 | Patient X: The case-book of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa by David Peace {Reviewed by THOMAS} He was born for lock-down, he told her, and it was not until the circumstances provided themselves, as circumstances occasionally do, as they had now done, that he had realised how far short ordinary life fell of those conditions, the conditions for which he had been born, or so it seemed to him. How had he managed that ordinary life, so to call it, that ordinary life in which he had participated beforehand, at least to a small extent, he wondered, but, even more, how will he manage to return to this so-called ordinary life if this so-called ordinary life is possible again? It was true that he was not making sense, and she had little trouble convincing him of this, but this nonsense was undeniably true for a part of himself, he thought, why else would he think it, how could this part be acknowledged, how could this part be ridiculed and suppressed by the rest of himself, if it was not permitted, from time to time, to express itself as if it spoke for all of him, or in the name of him, to release the pressure of its inclinations through exaggeration and to be stilled, at least momentarily, by the deflation that follows this exaggeration? Who is it or what is it that speaks for himself? In any case, he said, already beginning to ramble, he did not experience the self as a thing, there is, in his experience, he said, no such thing as a self, excepting perhaps in the eyes of others, in the world of names, which is the same thing, there are only experiences, inclinations, images, roughly bundled by who knows what forces, adhered to each other through being pressed so hard together, or by inertia, or by their shapes, though such shapes are always figurative at best, which should be etymologically self-evident, our identities are more convenient than real, he said, what lies within their bounds must necessarily be either tedious or inconsistent. Or both. Before she had the opportunity to point out the flaws in his thinking, the tediousness and inconsistency of his thinking, the tediousness and inconsistency that were the defining characteristics of his thinking, which would at once both invalidate and prove his point, he began to move the discussion, if such a one-directional torrent of speech can be called a discussion, even euphemistically, towards the book he had been reading, Patient X, a novel, if it is a novel, or a set of stories, if we can call them that, and possibly we should call them that, by David Peace on the life of the Japanese writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, or maybe that should be the lives of the writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, as here indeed is a person irreducible to a single narrative, a person who bundled his discordant parts with narrative, outsourcing his inclinations into characters, failing always to resolve the enigma of his own existence, or should I say, he said, the trauma of his own existence, a trauma being that which is irresolvable by narrative but also that toward which narrative is ineluctably drawn, but by so failing producing texts of considerable interest. “These are the narratives you tell yourself, you write yourself, you keep telling yourself, will keep writing yourself, these stories, these narratives that do not hold, which will not hold, will break apart, breaking you apart.” Peace writes Akutagawa in the third person and in the first and in the second, as fractured into stories, as seen by others, as fact, as experienced by Akutagawa himself, as he night have been if he had not been as he was. Akutagawa’s words well up throughout the text, or they are Peace’s words, if such a distinction can sensibly be made, Akutagawa’s double is Akutagawa himself, and also Peace, and neither Akutagawa nor Peace but something or someone else, there are no end of doubles. Akutagawa fears that there is another passing himself off as him, a doppelgänger that lives a life parallel to his, or lives the life that he does not live, or, if they share a life, that lives the parts of his life that he does not acknowledge, does not wish to acknowledge, cannot acknowledge. He fears that he is not himself but is a double passing himself off as him, even to himself. Of course, he told her, though she was fast developing resistance to his telling in just such a way as she had developed resistance to other forms of illness, as soon as a writer writes they create just such a doppelgänger, this is unavoidable, all literary life is doppelgänger life, and the closer to ‘actual’ life this literary doppelgänger life is, the greater the deception and the more striking, and the more disorienting the doppelgänger. In fact, he said, the word doppelgänger is only sufficient in a single instance, the cumulative effect of a life, or a literary oeuvre, each as fictional and as truthful as the other, is that of the presence and action of multiple doppelgängers, multigangers or polygangers, he wasn’t sure what to call them, existing and acting all at the same moment, thanks to literature, thanks to language, both in the past and in the present. Every character in a story is a splinter of one character. Akutagawa was fractured by fear, he was “afraid of the doors, afraid of the floors. That open, that tilt. The dust from the ceiling, the dust on the floor. Afraid of the tatami, afraid of the lamps. The old tatami, the dim lamps. Every night, every day.” He was driven mad by the fear that he would be driven mad like his mother who became mad after his birth. “The first act of the human tragedy starts when an individual becomes a child of certain parents.” Akutagawa’s resistance to life begins with his resistance to being born. He says he doesn’t want to be born “but no-one can hear you, no-one is listening to you or truly