptible to his audience.
Full of facsimiles of artwork and early editions, and giving an understanding of how the books came into existence.
Attack of the 50 ft. Women: How gender equality can save the world by Catherine Meyer $20
>> A vision of the future? 
The REPUBLIC OF CONSCIOUSNESS PRIZE for small presses.
There are some excellent books on the just-announced 2018 short list.
It takes approximately an hour and a half to fly from Berlin to Paris. Upon that hour and a half, a human memory, especially one working at neurotically obsessive speed, can loop a very large amount of time indeed, an hour and a half is plenty of time to go over and go over the things, or several of the things, the unassimilable things, that happened in Berlin, in an attempt to assimilate those things, though they are not assimilable, in an attempt, rather, albeit an involuntary attempt, to damage oneself by the exercise of one’s memories, to draw self-blame and self-disgust from a situation the hopelessness of which cannot be attributed to anything worthy of self-blame or self-disgust but which is sufficiently involved to exercise the self-blame and self-disgust that seethe always beneath their veneer of not-caring, of niceness, the veneer that preserves self-blame and self-disgust from resolution into anything other than self-blame and self-disgust. Upon this hour and a half can be looped, such is the efficacy of human memory, not only, obsessively, the unassimilable things that happened in Berlin but also much else that happened even into the distant past, but, largely speaking, the more recent things that have bearing upon, or occupy the same memory-pocket, not the best metaphor, as the unassimilable things that happened in Berlin, for disappointment and failure seldom happen in a vacuum but resonate with, even if they are not the direct result of, disappointments and failures reaching back even into the distant past, self-blame and self-disgust having the benefit, or detriment, if a difference can be told between benefit and detriment, of binding experiences to form an identity, and, not only this, upon that hour and a half can be looped also an endless amount of speculation and projection as to what may be occurring in the minds of others, or in the mind of, in this case, a specific other, a German-American pianist and composer with whom the narrator, who has been visiting Berlin with her sister, has had some manner of romantic encounter, so to call it, the extent of which is unclear, both, seemingly, to the narrator and, certainly, to the reader, the reader being necessarily confined to the mental claustrophobia of the narrator, on account of the obsessive speculation and projection and also the inescapable escapist and self-abnegating fantasising on the part of the narrator, together with the comet-like attraction-and-avoidance of her endless mental orbit around the most unassimilable things that happened in Berlin, or that might have happened in Berlin, or that did not happen in Berlin but are extrapolative fantasies unavoidably attendant upon what happened in Berlin, untrue but just as real as truth, for all thoughts, regardless of actuality, do the same damage to the brain. Lefebvre’s exquisitely pedantic, fugue-like sentences, their structure perfectly indistinguishable from their content, bestow upon her the mantle of Thomas Bernhard, which, after all, does not fall upon just any hem-plucker but, in this case, fully upon someone who, not looking skyward, has crawled far enough into its shadow when looking for something else. Where Bernhard’s narrators tend to direct their loathing outwards until the reader realises that all loathing is in fact self-loathing, Lefebvre’s narrator acknowledges her self-loathing and self-disgust, abnegating herself rather for circumstances in which self-abnegation is neither appropriate nor inappropriate, her self-abnegation arising from the circumstances, from her connection with the circumstances, from her rather than from the circumstances, her self-abnegation not, despite her certainty, having, really, any effect upon the circumstances. Not at all not-funny, pitch-perfect in both voice and structure, full of sly commentary on history and modernity, and on the frailties of human personality and desire, providing for the reader simultaneous resistance and release, Lefebvre shares many of Bernhard’s strengths and qualities, and the book contains memorable and effective passages such as that in which the narrator recalls playing tennis with her mother-in-law, now her ex-mother-in-law, and finding she is not the type for ‘collective happiness’, or her hilariously scathing descriptions of Berlin’s Sony Centre or of Brecht’s house, now a restaurant, or of the narrator's inability to acknowledge the German-American pianist-composer's wife as anything but 'the accompaniment', or, indeed many other passages, but the excellence of the book is perhaps less in the passages than in the book as a whole. I will be surprised if I read a better book this year. {THOMAS}
If a thought is thought it must be thought through to its end. This formula is productive both of great misery and of great literature, but, for most people, either consequence is fairly easily avoided through a simple lack of tenacity or focus, or through fear. Unfortunately, we are not all so easily saved from ourselves by such shortcomings. The narrator of Ariana Harwicz’s razor-fine novel Die, My Love finds herself living in the French countryside with a husband and young child, incapable of feeling anything other than displaced in every aspect of her life, both trapped by and excluded from the circumstances that have come to define her. She both longs for and is revolted by family life with her husband and child, the violence of her ambivalences make her incapable of either accepting or changing a situation about which there is nothing ostensibly wrong, she withdraws into herself, and, as the gap separating herself from the rest of existence widens, her attempts to bridge it become both more desperate and more doomed, further widening the gap. Every detail of everything around her causes her pain and harms her ability to feel anything other than the opposite of the way she feels she should feel. This negative electrostatic charge, so to call it, builds and builds but she is unable to discharge it, to return her situation to ‘normal’, to relieve the torment. In some ways, the support and love of her husband make it harder to regain a grip on ‘reality’ - if her husband had been a monster, her battles could have been played out in their home rather than inside her (it is for this reason, perhaps, that people subconsciously choose partners who will justify the negative feelings towards which they are inclined). The narrator feels more affinity with animals than with humans, she behaves erratically or not at all, she becomes obsessed with a neighbour but the encounters with him that she describes, and the moments of self-obliterative release they provide, are, I would say, entirely fantasised. Between these fantasies and ‘objective reality’, however, falls a wide area about which we and she must remain uncertain whether her perceptions, understandings and reactions are accurate or appropriate. At times the narrator’s love for her child creates small oases of anxiety in her depression, but these become rarer. Harwicz’s writing is exquisite, both sensitive and brutal, both lucid and claustrophobic, her observations both subtle and overwhelming. As the narrator loses her footing, the writer ensures that we are borne with her on through the novel, an experience not dissimilar to gathering speed downhill in a runaway pram*. (*Not a spoiler.) {THOMAS}
Darker With the Lights On by David Hayden (Little Island Press) $32The act of writing is an act of forgetting as much as it is an act of memory. Description replaces experience, if there was experience there to start with, or otherwise description precludes the experience described, permitting experience only of itself. The pencil’s mark obscures whatever line it traces. That which is described becomes digestible as text, becomes definite, finite and defined. Whatever is described becomes ersatz, the currency of exchange between a writer and a reader, the tin chip passed between parties to a language game, pretending understanding, pretending being understood, the cosiest, most intimate of couplings. How reassuring to have one’s expectations fulfilled by text, but how tiresome, this pact-as-habit, this plethora of detail, this obsessive mentioning that enervates the experience that gets obscured by words. But every signifier has its limit. Every mentioned thing is mentioned at the exclusion of another thing, the excluded or unincludable thing that pushes the mentioned into view while remaining, carefully, out of sight, hidden in the place of greater force, unseen, unfaced, the unseeable and unfaceable warping the mentioning by exerting its weight upon it from behind. A reader has no business to supply anything beyond the text, but also has to complete the text with nothing but their own paltry store of experiences to supply the meanings of the words. How to proceed? How to read the unseen mechanics behind but not referred to by the text? The