cares what you say, your words are drowned in the waters, your words are lost in the tunnel, and so, before long, the waters are breaking, and off you go, swept along, down the tunnel, through the curtains, into the room and out.” And, really, each moment is a repetition of the trauma of becoming, except in so far as we are anaesthetised through narrative, or habit, if these can be distinguished, he said, all narrative, literary or otherwise, is lived by our doppelgängers, or polygangers, there must be a better word, all life is a second-hand life, everything is experienced at a remove, all existence is an act of appropriation. Akutagawa’s resistance to “the diseases of the mind that reduce a man to a lump of flesh, plagued by delusions” reduced him to a lump of flesh, plagued by delusions, and Akutagawa ended the life of that lump, but the delusions that plagued that lump produced literature of considerable psychological insight, as well as beauty, and the same could be said of Peace’s book, he said. It is narrative, he said, though by this time she was not listening to him, he had after all never given himself the opportunity to listen to her, it is narrative, literary or otherwise, that provides the distancing from what he called, rather vaguely, existential trauma, that enables life to be lived despite such existential trauma, and the distancing of fiction is the safest form of distancing, the distancing of tense, or of point of view, of character, of narrative, or of any of the other novelistic PPE, provides the best protection, though not, as Akutagawa showed, infallible protection. Are we comfortable, though, he asked, and he was fortunate not to be expecting an answer to this question, with living at such remove? He thought perhaps we were, at least in current circumstances, or in what he termed current circumstances but which were probably circumstances that applied more particularly to himself than to any shared experience, current or otherwise, but he was not challenged for his sloppy thinking, if it could be called his own. He was not the sort of person, he said, if there in fact is such a sort, who takes refuge in the third person, I would never take refuge in the third person, he said, I always refer to myself in the first person, I take responsibility, entirely, for my opinions and for my actions, he said, by claiming them as mine, by admitting to them, no less, by referring to myself always in the first person, I do not refer to myself in the third person, I do not even attempt the pretence that I am fictional character, he said, a fictional character hiding not only in the third person but in the past tense also, he said, the past tense is another distancing device, a fictional distancing device that I would never stoop to using when referring to myself, he said, though, now that I think about it, he thought, the first person and the present tense are no less deceptive, the first person and the present tense are also fictional devices, fictional devices that give the illusion of honesty and immediacy and are therefore even more deceptive than the third person and the past tense, where the deception is more obvious and therefore less deceptive, he thought, but naturally he did not speak these thoughts. Whether he spoke these thoughts of not made no difference, he could speak or not to an equal lack of effect, no response was forthcoming, she had long ago fallen asleep. |
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 | The Wild Lands by Paul Greci {Reviewed by STELLA}Alaska is cut off and abandoned. Industry has ceased as the resources dried up, wildfires have ripped through the landscape year on year and most people have left their homes — bussed out to an uncertain future. There are no supplies, no internet, no news, and those that stayed are hardy and resourceful, living in underground shelters — basements of houses — the rest of the homes being razed to the ground, and attempting to survive off the land. The ongoing environmental disasters have tipped the landscape into chaos and now without any salmon running in the waters nor beasts on the plains, after two years of eking out an existence, it’s time to move on. Walking is the only option over vast distances. North or South? Travis’s parents decide on North towards the Yukon. It’s a long walk, especially for his little sister Jess, and there are many dangers along the way, especially some of the people they encounter. When they finally get to the river it’s vast and the way across looks impossible, but teaming up another small group is a way forward — until disaster strikes. Separated from their parents and with no way across the river, Travis and Jess head back to their home to retrieve more supplies, left behind (buried) just in case they needed to return. Suddenly, all decisions are on Travis’s head and the responsibility for his sister lies with him and him alone. Who can he trust? Anyone? Where should you go? They can no longer stay in such an inhospitable environment. And when you do meet new folk, it will be a test each and every time. Pit this alongside the physical dangers and the shortage of food and the sheer willpower you will need to keep moving towards an uncertain future and you have a riveting survival story — both rich in its description of a ruined (and recovering) landscape, and provocative in its glimpse of what a future planet could look like if we continue on the extraction path. It’s also got some sassy survivalists as well as some dangerously deluded ones. Will Travis be able to find a safe place for Jess, and will he have enough strength to keep going when the odds are stacked against them? And how far will he go to protect those he loves? A gripping teen story that rips along at a great pace. |
      | Cookbooks by Yotam Ottolenghi {Reviewed by STELLA} I’m the kind of cook who looks in the fridge to see what’s there. What vegetables are lurking in the bins? And then, what can I do with that? Well towards the end of a fortnight’s lock-down shop, the pickings were slim, but two-thirds of an aubergine meant a meal was able to be made. The cupboard announced a deficit of pasta, but plenty of rice. So a pilaf or risotto — reach for the Ottolenghis! Cookbooks are inspiring — sometimes they might just trigger an idea of something to whip up; they are surprising — giving you new and unexpected ways to cook. and food combinations to experiment with; delightful — if they are well written, with great anecdotes and foodie knowledge; and sometimes you just go ahead and follow the recipe. In Plenty, my first Ottolenghi purchase, the recipe for Lemon and Aubergine Risotto fitted the bill for one of our lock-down dinners. Okay, so we didn’t have any lemons, basil, nor the correct rice type or vegetable stock (but that was easily sorted with a quick half-hour boil of vegetable ends (saved) from previously meals, an onion, garlic and fennel (from the garden), but we did have a lime and rice of a kind. The aubergine was well under half of what was required but skipping the topping of fried and diced cubes would be fine (still enough for the body of the risotto) and we did have a bottle of cheap white wine which needed a purpose. The recipe has a few steps, but you can walk through these in a relaxing and orderly manner — no crazy keeping both hands occupied with several different tasks at once. Ottolenghi’s recipes are like this — pleasure in the cooking. While some are more time-consuming and have a few tricky preparation aspects, most are adaptable and some (especially in his latest book, Simple) are ingredient- and time-minimal. Plenty and Plenty More are wholly vegetarian, while Jerusalem and Nopi (more dining than cooking) and Simple include recipes for all palates. And there is also Sweet! Needless to say, the lime and aubergine risotto was a hit — even with those who prefer pasta to rice. |
 | Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard {Reviewed by Thomas} While being generally uncomfortable about comfort, he wrote when asked what he read for comfort for an article about what booksellers read for comfort, in times of particular stress or despair I do find that re-reading any of the novels of Thomas Bernhard makes me feel better, though I am also uncomfortable about the concept of feeling better, he wrote. Apparently, as Level Four was approaching its end, an end he declared himself to be resisting, at least internally, though resistance is useless, so they say, and it was unclear in any case what form such internal resistance could take, he had been re-reading Thomas Bernhard’s novel Woodcutters, a book that he had read before, and, indeed, reviewed before, so, he thought, he would not review it again, he would just read it for what he, not without irony, called comfort, not that he understood the word. Bernhard’s sentences are unrelentingly beautiful and his negativity so intense that it becomes ludicrous, he wrote. Everything exaggerated moves towards its opposite, so I often find my negativity turned, too, he also wrote, and then, he thought, I have finished answering the question I have been asked, not only answering it but explaining my answer, too, which was more than I had been asked to do, even though I have done it rather briefly. The first time he had read Woodcutters, he had been younger than the narrator, and younger than the author when he wrote the book, the narrator and the author sharing rather more than their age, he thought, but now he was older than the narrator, and older than the author was when he wrote the book, though admittedly not quite as old as the author was when he died, or, rather, committed suicide, whichever is the better description of the author’s death. The narrator of Woodcutters has not committed suicide, obviously, and does not do so at the end, but the entire novel is narrated in the evening of the day of the funeral of one of the narrator’s former friends, who, finding herself denied artistic success merely through mediocrity of talent, which is not necessarily sufficient to exclude someone from success, depending on how you understand the word success, but perhaps sufficient to exclude someone from success in what the narrator calls Vienna’s art mill, the art mill that grinds even those with talent into powder, most effectively by acclaiming their talent, and, by doing so, destroying it, whereas Joana, losing all that she had going for her, which is a strange turn of phrase, spent many years in alcoholism and despair, in decline, so to speak, and hanged herself in the village in which she was born, just before the narrator’s return to Vienna after an absence, apparently, of some twenty years. The host of the dinner party at which the narrator observes the proceedings without involving himself in them, as he says, was once a talented composer, or at least so it had seemed to the narrator when he had been involved with him twenty or even thirty years before, before the narrator had left Vienna in disgust with Vienna and with the artistic and literary circles of Vienna, but now the host has been destroyed by his talent, or by the acclaim accorded his talent, and in this way relieved of this talent, and the host, one Auersberger, or so he is called in the novel, though it is perhaps interesting to note that the book was banned in Austria after one of Bernhard’s former patrons reognised himself in the character, is now little more than ludicrous or pathetic. And the same could be said, and indeed is said by the narrator, albeit to himself, as he sits in a chair just off the main room, observing them, of the other guests at the dinner party, the dinner party styled by its hosts an artistic dinner held in honour of an