reader too has ungraspable weights that can be induced to rise and touch the undersurface of the text, pressing up upon it as those of the author press down, two sides of one skin, the text the shared rind of two ungraspable depths, if there are such things as depths, otherwise, without depths, a synclastic and anticlastic flexing of the only surface, two dimensions modelled in a third. If it is what is excluded that potentises text, if it is what is destroyed by writing that makes writing do what writing does, then the stories of David Hayden in Darker with the Lights On move like the sharpened tip of a great black crayon as it scribbles out all memory and knowledge. Not in these stories the reassurance of the expected, nor that of continuity or clarity. Answers are not given, perhaps withheld, though withholding requires an existence for which no evidence ensues, but we are participants in the ritual taking away of knowledge, the deanswering of questions, itself a sort of understanding. Many of the stories concern themselves with the tensions between memory and perception, between two times running concurrently, memory snarling on details and producing not-quite-narrative but a stuttering intimation of the vast force of passing time. What unfaceable calamity bridged the idyll of memory with the torment of the present? In ‘Dick’, for me, perhaps, the most memorable story in the collection, the main character is buried to the waist in the sand, declaring snippets of memory, of idyll even, like some character shoved from Beckett to somewhere beyond the apocalypse, declarative not in Beckettian wearidom and decline but in extremis, the object of some cruelty, disoriented by their own presence, spouting words such as those that may have spoken by the condemnee in Kafka’s ‘Penal Colony’ reading aloud the words as they are inscribed into his flesh by the harrow. It often seems Hayden’s characters’ backgrounds are withheld not only from the reader but seemingly also from the characters themselves. They are being dememorised by their stories, or they exist, as perhaps we all do, with great voids where stories could be expected to be. But stories come from somewhere, unseen, and visit themselves upon us. “There were stories everywhere. Stories in the body, stories in and out of time, stories in the chosen and the unchosen, stories under glass, stories under water, stories under flesh, hot and cold, stories in tumult and silence.” Remembering and inventing contest the same attention, preclude each other but find themselves indistinguishable from one another, as a matter of course in fiction, more problematically so in the lives of writers and of readers. The characters are disoriented but grasp at every chance to climb into, or out of, some awareness: “He senses his head thinking, his trunk big and loose, his delicate fingers flickering at the ends of his arms and decides that he is conscious: real.” The stories’ worlds are composed of granules of awareness, snatches of phrases forced out against their silencing. Reading is akin to viewing through a narrow tube: the perspective is limited but the focus is immense. What is not seen is always there, deforming what is seen, but unglimpsable, unassailable beyond the vertigo of any attempt to look in its direction. Hayden produces a spare disorienting beauty on the level of the sentence. His admixture of restraint, even paucity, and excess, produces a surrealism truncated rather than efflorescent, its effects cumulative rather than expansive, a surrealism not the furthest expression of surrealism’s usual tired romantic literary inclinations but of their opposite, their extinguishment, not the surrealism of dreams but of the repetitive banging of the back of the head as the reader is dragged down a flight of steps, their eyes either closed or open. {THOMAS}
It is overwhelmingly, facetiously tempting to call Gaudy Bauble a detective novel, principally because it is one (a fake detective novel is just as much a detective novel as a non-fake one, if there can be such a thing as a non-fake detective novel). In Gaudy Bauble the detectives, so to call them, never actually detect anything, they never leave their flats (except for dental repairs, &c), they are effectively ineffectual, placebos, and, when the lost budgerigar that triggered the investigation, so to call it, returns, it is not due to any detecting on their part. “Is not detective work labelling work?” states a voice, presumably that of P.I. Belahg, a writer mainly not writing the script for a television series seemingly entitled Querbird, being filmed by Blulip, Belahg’s lesbian Gilbert-and-George-like double, a film-maker whose ideas change faster than they can be realised. The investigation gains no traction not because there is a lack of evidence but because there is too much. Everything is evidence of something (or of everything). The investigation gains no traction because it is too thorough. The details are too much evidence to amount to anything in particular, only to everything. Every detail, every association, every etymological permutation, every taxonomy, every history, every identity is interrogated and dissolved, every distinction is ruptured, the narrative, so to call it, constantly derailed by detail and by the refusal of detail to retain a fixed identity. In total flux, attributions and prescribed identities function as little more than costumes (clothes have more stable identities than persons), everything mentioned becomes activated by that mentioning, becomes a protagonist, pulls the plot, so to call it, towards it, off course, if it could be said ever to have had a course, or to be a plot. The world, after all, consists not of plot, which is always a fictive result of arbitrary interpretation of an unjustifiably normative kind, but of details, details about which little of certainty can be said without making similarly normative transgressions against their true nature, which lies not in identity but in momentum. In flux, in the tohubohu which is the natural state of all entities and from which entities become exiled at the moment they become entities, the state to which all entities long to return, the only certainty that can be maintained is that of momentum, if a certainty can be maintained at all. Gaudy Bauble retains all the excitement and pace and rigour of a detective novel. More and more characters appear, change names, blur their distinctions, overwhelm the narrative from locations in its margins or beyond: “There can never be too many crackpot agents. There could never be too much hyperactive riffraff interfering with events.” The dichotomy between the performative and the authentic is constantly ruptured, as if this dichotomy were a wall set to measure and constrain us, against which it is our nature to rebel, to seek release into illimitable inclusivity. The conflation of the performative and the authentic manifests in a doubling of entities, not only of P.I. Belahg and Blulip, but of the actual and the representation: budgerigar and statuette, tooth and denture, the characters and their appearances on the TV show Querbird. All categories are in flux. There may be a lost budgerigar, a broken tooth, statuettes, and so forth, but these categories are not exclusive of other categories, and tend always, by ontological clinamen, towards these categories. This ontology, since something must be said, or since the author, in choosing to write the novel, has put it about that something must be said in order for the novel to be written, makes language the territory in which this clinamen, this queerness in the nature of the particles, will in this instance be traced. All presences, all absences, all substances, all entities, all dissolutions, all metamorphoses, all wounds and all healing of wounds, are exercises of language, are both problems of language and solutions to these problems of language. Waidner, with nothing more constrained than hyperactive brilliance, somehow combines the register of Janet & John or the Teletubbies with that of specialist academic obscurantism without being anywhere between these poles, for only the extremes are worth conflating. At times there are similarities of rhythm with texts written under lipogrammatic or other artificial constraints, or with the lyric style of Mark E. Smith, or with impromptu dramatic performances using only the text of foreign-language phrasebooks (recommended). “Might sea urchin odontogenesis, fully understood, provide the biochemical tools to transform mainstream prosthodontics?” But, really, the book is quite unlike anything else, and is an exemplar of the sort of enjoyable and uncompromising queering experiment at the edge of literature and with the substance of literature itselfthat literature so desperately needs if it is to open new potentials within itself. When the novel comes to a (sort-of) end, new, more fluid entities have been achieved in a game of ‘real-life’ Exquisite Corpse, the budgerigar has returned, the momentum of the investigation has been expended. “The truth is the only thing left now. The truth ate everyone else alive.” {THOMAS}
A sprawling but incisive retelling of King Lear, set against a backdrop of tradition, misogyny and corruption in modern India.