actor who is rather late to arrive, but really more of a gathering of members of the artistic and literary circles that included both the narrator and Joana twenty or thirty years before, when the narrator, like the author, if the author can be distinguished even a little from the narrator, was an aspiring writer who was supported by persons like Auersberger, or by the person who recognised himself as Auersberger, writers who had talent but whose talent has been destroyed by Vienna’s art mill and other persons whose talent has been similarly destroyed. “As I see it they haven’t become anything. They’ve all quite simply failed to achieve the highest, and as I see it only the highest can ever bring satisfaction, I thought.” But, thinks the narrator, these people, the people of this so-called artistic circle, have been more than complicit in the destruction of their talent. “All these people have contrived to turn conditions and circumstances that were once happy into something utterly depressing, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, they’ve managed to make everything depressing, to transform all the happiness they once had into utter depression, just as I have.” When the celebrated actor finally arrives and the narrator moves with the other guests to the dining room, the narrator’s focus moves, if the narrator can be said to have a focus, from his opinions formed in the past of those present, attitudes which caused him to leave Vienna twenty years ago, when his love for those present, and for Joana, had turned entirely to disgust, when he had taken from them all he could, to his observations of what is said and done, though not said and done by him, who only observes the proceedings and does not participate in them, or so he says, in the present, at the artistic dinner itself, observations, it must be said, no less vitriolic but rather more ambivalent, by which I mean, the bookseller thought as he paused in his train of thought, a train of thought that had begun to resemble a review but was not a review but only a train of thought, unless a train of thought can be called a review, and he thought not, he thought, not the popular misconception of ambivalence as some wishy-washiness, if he was writing a review he would replace wishy-washiness with a better word, or at least an actual word, but ambivalence in its true, etymological and Freudian sense of being beset with equally overwhelming but opposite inclinations. The narrator, he thought, loathes those most like himself, all his loathing is self-loathing, and to loathe, therefore, is the greatest act of sympathy, the strongest form, he thought, of identification. “We are not one jot better than the people we constantly find objectionable and insufferable, those repellent people with whom we want to have as few dealings as possible although, if we are honest we do have dealings with them and are no different from them. We reproach them with all kinds of objectionable and insufferable behaviour and are no less insufferable and objectionable ourselves — perhaps we are even more insufferable and objectionable, it occurs to me,” the narrator of Woodcutters says. To grow older, the bookseller thought, is not to become more certain but to become less certain, certainty is for the young, he thought, certainty is for those who do not think, not that it is necessarily true that the young do not think, there are, no doubt, some who are young who do think, but they have not thought long enough, being young, to realise that all thought leads to the destruction of certainty, all thought leads to ambivalence, to the undermining of anything that might be said to be one’s own identity, there’s no such thing as one’s own identity, he thought, except in the thoughts of others, and hardly even then, all thought is its own undoing. As the guests depart from the dinner, the narrator, the last to leave, thanks the hostess for a lovely time, after apparently hating it the whole time and hating everything about it and everyone who was there and everything they said and did, kisses her, and then runs through the streets of Vienna, away from his home, towards the centre of town, in the wrong direction, in a dishevelled state of mind, so to term it, completely dishevelled and confused. “To think that I was capable of such hypocrisy, I thought as I was speaking to her,” he says to himself about the only words he actually speaks in a book full of words. “To think that I am capable of telling her to her face the precise opposite of what I feel, because it makes things momentarily more endurable.” Well, thought the bookseller, I can understand that, we all tell others to their faces the opposite of what we feel because it makes things momentarily more endurable, and, in fact, we also do feel what we tell them, that is how we survive and that is how we destroy ourselves, we destroy ourselves by surviving and we survive by destroying ourselves, this is what thinking tells us if we think our thoughts through to the end, this is the truth that is hidden from the young by their youth, this is why I resist the end of Level Four, at least internally, whatever that means, whatever form that resistance could take, and, at the same time, this is why I long for Level Four to end, for my isolation to end, though my isolation cannot end, it can only be obscured, for a chance to take refuge from thinking in busyness, so to call it, in the busyness of others, the others I therefore both long for and resent. He felt comforted by this thought, he thought, my negativity has become so intense, he thought, through reading Thomas Bernhard or through the thinking that accompanies reading Thomas Bernhard, through thinking like Thomas Bernhard and not thinking like myself, that it has become ludicrous, and always was ludicrous. Everything exaggerated moves towards its opposite like this, he thought. I find my negativity has turned, he thought, and this, he thought, is a comfort. |