Long-listed for the Republic of Consciousness Prize.
>> Modern rewritings of King Lear tend to have Lear the CEO of a corporation. See also Dunbar by Edward St. Aubyn.
This collection from centres upon the difficulties of communication and the way thoughts may never be fully communicable and yet can overwhelm you. Attrib. celebrates the tricksiness of language just as it confronts its limits. The stories are littered with the physical ephemera of language: dictionaries, dog-eared pages, bookmarks and old coffee stains on older books.
"Vividly imagined instants of mental disarray." - Guardian
>> Attrib. has been awarded the 2018 Republic of Consciousness Prize!!
>> Read Thomas's review (below).
>> The author reads an extract and you listen.
>> "It's a book about time. It's a book about detail."
>> "Visionary power." - James Wood
>> "Why is it always a girl who is missing?"
>> Reservoir 13 won the 2017 Costa Novel Award.
>> "McGregor has revolutionised the most hallowed of mystery plots."
>> Also read McGregor's The Reservoir Tapes: 15 back-stories of characters in Reservoir 13.
THOMAS'S REVIEW:
 | Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor
There are thirteen reservoirs in the moors above the village in central England near which a thirteen-year-old girl disappears, reservoirs that must be continually monitored and repaired if they are to continue their function and withstand the effects of time. The girl separates from her parents and disappears. Reservoir 13 seems at first as if it might be going to be a sort of thriller, but if it is a thriller it is an infinitely dissipated thriller, a thriller infinitely slowed (the book is thirteen years long without any resolution for the fate of the missing girl). The mode of expectation built in the reader, however, cannot be discharged, the suspense of a thriller is not lessened but transposed, heightening our awareness of every detail of this novel, this archive of the minutiae of human behaviour and of the natural world, this essay in the great, awful equivalence of all things, in which each breakfast, the behaviour of each bird is freighted with significance, but not with the sort of significance from which plot is usually built. Not only is this book a thriller that overturns the expectations of a thriller while still achieving the effects upon the reader of a thriller, it is a novel that overturns the expectations of a novel (plot, protagonists, ‘viewpoint’, shape, interiority, &c) while achieving the effects upon the reader of a novel. Written scrupulously in the flat, detached, austere tone of reportage, infinitely patient but with implacable momentum, a slow mill grinding detail out of circumstance, a forensic dossier on English rurality, the novel is comprised of detail after detail of the human, animal and vegetative life in a small rural community over thirteen years. The narrative, so to call it, shifts, within paragraphs, from subject to subject, or, rather, from object to object (there is an ambiguity of agency to the term ‘subject’), the persons, the nature, the seasons all particles borne on and changed by the awful impersonal force of time. McGregor’s swift, precise sentences heighten our awareness and make every detail, every observation first beautiful and then, cumulatively, horrific, with the horror of time passing, of the great destructive central force of nature that is time. Time suffocates the mystery of the girl’s disappearance, and, in McGregor’s forensic description, everyday life and the rhythms of nature of a community in which a crime may have been committed become more terrifying than the possible crime itself, whatever it may have been. Each detail is indeed a clue, but not a clue towards the solution of a crime so much as a clue towards understanding the kind of world in which this crime, whatever it was, if a crime was committed, a crime against a young woman, even a child, could be committed, and in which such a crime seems to have no real consequences. The crime may be submerged beneath the accretion of quotidian concerns but the increasingly panic-inducing alertness for clues spreads out upon the whole countryside and the whole community, infecting them with suspicion, even culpability for unspecified and even indefinable crimes, for guilt is not predicated upon crime. McGregor writes with terrible understatement, cumulatively insinuating suspicion and distaste upon his characters. We are first drawn in, then repelled, then detached. As detail is heaped upon detail, as the narrative focus becomes more and more diffuse, as each season is repeated, as the characters move closer to and further away from each other, as agency is grasped at and relinquished, as time deprives them of their situations and capacities, as the tone of the novel becomes flatter, if possible, as the events, such as they are, become less and less interesting, largely through repetition, certainly less and less consequential, the reader is not bored, as might be expected, but more and more fascinated and appalled, caught in the awful forward, or, worse, circular motion, not wanting to miss a word, a sentence, a clue to what becomes an existential crime. The guilt for every disappearance, for all harm, for all loss, for each act done or not done, lies with time. Everything will be erased. Everything will be lost, but, even worse, everything will continue.
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 | Witchfairy by Brigitte Minne and Carl Cneut {Reviewed by STELLA} When you want to fall into a picture and enter the world of a character without even reading a word, you know that you have been beguiled by some very luscious images. From the moment you pick up this book, you will be entranced. The cover and title invite you in, although with some caution as you contemplate the blue-black woods and the word witch. But there is also the word fairy with its dream-like airy qualities and a rich floral carpet which a child, cherub-faced and determined, roller-skates through. She’s heading towards the edge of the book cover. Yet more temptation: follow her and open the book. In the first paragraph we are introduced to Rosemary, a fairy, who has received a wand for her birthday, something all darling fairy children want, but not Rosemary, who is most put out. When you want roller-skates, a stupid magic wand is a disappointment. Her mother wants her to be like the other fairy children, who clutch their special toys, wands and handbags; who have the bows nicely tied in their hair, their pretty hats and frocks just so. They are sweet and have little tea-parties and tête-à-têtes just so. “They ate their cake without making crumbs. They drank tea without spilling a drop...They told only the sweetest stories with their honeyed voices.” Rosemary’s mother says no to roller-skates, worried about falls and nosebleeds, and the disgrace of the being a fairy whose hat might be askew or dress dirtied. Rosemary declares, much to her mother’s horror, “I want to be a witch”. And no one can persuade her to change her mind. Exasperated, her mother declares that witches cannot live in golden turrets - they live in the wood, so Rosemary packs her bags and flies away. Her mother knows she’ll be back soon. The witch’s wood is gloriously dark compared with the pink, red and white pages of the fairy castles. Yet it is the perfect place for Rosemary. She builds a treehouse and a boat and forages for berries and nuts. She explores the forest, which has wonderful carpets of flowers, all in hues of red - a red which has become a signature colour for the illustrator and is commonly called ‘Cneut-red’. She meets the witches, who are delightfully drawn with angled faces, grey hair and long pointed noses in contrast to the fairies who have rosy cheeks and small pert noses. We first see the witches poking their heads out of the river watching Rosemary. Are they dangerous? Author and illustrator make us wait a few pages to find out the true nature of the witches. They are kind and generous, reminiscent of kindly aunts and grandmothers, welcoming and encouraging Rosemary. They give her roller-skates and teach her how to ride a broom. Life in the woods is good and Rosemary is having a ball. Minne deftly uses words. You can almost hear Rosemary stamp her foot in defiance, even though this is never described. You can feel Rosemary’s wistful wantings even though these are not explicitly said. Minne’s skill as a writer, combined with Cneut’s illustrations, his ability to render facial emotions and to use colour, the warm reds and the cold blue-blacks to intensify those emotions and the tension inherent between Rosemary’s two worlds, will make Witchfairy a new favourite for many. Yet is the content that takes it that next layer deeper. Witchfairy tells the story of a girl who feels out of place, who doesn’t want to be what she was born to. The world of golden turrets isn’t for her - she wants to run and chase the wind, to get grubby and play a few tricks. Being a witch is a fine thing, but Rosemary wistfully looks up at the moon and wonders about her other life. And Rosemary’s mother misses her so much, she decides to visit her. They find out together who Rosemary is: neither fairy nor witch but a combination of both, a witchfairy. This is a charming adventure about a curious young child and her desire to be herself, as well as a mother’s acceptance and love of her child in whatever guise that takes. |
We have reviewed some of our favourite picture books for The Sapling, the New Zealand website dedicated to conversations about children's books. Click though to read the reviews and to browse their excellent website.