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Guestbook by Leanne Shapton {Reviewed by STELLA}
Guestbook is the best thing I have read in lock-down so far — and there have been some great books in the pile — I'm so pleased I saved it until now. It’s a project, as much as a book. My first Leanne Shapton experience was Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris — a novel about a relationship break-up in the form of an auction catalogue. Then Swimming Studies — a memoir of sorts with essays, photographs and illustrations (which I’m very pleased to own a hardback copy of — now out of print (and if you are keen on Guestbook, I recommend this very handsome hardback edition while it is still available)) and also her collaborative work with Sheila Heti and Heidi Julavits, Women in Clothes, which is just brilliant and endlessly browseable. But I think Guestbook might top all these. It’s an experience, an art project, a rumination on memory and story-telling, with its collected images and texts and wonderfully strange, clever juxtapositions. These collected pieces are various and endlessly fascinating. In 'Eqalussuaq', a series of black-and-white photographs worthy of old nature magazines of the Greenland shark is captioned with snippets from newspaper items as well as a monologue of culinary requests to the possible chef for a private party sailing trip. 'At the Foot of the Bed', a series of photographs, some from magazine advertising, of empty beds have an eerie presence on the page — disturbing by their silence and strange wanting for someone or something to happen. There’s the story of a traumatised tennis player, Billy Byron, and his imaginary companion who drives him to the brink — a pinprick look at highly driven competitive personalities. It’s no coincidence that this book is subtitled Ghost Stories. There are ghostly apparitions, tales of odd happenings, old houses with haunting fables. Shapton is delving into and creating the unexplained, using memorabilia, found objects (photos and images), reminiscences, resonances and mis-tellings to make us look twice and then make us look again — think again. Her artworks from various projects are interspersed throughout, watercolours, drawings, sculptural and photographic work, and the overall black-and-white printing gives a feeling of timelessness or 'timetrappedness'. In 'The Iceberg as Viewed by Eyewitnesses', she matches drawings (falsely attributed to eyewitnesses of the Titanic sinking) with the incident book from an upmarket restaurant and bar — the complaints and how the staff dealt with the issues, alongside recommendations for more appropriate actions next time. Humour underscores many of the vignettes. What is true and what is real are not considerations in this Guestbook, but the emotions, the philosophical musings, and Shapton’s role as witness of events and medium of ghostly apparitions will delight anyone who likes to look sideways at the world with one eye squinting and a mind wide open to intrigues and play.
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 | Untold Night and Day by Bae Suah {Reviewed by THOMAS} “Does the weather come before the news or after?” asks a character, or someone, in Bae Suah’s novel Untold Night and Day. That this should be a question, that the familiar should be sufficiently unfamiliar for this question to be asked, not to mention that a reader, for some reason, should find this question worth noting down on a piece of paper, presumably the question appears near the end of the book, perhaps at the point, or at least not before the point, at which the reader decided, assuming that the reader did decide, that they would write what might pass for a review of Untold Night and Day, strikes to the heart, ouch, of Suah’s assault, ouch again, metaphors are bad and lazy, especially these ones, on the problematics of time in the theatre, so to call it, of the quotidian. What justification have we to claim that time ‘flows’, that a moment and all it contains is swept forward, or leaps forward, until it becomes another moment and all that that moment contains? Flows how and in relation to what? Sweeps or leaps forward how and in relation to what? There seems to be, the reader notes, at least the reader who noted down the quote with which this paragraph begins notes, no way of thinking about time without a metaphor, no way of thinking about time without thinking about it in terms of something else, something that it is not. If there is no way of thinking about something except in terms of something that it is not, the reader thinks, we must be thinking wrongly, or lazily, or without sufficient reason to think of it in this way even if our thinking is not completely wrong or lazy. With what could we replace a way of thinking that is either wrong or lazy, the reader wonders, thinking that, immersed as the reader is entirely in language, if that itself is not a metaphor, the reader is not sure, with what could we replace wrong or lazy thinking if not with grammar, the people’s friend? All problems are grammatical problems, it occurs to the reader, all problems, from the problem of time, so to call it, to the problem of the relationship between the mind and the brain, so to call them, can be resolved with grammar, all problems are grammatical problems and can be fixed with a bit of editing. A noun seems certain but is never certain, a noun is arbitrary, contestable, ostensible at best but imprecisely bordered, the reader thinks, a noun may be a useful tool but a noun is never more than a tool, the reader thinks, and, the reader thinks, this especially applies to the so-called proper nouns, a noun is imposed upon reality, so to call it, if there is something that we can call reality, but