Charco Press is a new publisher of contemporary literature in translation from Latin America. Based in Edinburgh, Charco is run by Argentinian-born Carolina Orloff and New Zealand-born Samuel McDowell. Click through to visit their website and learn more about these authors and their books. Their first five titles are all from Argentina:
If a thought is thought it must be thought through to its end. This formula is productive both of great misery and of great literature, but, for most people, either consequence is fairly easily avoided through a simple lack of tenacity or focus, or through fear. Unfortunately, we are not all so easily saved from ourselves by such shortcomings. The narrator of Ariana Harwicz’s razor-fine novel Die, My Love finds herself living in the French countryside with a husband and young child, incapable of feeling anything other than displaced in every aspect of her life, both trapped by and excluded from the circumstances that have come to define her. She both longs for and is revolted by family life with her husband and child, the violence of her ambivalences make her incapable of either accepting or changing a situation about which there is nothing ostensibly wrong, she withdraws into herself, and, as the gap separating herself from the rest of existence widens, her attempts to bridge it become both more desperate and more doomed, further widening the gap. Every detail of everything around her causes her pain and harms her ability to feel anything other than the opposite of the way she feels she should feel. This negative electrostatic charge, so to call it, builds and builds but she is unable to discharge it, to return her situation to ‘normal’, to relieve the torment. In some ways, the support and love of her husband make it harder to regain a grip on ‘reality’ - if her husband had been a monster, her battles could have been played out in their home rather than inside her (it is for this reason, perhaps, that people subconsciously choose partners who will justify the negative feelings towards which they are inclined). The narrator feels more affinity with animals than with humans, she behaves erratically or not at all, she becomes obsessed with a neighbour but the encounters with him that she describes, and the moments of self-obliterative release they provide, are, I would say, entirely fantasised. Between these fantasies and ‘objective reality’, however, falls a wide area about which we and she must remain uncertain whether her perceptions, understandings and reactions are accurate or appropriate. At times the narrator’s love for her child creates small oases of anxiety in her depression, but these become rarer. Harwicz’s writing is exquisite, both sensitive and brutal, both lucid and claustrophobic, her observations both subtle and overwhelming. As the narrator loses her footing, the writer ensures that we are borne with her on through the novel, an experience not dissimilar to gathering speed downhill in a runaway pram*. (*Not a spoiler). {Review by THOMAS}
>>Die, My Love has just been short-listed for the 2018 Republic of Consciousness Prize.
>>Die, My Love has just been short-listed for the 2018 Republic of Consciousness Prize.
Fireflies by Luis Segasti $30
How do we make our histories? Why is it that memory assembles certain illuminated moments into a kind of story? Segasti is fully aware that each moment in life or literature is an amalgam of numerous stories and times, all having bearing on a moment's experience, and concocts this novel with, among other referents, dashes of Joseph Beuys, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Japanese poets and Russian cosmonauts.
How do we make our histories? Why is it that memory assembles certain illuminated moments into a kind of story? Segasti is fully aware that each moment in life or literature is an amalgam of numerous stories and times, all having bearing on a moment's experience, and concocts this novel with, among other referents, dashes of Joseph Beuys, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Japanese poets and Russian cosmonauts.
On the eve of an important battle, a colonel is visited in his tent by an indigenous woman with a message to pass on. A man sets about renovating the house of his childhood, and starts to feel that he might be rebuilding his own life in the process. At a private clinic to treat the morbidly obese, a caregiver has issues of her own. Stories of immigration, marginality, history, intimacy and obsession from an acclaimed Argentinian author.
In a nameless suburb in an equally nameless country, every house has a room reserved for the president. No one knows when or why this came to be. It’s simply how things are, and no one seems to question it except for one young boy. Can anyone - the narrator? even the reader? - be trusted to tell the truth? Overtones of Cortázar and Kafka potentise the sinister mystery surrounding the room that is both many rooms and no room.
A Buenos Aires slum is transformed into a tiny utopia when a transvestite is led by a divine revelation to steer the community. The lively separatism of the shantytown attracts and then subsumes a journalist at first intent only on a story.
>> Read an extract.
>> Meet the Publisher.
NEW RELEASES
A few of the interesting books that arrived this week.
In a strange but possibly possible future Ireland where it never stops raining and where violence is the chief currency, the Kid, having fallen in love with the Earlie King's daughter, vows to care for their babby (although he is only 13). A lively and inventive novel from a fresh Irish writer.
"Mashing ancient myth with a miserable future, Denton’s fierce and distinctive debut should set the books world alight." - Irish Times
When an aging musician's reaches out to a feral child, he begins to question the borders between civilised and wild, between acceptable and unacceptable, and between natural and unnatural. Ecological aware, multileveled and beautifully written.
"Takes its place amongst Crace's finest novels." - Guardian
"The book blazes with anger." - Irish Times
River by Esther Kinsky $38
A woman moves to London and begins a series of walks along the River Lea, precisely recording what she sees. As the narrative progresses, the associative qualities of her experiences provide access to tributaries of memory, both personal and collective, reaching back to a place where stories seep into consciousness and collect themselves on the margins of experience.
"There’s a timeless quality to River. How much is fact and how much is pure fiction? It hardly matters. River exists in a hinterland between personal and universal strands of truth. Esther Kinsky has produced a minor-key masterpiece. Iain Galbraith’s English translation could well be one of the best new translations of 2018." — Asymptote
An anthology of examples of contemporary innovative and nonconforming literary forms in English emerging at the intersections of prose, poetry, art, performance, political activism; the whole being a sort of cultural resistance movement to ascendant nationalist and reactionary contexts.
In 1969, the four Gold children, Simon, Klara, Daniel, and Varya, visit a psychic on Manhattan’s Lower East Side who predicts the date each of them will die. The novel then follows how the siblings deal with the news. How does foreknowledge affect the choices we make? How would the way we live our life change as we approached what we knew to be its end?
"It's amazing how good this book is." - Karen Joy Fowler
How do we make our histories? Why is it that memory assembles certain illuminated moments into a kind of story? Segasti is fully aware that each moment in life or literature is an amalgam of numerous stories and times, all having bearing on a moment's experience, and concocts this novel with, among other referents, dashes of Joseph Beuys, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Japanese poets and Russian cosmonauts.
As Elissa Washuta makes the transition from college kid to independent adult, she finds herself overwhelmed by the calamities piling up in her brain. When her mood-stabilizing medications aren't threatening her life, they re shoving her from depression to mania and back in the space of an hour. Her crisis of American Indian identity bleeds into other areas of self-doubt: mental illness, sexual trauma, ethnic identity, and independence become intertwined. Compelling and inventively written, this is not only a portrait of a woman at the battle-front of her own life but a rethinking of the form of memoir.
On the eve of an important battle, a colonel is visited in his tent by an indigenous woman with a message to pass on. A man sets about renovating the house of his childhood, and starts to feel that he might be rebuilding his own life in the process. At a private clinic to treat the morbidly obese, a caregiver has issues of her own. Stories of immigration, marginality, history, intimacy and obsession from an acclaimed Argentinian author.
A very useful guide for writers, especially on the aspects of a work, such as structure, that should go unnoticed by the reader.
>> Read an excerpt.
On a small farm in Normandy, as Hitler rises to power in Germany, young Ludo comes of age in the care of his Uncle Ambrose, an eccentric mailman, kite-maker, and pacifist. Ludo’s quiet existence changes the day he meets Lila, a girl from the aristocratic Polish family who own the estate next door. Lila begins to reciprocate his feelings just as Europe descends into war. After Germany invades Poland, Lila and her family disappear, and Ludo’s journey to save her from the Nazis becomes a journey to save his loved ones, his country, and ultimately himself. A French classic, finally translated into English.
>> Romain Gary is a great big liar.
In a nameless suburb in an equally nameless country, every house has a room reserved for the president. No one knows when or why this came to be. It’s simply how things are, and no one seems to question it except for one young boy. Can anyone - the narrator? even the reader? - be trusted to tell the truth? Overtones of Cortázar and Kafka potentise the sinister mystery surround the room that is both many rooms and no room.
A man with a preternatural ability to find emerging artists, Richard Bellamy was one of the first advocates of pop art, minimalism, and conceptual art. At home both in New York's arts Bohemia and glittering upper-crust salons, Bellamy was a catalyst for fame for many artists in the mid-to-late twentieth century.
What was it like to have a body in the nineteenth century? How did attitudes towards bodies shape social practices? How did the physical particularities of individuals affect the course of collective history? Hughes will make you think differently both about historical personages and about life in the Victorian era.
"A dazzling experiment in life writing. Every page fizzes with the excitement of fresh discoveries. Each page becomes a window on to a world that is far stranger than we might expect." - Guardian
Interesting comparisons can be made to the work of Rita Angus and others practicing in New Zealand in the same period.
Generally regarded as the one of the purest examples of the Nouveau Roman novels of which Robbe-Grillet outlined the theory in For a New Novel (1963), Jealousy is narrated by an invisible uninvolved observer who can be postulated as the jealous husband of the character known only as A, whose suspicion that A. is having an affair with a neighbour constantly brings the reliability of the narrative into question. Robbe-Grillet's 'phenomenological' writing has a rigour and clarity still stands as an object lesson for contemporary writers.
What is the black spot that is spreading across a flamboyant gambler's vision? More importantly: what does it mean?
"The Blot sets a high bar for 2017's fiction. There are moments of genuine, inexplicable tenderness as well as the sarcasm, venality and schadenfreude that swirl around the book. It also shows that the genre best equipped to speak truthfully about the world we are in is not a flat-footed and sententious realism, but un-realism." - Scotland on Sunday
"The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it." Orwell's clarity of thought is a healthy tool in a post-truth world. Read what he has to say about freedom, ethics, honesty and propaganda.
Traces the fashion arcs of the 1960s and 1970s, when designers worked hard to keep pace with social change. Well documented with historical and garment photographs.
Returning to Iceland to visit his dying father, a writer thinks deeply about the passing of time and of life perched on an island of black lava pushed at on all sides by implacable ocean. In the memories of tte narrator and his father a century of change, both personal and cultural, becomes apparent.
Long-listed for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
"Powerful and sparkling. Translator Philip Roughton's feather-light touch brings out the gleaming, fairy-tale quality of the writing, making this novel an impassioned and lyrical read. Stefansson brings out the history of a place and its people in a way few contemporary writers ever manage." - Irish Times
The great epic poem, compiled by Lönnrot in the nineteenth century from Finnish and Karelian folklore and mythology, contains much that is very ancient and demonstrates an alternative path to consideration of the human condition, so to call it, especially in its relation to the forces of nature, so to call them.
In 1945, on the eve of his trial for the pro-Fascist broadcasts he produced in Italy, Pound was declared insane and committed to an institution, where he stayed for ten years, holding salons for visitors. Swift enters these uncomfortable waters to learn more about this strange man and about the relationship between his life and his poetry.
The so-called 'Buried Army' that so amazed the world when discovered in Shaanxi Province in 1974 continues to provide new insights into life and death in China in the late third century BCE, and to pose new questions.
A selection of the best food writing from 'The Poet Laureate of Appetite', and author of the hugely enjoyable The Raw and the Cooked.
"A celebration of eating well and drinking even better as a recipe for the good life." - Kirkus
A nicely presented new collection of stories in which Oates typically at once coolly condemns and warmly sympathises with her characters, their lives careening out of bounds.
A sensitively illustrated true story of a violin's survival of the horrors of both The Somme and Gallipoli, and of the collective efforts of ordinary soldiers to protect it and return it to its owner when they became separated.
A half-life's account of one man's struggles to understand himself through the intensities and regrets of his erotic fixations.
"A rewarding excavation about one man’s inner life, mapping out the way our emotional and romantic ties can shape our self-knowledge for the rest of our lives." - Lambda
"A Proustian tale of conflicted desires." - The New York Times
"The stakes could not be higher in this bloody, muscular and adrenaline-charged memoir from a pioneering heart surgeon. `Surgeons are meant to be objective,' Westaby tells himself, `not human'. What makes this book so fascinating, and so moving, is the terrible tension between these necessary qualities." - Sunday Times
Turn the flap and trace the outlines to complete the creatures in this madcap interactive tale of the meetings of similars.