a noun is never real, not in the way that a verb is real, not in the way that a verb is incontestable, the reader thinks, a verb is never uncertain or ostensible, verbs are really all there is, or all there are, the reader thinks, there are only verbs, everything else we have is just a set of tools to help us think about verbs. The problem of time is a problem with nouns, the reader thinks, all metaphors are illnesses of nouns. Nouns occur, recur, or persist, they perhaps transform or are transformed, instantaneously or slowly, though we are suspicious of this, and rightly so, for change calls all nouns into doubt. Nouns can be replaced or exchanged, though, the reader thinks, without changing much but themselves. There is no great importance to nouns. One of the pleasures of Bae Suah’s Untold Night and Day, and one of the pleasures of Sadegh Hedayat's The Blind Owl, to which Bae Suah frequently refers in her novel, the reader thinks, is the way in which a limited number of elements, a limited number of identities, properties, descriptions and phrases, are combined and recombined to disconcerting effect, blurring the characters and events, each entity reaching for its opposite, or for its undoing, if its opposite and its undoing are not the same thing, each entity sharing the qualities by which we recognise it with some other entity, which thereby is perhaps the same entity since entities are only knots of qualities, arbitrary, ostensible and so forth, we’ve been there, the reader thinks. In Suah’s case we cannot know if the main character is a young actress losing her job at an audio theatre for the blind, or a middle-aged poet and translator of German, like Suah herself, though Suah isn’t a poet, as far as the reader knows, whether there is a temporal relationship between these possibilities, there is evidence both for and against this, one in the eye for the concept of time, whether the legs described as knotty, with too-small feet and shoes well-polished but nevertheless seeming castoff, a description repeated many times but which the reader cannot now find in the book, belong to the actress or the poet or the actress's or the poet’s mother standing outside the closed audio theatre, whether the figure in the white hambok is a blind girl visiting the theatre, or the actress when her other clothes are wet or the actress when she once acted in a film or the poet or someone else, the elements occur and recur, they both attach and detach themselves from entities, they both describe and undermine, they are evidence both for and against any attempt we may make, that we perhaps cannot help making, to resolve character, plot, or any of the other novelistic presumptions we may bring to the book through training or out of habit or convention, we are bad detectives, or, really, inverse detectives, thinks the reader, if there can be such a thing. Wolfi, the German writer who has come to Seoul to finish his detective novel is both absolutely right and absolutely wrong, at least about this book, and certainly simplistic and uninteresting compared with what else could be said, when he says, “the murder is a doppelgänger incident. Readers later realise that the female protagonist is the ghost of the woman who has been murdered many years ago.” Without character or plot, the reader thinks, with neither stasis nor development, with these disconcerting shifts of perspective, entity and tense, there must be some other force that knots the elements, that unknots and reknots them, but what might that be, the reader wonders, if not trauma, trauma unspecified, memory unacknowledged, unfaceable, not present, not mentioned, but pressing upon all that is present and mentioned, memory without the presumption of time. The elements of the book wear themselves out through repetition, the reader thinks, they erase themselves through reiteration. Blindness sucks at the novel, sight is lost, forgetting is a relief, the reader thinks, forgetting is as good as death but without death’s messy aspects, the reader thinks, or the reader thinks that he thinks, he’s not quite sure, at least as far as the novel goes, or forgetting is what makes death unneeded. Everything in Untold Night and Day, this title does not refer to a 24-hour convenience store but the reader wishes he had not thought of a 24-hour convenience store but he cannot stop thinking about it in relation to the title now that he has thought of it, is, as Suah or Suah’s character says, “a symptom of disintegration”, a symptom, why had he not used the word symptom above, in so many places, he wondered, of its own effacement, of the application of combinatorial rigour in the undoing of the effects of memory, in the erasure of unspecified, unspecifiable, trauma, a symptom of the loss of sight. In Untold Night and Day the loss of sight is privileged above all other losses, the reader thinks. All poets are shabby and old, and the oldest and shabbiest and best of the poets is almost blind: “Those milky eyes were the oldest of the body’s constituent parts. Hesitating as though they still did not believe in their own ability to perceive the world, those eyes blinked ceaselessly and irregularly. At each spasmodic movement, the eyeballs themselves aged yet more rapidly.” |
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 | A Mistake by Carl Shuker {Reviewed by STELLA}