BOOKS @ VOLUME #61 (10.2.18).
Read our latest NEWSLETTER. Find out what we've been reading. Find out about our after school book groups. Find out about this week's new releases. Find out about International Book Giving Day.
This week's BOOK OF THE WEEK is Lloyd Jones's new novel The Cage.
>> Read Thomas's review.
>> Jones discusses the book with Gregory O'Brien.
>> Radio from across the ditch.
>> Some book club notes!
>> If you're in Wellington on Tuesday 13th, go to the launch at Unity Books.
>> Jones wrote this book in anger over the ill-treatment and passivity Jones observed directed by ordinary citizens towards Syrian refugees in Hungary. Here are some other books at VOLUME dealing with the refugee crisis:
Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck (reviewed by Stella)
Charges by Elfreide Jelinek (reviewed by Thomas)
Mediterranean by Armin Greder (a powerful wordless picture book)
Violent Borders: Refugees and the right to move by Reece Jones
Against the Double Blackmail: Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbours by Slavoj Žižek
I Can Only Tell You What My Eyes See by Giles Duley
Refugee Boy by Benjamin Zephaniah
Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System by Alexander Betts and Paul Collier
The New Odyssey: A history of Europe's refugee crisis by Patrick Kingsley
Crossing the Sea: With the Syrians on the exodus to Europe by Wolfgang Bauer
The Bone Sparrow by Zana Fraillon
Illegal by Eion Colfer, Andrew Donkin and Giovanni Rigano
The Right to Have Rights by Alastair Hunt, Stephanie DeGooyer, Werner Hamacher, Samuel Moyn and Astra Taylor
The Quiet War on Asylum by Tracey Barnett
 {Reviewed by STELLA} | Han Kang's semi-autobiographical The White Book is a contemplation of life and death. It’s her meditative study of her sibling’s death at a few hours old, and how this event shapes her own history. Taking the colour white as a central component to explore this memory, she makes a list of objects that trigger responses. These include swaddling bands, salt, snow, moon, blank paper and shroud. “With each item I wrote down, a ripple of agitation ran through me. I felt I needed to write this book, and that the process of writing would be transformative, would itself transform, into something like a white ointment applied to a swelling, like a gauze laid over a wound.” Han Kang was in Warsaw - a place which is foreign to her when she undertook this project - and in being in a new place, she recalls with startling clarity the voices and happenings of her home and past. The book is a collection of quiet yet unsettling reflections on exquisitely observed moments. These capsules of text build upon each other, creating a powerful sense of pain, loss and beauty. Each moment so tranquil yet uneasy. Han Kang’s writing is sparse, delicate and nuanced. Describing her process of writing she states, “Each sentence is a leap forwards from the brink of an invisible cliff, where time’s keen edges are constantly renewed. We lift our foot from the solid ground of all our life lived thus far, and take that perilous step out into the empty air.” You can sense the narrator’s exploration and stepping out into the unknown in her descriptions of snow, in her observations as she walks streets hitherto unknown, and in her attempts to realise the view of her mother, a young woman dealing with a premature birth, and the child herself, briefly looking out at the world. Small objects become talismans of memory, a white pebble carries much more meaning than its actuality. Salt and sugar cubes each hold their own value in their crystal structure. “Those crystals had a cool beauty, their white touched with grey.” “Those squares wrapped in white paper possessed an almost unerring perfection.” In 'Salt', she cleverly reveres the substance while at the same time cursing the pain it can cause a fresh wound. The White Book is a book you handle with some reverence - its white cover makes you want to pick it up delicately. A small hardback, the text is interspersed with a handful of moody black and white photographs. This is a book you will read, pick up again to re-read passages, as each deserves concentration for both the writing and ideas. |
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The Weight of Things by Marianne Fritz {Reviewed by THOMAS}
The degree of control any of us have over our life is undoubtedly, if measured against the degree of force bearing down on us in the form of history, negligible, but we are generally spared realisation of the full extent of this negligibility unless history rolls more heavily upon us, especially if we are constituted to, or are caused to, lie where its tread impacts uncushioned upon its path. History hits the unfortunate hardest: those at the bottom of the heap, so to call it, are society’s most expendable and the first to absorb the impact of the weight of things. Our social structures are largely concerned with positioning others to take our place in the way of approaching disaster. Marianne Fritz’s novel The Weight of Things is written is a brisk, almost satirical tone, yet it slowly, as it jumps back and forth in time, closing in on the pivotal act of the book, reveals depths of suffering and harm absorbed by its most vulnerable characters. What does it mean to survive when others do not survive? What does it mean to have a body following a disaster that deprived so many of theirs (and that continues to press itself towards the destruction of the bodies of the survivors)? Following the Second World War, Berta learns from Wilhelm that Rudolph, the music teacher whose child she carries, has been killed, and that Rudolph has charged Wilhelm to care for Berta. He marries her and she bears two children: Little Rudolph and Little Berta. The attention shown Berta by the two men draws the envy of Berta’s sister Wilhelmina, who is intent on poisoning the relationship and taking Berta’s place. The doubling of the characters’ names: Berta/Little Berta, Rudolph/Little Rudolph, Wilhelm/Wilhelmina serves to further depersonalise the forces that act through them, limited as they are in their capacities to understand those forces, as well as to manifest the contrapuntal musical structure of the novel. Wilhelm, with his job as a ‘chauffeur and come-hither boy’ for an aristocratic playboy, puts his employer’s interests before those of his family, and, with his ‘chauffeur philosophy’ (he extols the virtues of seeing obstacles early enough to avoid them), preserves his ignorance and passivity as Berta falls under the weight of things. Despite the love she expends on her children, Berta cannot see them ultimately as anything other than failed creations for which she is responsible, in a world in which a worthwhile life is impossible. The act she commits is so much a result of the mental collapse which manifests itself in her, though its mechanisms remain beyond her and opaque to her, that it is not inconsistent with her natural fatalism and resignation (the weight of things having conditioned her to its irresistibility). The frame narrative of this multitemporal novel has Wilhelm and Wilhelmina visiting Berta in the psychiatric hospital (or ‘fortress’) in which she is contained, where a final cruelty is visited upon her and she commits the ultimate resignation, demonstrating that more harm can be done to subjectivity that its removal from the world.
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NEW RELEASES
New this week.
Exploring the risks and seductions of going over the edge, this collection of stories and fragments provides a good introduction to this cult writer of the 1960s who cut an alternative path across twentieth century innovative writing, bridging the world of Virginia Woolf and Anna Kavan with that of Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus.
"Ann Quin is one of the few mid-century British novelists who actually, in the long term, matter." - Tom McCarthy
" Quin works over a small area with the finest of tools. Every page, every word gives evidence of her care and workmanship." - New York Times
Eighteenth century German physicist, satirist, Anglophile, mathematician, electrical theorist, womaniser, hunchback, asthmatic, hypochondriac and author of 8,000 aphorisms, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg recorded his many and various thoughts in a dozen what he termed 'sudelbücher' (scrapbooks). Senges' remarkable novel treats these fragments as minutiae feeling their way towards becoming a single work - and attempts to construct that work.