Medical misadventure is the stuff of shouty headlines and third-hand anecdote: told, embellished and finger-pointing. We all know mistakes happen in all professions but when it comes to medicine we are quick to blame and sharply condemn. Accountability is fine, but where is the line between personal responsibility and institutional culpability? In Carl Shuker’s A Mistake, his latest novel, we are in crisis mode from the opening pages. A young woman with severe abdominal pain is in A&E — immediate surgery necessary. Elizabeth Taylor, perfectionist, surgeon, 27 hrs on her feet, is in charge and the theatre is ready — the stage set. We know that this is just the beginning of a disaster, and just as we, the reader, are shunted into the midst of this medical freneticism, the author calls cut and the clapper board comes down and we are taken back to 1986 — to the launch of the space shuttle Challenger. The tension is the same, the anticipation and our watchfulness as the audience just as intense. From the small confines of the theatre and looking down through Elizabeth’s eyes at her patient (well, her patient’s body — her awareness of the woman sometimes seems absent), we are suddenly surrounded by the hype and immensity of space science and we are looking up at the sky in wonder — waiting and on tenterhooks as the countdown begins. Shuker cleverly moves between these two situations building an energetic forcefield — and what some readers will feel is a distraction is anything but: technical language — medical in our hospital theatre and astrophysical at NASA mission control, blow-by-blow action — as the surgeons operate and as the NASA team relay information (the as-it-happens variety), the power hierarchy — who’s in charge in each scenario, and the realisation of the error (too late to save anyone). It all piles up around us — the chaos growing. Yet it is what happens next that will reveal more: the consequences for the medical team and for the engineers. Shuker’s Elizabeth Taylor is not the easiest character to slide along with — she’s a perfectionist, dedicated, frustrating, sometimes a lousy friend, brash, dismissive of fools, and is described variously as a brilliant surgeon and a ‘fucking psychopath’. Yet she's loyal, takes the rap for the mistake and, unlike the bureaucratic nightmare she has to work under, she’s not looking for the ‘good’ PR story even when there is wriggle room for her to distance herself from the crisis. But it’s hard to tell whether she has been altered by the mistake or is ultimately only concerned for her own record. Ego, power and success are themes that you expect in this story, and with these comes the flip side: young doctor burnout and suicide, overwork, failed relationships, doubt, recklessness and the unrelenting pressure to be right always. Shuker’s new novel is a departure in style from his previous work. The Method Actors, his first novel, which I read back in 2005, was a big, brilliant, complex book. A Mistake is sharp, scalpel-fine. Shuker has pared this novel back to bone and gristle, letting the reader feel, by being stabbed repeatedly with attack language, reckless behaviour, fleeting insights and snide dialogue, the intensity of this life and this error. The ending is as abrupt as the start and you will be wounded — but intrigued by that scalpel cut. Long after you read this novel you will have a scar to remember it by.
A Mistake is short-listed for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction in the 2020 Ockham New Zealand Book awards. >>See which other books have been listed. |
 | {THOMAS} There had been a strong wind in the night, he said, and the leaves of the banana tree, no, he corrected himself, the fronds of the banana palm, no, he re-corrected himself, nothing seemed right, the leaves of the banana plant, a more general term is always safer when unsure, the leaves of the banana plant he could see from the bathroom window were shredded and were this morning little more than a fringe of fibres tossing from each stem, or spine, perhaps, looking like those things that American cheerleaders wave about, whatever they are called, he didn’t know, not having taken an interest in American cheerleaders, are those things waved by American cheerleaders on sticks, though, he wondered, perhaps he should stop making similes with things he knew nothing about, perhaps he should stop making similes altogether, a simile is lazy, after all, in any case the leaves, whatever they looked like, looked silly, if silly can be a property of nature, silly enough to be used by an American cheerleader, or possibly a Morris dancer, he wondered, no, they’re either handkerchiefs or sticks, but the leaves of the banana plant were each a switch fringed with ribbons, silly, perhaps, a jester’s baton perhaps, but undoubtedly an evolutionary exemplar, everything in nature is an evolutionary exemplar, he thought, with the possible exception of human beings, or of myself at any rate, he thought, everything is an exemplar of the ineluctable operations of nature, why else would a banana leaf, or frond, whatever, unfurl itself pre-perforated like a seagull’s quill, bad simile, we won’t go there, if not to be torn apart along those perforations by the wind, when the wind is strong enough, shredding itself into ribbons rather than snapping, if not to protect its functions at the expense of looking silly, that is certainly the way the way of nature, he thought, I could certainly learn something from that. He was having trouble concentrating, he said, he was having trouble thinking really at all, lock-down has delivered all this extra mental space, or mental time, mental space and mental time being the same thing even more obviously than physical space and physical time, so to call it, this extra mental space-time is, more than anything, a big internal vacuum, a big empty space (or time) for thoughts to reveal their clinamen unimpeded by practicalities, a tendency usually recognised as dissipation, but also, at least in theory, the circumstances in which thoughts might unexpectedly swerve towards each other, collide and make new thoughts. No sign of that, at least for me, he thought. I have sat down to write my weekly review, time is running out, and here I am, thinking about banana leaves, or banana fronds, not that I even have any strong feelings towards