"This is no mere literary game: what hides behind all this is a deep observation of the links between one's age and one's culture; a subtle reflection on the construction of canon, schools, and literary cults that structures our idea of great literature and thus closes our mind to a more dynamic, alternative, or revisionist view. It is also a very moving illustration of close reading as a sort of rewriting that goes beyond the specialist consensus, a political novel that dares not say its name, and one of the funniest books I've read in a long while." - The Quarterly Conversation
When her mother, a former slave, is killed by the panther that also leaves herself disfigured, Samantha crosses the Texan frontier with her brother Benjamin, and, with an unlikely posse, seeks revenge on this implacable and unknowable force of nature.
In turns funny, angry and insightful, Lockwood's memoir of growing up with a father several times larger than life in a world several sizes too small for them both is not quite like anything else. Lockwood, whose Motherland, Fatherland, Homelandsexuals positioned her as an American approximation of Hera Lindsay Bird, will appear at this year's New Zealand Festival.
"Lockwood's prose is cute and dirty and innocent and experienced, Betty Boop in a pas de deux with David Sedaris." - The New York Times
"I couldn't explain how I'd become a teenage mother, or shoplifted books for years, or why I was afraid of the dark and had a compulsion to rescue people, without explaining about the Brethren or the God they made for us, and the Rapture they told us was coming. But then I couldn't really begin to talk about the Brethren without explaining about my father..."
Winner of the 2017 Costa Biography Prize.
"Beautiful, dizzying, terrifying, Stott's memoir maps the unnerving hinterland where faith becomes cruelty and devotion turns into disaster. A brave, frightening and strangely hopeful book." - Olivia Laing, author of The Lonely City
In 865, a great Viking army landed in East Anglia, precipitating a series of wars that would last until the middle of the following century. It was in this time of crisis that the modern kingdoms of Britain were born. In their responses to the Viking threat, these kingdoms forged their identities as hybrid cultures.
Thirteen-year-old Lora is determined to leave Havana and teach literacy in the rural backblocks of Cuba. Her parents aren't too pleased, but she has the support of her grandfather.
A graphic novel-style introduction to the senses, drawn by a neuroscientist. Interesting and fun. From the author of the excellent Neurocomic.
>>> Sample pages!
Elizabeth, eleven, spends Christmas break at Winterhouse hotel under strange circumstances, where she discovers that she has magical abilities, and where her love of puzzles makes her ideally suited to solve a mystery.
>> Looks good!
A Buenos Aires slum is transformed into a tiny utopia when a transvestite is led by a divine revelation to steer the community. The lively separatism of the shantytown attracts and then subsumes a journalist at first intent only on a story.
>> Read an extract.
Gazing at illuminated manuscripts made by human hands hundreds of years ago creates a very special kind of connection across the centuries. Who better to do the introductions than Christopher de Hamel? Fully illustrated.
Astrid loves to spend her days racing down the hillside on her sledge or skis. Astrid longs for other children to come to her village and join her adventures. Instead, she has to put up with a grumpy old seventy-four year old for a best friend (although secretly, she knows she wouldn't have it any other way). Astrid's world is about to be turned upside down, however, first by the arrival of a strange family, and then a mystery woman. Her best friend, Gunnvald, has been keeping a secret from her - one that will test their friendship to its limits. Everything is changing in Astrid's valley, and she's not sure she likes it.
In June 2006, police were called to number 9 Downshire Hill in Hampstead to investigate reports of unusual card activity. The owner of the house, Allan Chappelow, was an award-winning photographer and biographer, an expert on George Bernard Shaw, and a notorious recluse, who had not been seen for several weeks. Inside they found piles of rubbish, trees growing through the floor, and, in what was once the living room, the body of Chappelow, battered to death, and buried under four-feet of page proofs. The man eventually convicted of his murder was a Chinese dissident named Wang Yam: the grandson of one of Mao's closest aides, and a key negotiator in the Tiananmen Square protests. His trial was the first in the UK to be held without access to the press or public. Yam has always protested his innocence - admitting to the card fraud, but claiming no knowledge of the murder. Intriguing.
Arthur's ambivalence towards his estranged father reaches a head during an evening of drinking and romance in this novella from the author of Stoner.
Inspired by the Foundling Hospital, this tale set in the eighteenth century features, understandable, an orphan, and the transformative power of music. Illustrated by Michael Foreman.
The movement of rural Maori to the cities following World War 2 has transformed not only they texture of New Zealand life but also necessitated new definitions of what it means to be Maori.
Obviously, any system that is dependent upon indefinite and continued growth is at best unsustainable. Why then has this been the dominant model of economics in recent times? What are the alternatives?
The trail of the Storm-Opals takes Mouse into a dangerous new world. With little brother Sparrow and friend Crow alongside her, she finds herself in Sky, where fortresses hide among the clouds, secret libraries (skybraries) nestle atop icebergs and the air swirls with ferocious flying beasts. Start the series with Sea.
Everyone has heard of MI5 and MI6. Some may even have heard of MI9 which helped downed airmen escape in World War II. But few will know of MI14(d) - the `Special Pigeon Service'. Between 1941 and 1944, sixteen thousand plucky pigeons were dropped in an arc from Bordeaux to Copenhagen as part of `Columba' - a secret British operation to bring back intelligence from those living under Nazi occupation.
A biography of Coleridge, showing his life's arc to be similar to that described in the poem he wrote at age 25. Guite not only uses 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' as a lens through which to view the poet's life, but also uses it to reveal something of the human condition or relevance to our own times.
A novel of three strands (the Roman occupation, the present, a plausible future) set around a Roman Road in South-East England, and with a strong ecological awareness. The post-apocalyptic strand is written in a decayed English reminiscent of Riddley Walker.
For a young woman in medieval Russia, the choices are stark- marriage or a life in a convent. Vasya will choose a third way: magic. Follows The Bear and the Nightingale.
"With its beautiful storytelling and fiercely independent heroine fighting to be in charge of her own story, Katherine Arden's series finally fills a gap long left empty by Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. Full of snowy Russian legends come to life, the lights and political intrigue of medieval Moscow, beautiful princes and monks with swords, Arden's writing is striking in its loveliness and impressive in its storytelling instincts." - Anna James
How have the past twenty years fulfilled our expectations for our museum?
>> Have a look inside.
Our latest NEWSLETTER, containing our reviews and a selection of new books and literary events.
BOOKS @ VOLUME #60 (3.2.18)
Our BOOK OF THE WEEK this week is A Skinful of Shadows by Frances Hardinge.
>> Read Stella's review.
>> Visit the author's website.
>> Rachel Vale on designing the cover of A Skinful of Shadows.
>> How to paint your nails to match the book.
>> Meet Frances Hardinge.
>> Galloping Imposter Syndrome: on winning the Costa for The Lie Tree.
>> Books by Frances Hardinge at VOLUME.
 | The Mother of All Questions: Further feminisms by Rebecca Solnit {Reviewed by STELLA} A few years ago I read Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me and was bowled over by her clarity, wit, anger and determination. Her recent collection of feminist essays, The Mother of All Questions, covers similar ground. She explores power, prejudice and sexual violence head-on, making the reader sit up and take notice, questioning the stories that we are told, the ones we hear and the others that get subsumed. This collection is very much about telling our stories, and about what happens when we do. In the light of high-profile celebrity abuse cases, Weinstein, Saville and Cosby to mention just a few, this couldn't be more relevant, and it is not surprising that we are seeing a steady stream of feminist writings on the topic of rape and sexual abuse. Solnit wants to dig deeper to uncover the reasons that we have a culture of violence, and why women continue to be victims of a power hierarchy that favours men, particularly white men. Yet this isn’t a polemic - it doesn’t label all men as perpetrators, and in the essay, 'The Pigeonholes When the Doves Have Flown', she talks about the problems of categories and labeling societal groups. In her introduction and an essay entitled, 'Feminism: When the Men Arrive', she acknowledges the changes in feminist dialogue in recent years with the advent of men talking about feminism and critiquing the patriarchal system that disenfranchises women (and men). The lead essay of this collection, 'The Mother of All Questions', is a survey of silence and the silencing, in all its many guises, of women’s stories. It’s a compelling analysis of the dangers of silence and the power that silence can strip from a person. Solnit believes in language and the importance of all stories to be told, and that by speaking out and speaking up change will come. In her dialogue, she is hopeful. Yet change is slow - domestic violence, campus rape and misogynistic behaviour are still rife. For many reading these essays it may feel repetitive, that the arguments have been made before, and this is a valid point. Feminism has been through several waves. The difference, Solnit would argue, is that a greater and more diverse community is now talking and maybe more are listening. Solnit’s writing is agile and thought-provoking. She draws on history, popular culture and writing by her forebears as well as her contemporaries to illustrate her points. Most essays deserve a second, if not third, reading. |
 | The Cage by Lloyd Jones {Review by THOMAS}
“We wanted the strangers to be comfortable. We wanted them to be more like us, and to be more responsive to our own willing faces. We wanted them to be available. Instead they moved around the hotel like ghosts.” Two strangers arrive in a small rural town, stripped of their identities and histories by the presumed trauma (suggested by one of the townsfolk as “Death. Colossal death.”) that caused them to leave the circumstances that had comprised their lives and expose themselves to the mercy of the townsfolk. The strangers are given nicknames and accommodated at first in a room at the hotel (a supposed place of ‘welcome’ to strangers), where they are repeatedly asked about their pasts, but they are what the townsfolk see as unwilling to talk. Is it possible to convey something that is beyond the experience of the hearer? It is language itself that is incapable of expressing the disaster. “If we must say that something looks likesomething else then we miss the opportunity to say what it is,” says the stranger nicknamed the Doctor. The strangers make a tangle of wire in an attempt to express their plight, but the townsfolk’s response is to replicate this model on a large enough scale in the garden to imprison the strangers (fortunately this diabolus-ex-machina transition is sufficiently downplayed to minimise its potential clumsiness). In fiction the symbolic is as literal as the literal. The cage is constructed by the townsfolk to separate them from the experience of those placed inside it. Although all that we know of the strangers (one, like the narrator, loves the music of Mendelssohn; the other, like the narrator’s uncle, the hotel proprietor, was a tennis player) demonstrates their similarity to their hosts, as soon as they are seen as ‘other’, the fears and the suppressed abject aspects of their perceivers are projected upon them. Kept in the cage, the key ‘lost’, the strangers are fed and hosed, and become, at first, something of a tourist attraction. Of necessity they must excrete in a corner of their enclosure. When one attempts to conceal the other when he is doing this, it is interpreted as display by the observers. For the sightseers, “the most common complaint is that a visitor was ‘looked at’. And the most common question? ‘Are the strangers happy?’ Of course they are. Why wouldn’t they be?” The narrator is an adolescent boy, who, like the strangers, is a refugee from an unfaceable trauma in his past that made him an orphan, who is given shelter by his aunt and uncle, and who, also like the strangers, is unnamed in the book, referred to by the nickname given to him by his uncle. The fate of the strangers is overseen by a group of ‘trustees’, who appoint themselves to grant or deny the basic necessities to the strangers. They are granted, first, the use of a hose and, later, as the weather cools, the use of an old electric plate warmer, but the use of both of these is so constrained as to be more of a cruelty than a kindness. The narrator is appointed to observe the strangers but to not interfere. He takes his task seriously, but fails to represent the plight of the strangers to the trustees, and, although in sympathy in some ways with the plight of the strangers, he takes no useful action to relieve them. “If I dash out there and offer sympathy, the moment will lose its authenticity. It will become confused with my reason for dashing out there.” His inaction and, by extension, the inaction of the trustees, is crueller and does more harm than the actions taken by some, such as by Mr Hughes, who pelts them with oranges: “Look at them, he said, Rubbing their shit in our faces.” The narrator’s role as an observer makes him not only complicit but catalytic in the treatment of the strangers. It is also he who does the actual labour of building a ‘monument’ to the strangers, a wall of stone that turns the cage into a virtual tomb, that conceals and denies the reality it represents. Words come unstuck from their meanings. It is the continued containment of the traumatised strangers in the cage as ‘other’ that aligns the narrator with society, that prevents him from being categorised as an outsider himself. When the strangers attempt to escape, he feels threatened: “As the strangers dig, I feel a surprising allegiance to the cage.” All demarcations will lead to prejudice and abuse if they are not actively challenged. The strangers are regarded more and more as animals, like those in the zoo or on the farm: “One morning I could not separate Doctor’s expectant look from those of thirsty cattle lined up at the fence.” As the book progresses the narrator overcomes his sympathy with the strangers and learns to see them as abject. “Doctor’s misery stops at the end of his nose. He is in his own world. I am in mine.” Due to the failure to take action, the degradation progresses towards its projected end. “Some awful accommodation is offered that at first everyone resists, then welcomes.” The garden is divided into “two worlds” by a high wall built by the narrator. On one side his uncle “bangs away with his racquet and ball,” alone, though the stranger, who “squats and shits on the other”, was a tennis player before his degradation. For a while I thought this book, written in anger over the ill-treatment and passivity Jones observed directed by ordinary citizens towards Syrian refugees in Hungary, would have been more suited to being a short story or novella, but I came to appreciate the appropriately drawn-out portrayal of passive cruelty and its dehumanising consequences. The book has been compared with Kafka by some, and there are some resemblances, albeit Jones’s is a small-town antipodean Kafkaism, but where Jones’s meanings have a mathematical relation to the narrative (usually stopping short of feeling forced, thanks to the narrator’s naivety and lack of perspicacity), the referents of Kafka’s allegories lie somewhere beyond analysis.
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