banana leaves or banana fronds, though I do, I suppose, hold banana fruit in a positive light even though the banana fruit is undoubtedly also silly, here I go again, and I am not even sure which book I will review. I have read many books this week, he declared, I have read many books and I have put many books aside half-read, or read in some proportions either greater or less than a half, I have read more and finished less, he said, even than usual, I have immersed myself in sentences, paragraphs and chapters but emerged quite dry, I do not know what to review, he said, perhaps, he thought, I will call my piece Why I Have Not Read Any of My Books, an explanatory text, perhaps, to Why I Have Not Reviewed Any of My Books, though it is not true that I have not been reading, he protested, I have been reading many books, far too many, he said, I have this pile here, by the bed, and here are books by Rachel Cusk, Virginia Woolf, Yoko Ogawa, Julio Cortázar, Osamu Dazai, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, Albert Camus, Nell Zink and others, all of which I have been reading this week and enjoying but all of which I have stopped reading and moved on to reading something else, I have not finished a single book this week, he admitted, with the exception of All My Cats by Bohumil Hrabal, a book of which he had read something a little over half some weeks ago and had put aside unfinished, perhaps there is hope for the rest, he thought, perhaps I will come back to these books by Rachel Cusk, Virginia Woolf, Yoko Ogawa, Julio Cortázar, Osamu Dazai, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, Albert Camus, Nell Zink and others, or at least to some of them, finish them off and write reviews, as if, he thought with passing irritation, the purpose of my reading was to write reviews, I promised myself I would never read for that reason, and I must remind myself not to finish reading a book for any reason than the reading itself, whatever that means, he thought, there is little sense in that statement. “What are we going to do with all those cats?” Hrabal’s wife asks throughout Hrabal’s book, All My Cats, for there are, over the years, a varying but large number of cats at the Hrabals’ country cottage in Kersko, near Prague, some of whom just arrive and start living there but most of whom are the offspring of other cats already living there, as desexing cats does not seem to have occurred to Hrabal or to Hrabal’s wife, or perhaps was not common practice in Czechoslovakia in the period about which the book was written. Hrabal’s love for the cats is immense and respectful, he is a perceptive and sensitive companion for the cats, he seems to feel greater affinity for the cats than for humans, especially than for his neighbours, but Hrabal is a man who is easily overwhelmed, a man also constantly resisting the urge to hang himself from the willow tree beside the stream, as the fortune teller had told him he would, and he succeeds in this, he died falling from a hospital window after he had written this book, obviously. The greater Hrabal’s love for all his cats, the greater Hrabal’s feelings of guilt about those times when he has taken certain of his cats and killed them in the old mail sack in the shed, killed them for there being too many of them, for their demands being too great for Hrabal, both practically and emotionally, and Hrabal’s capacity to love ensures that his guilt will never be assuaged, his guilt grows more intense over the years, so much so that he even buys a brown car. How lucky you are, say Hrabal’s friends and acquaintances, to have this cottage at Kersko, bought with the income from your literary success, this cottage at Kersko to which you can go and write, to which you can go and enjoy the mental space and the mental time, the same thing, in which thoughts reveal their clinamen and collide with other thoughts to make that writing happen, but for Hrabal the mental space and the mental time spent in his cottage in Kersko are entirely filled with his cats, with his love for his cats and his guilt about killing his cats, and his time and his space are a torment, Hrabal could have made a torment of anything, the cats are central and everything else, from his accident in his brown car to his attempts to rescue a swan frozen into the river, gain their meaning for Hrabal from their relationship to the love-guilt axis he has with his cats. All of Hrabal’s writing is an elaboration on this love-guilt axis, or on the love-guilt axis of the characters in his books, a love-guilt axis that draws its authenticity from the love-guilt axis of their author. Hrabal shows, he thought as he wondered if he would be able to write a review of Hrabal’s book, whether he had enough mental space and mental time to write such a review, Hrabal shows how the mental space and mental time required for writing is also the mental space and mental time that runs what could be termed a constant existential risk, why else would we construct our normal lives, so to call them, our cultural and social and practical lives, so carefully to minimise our mental space and our mental time, if not to avoid the realisation of an underlying existential void, if not to avoid what he called, offhandedly, a Kierkegaardian moment of enlightenment, an intolerable recognition of the meaningless, purposelessness and ennui that assail us from all sides and at every moment but which we avoid thinking about by deceiving ourselves. Thank goodness for love and guilt, he thought, do I have enough of either? He had not finished reading his books and he had not written his review, but then he had not done any of the many other things he had also intended to do during the week, he had not changed the washers in the dripping taps or sorted out his clothes draw, he had not dealt with the borer in the bathroom, he was not quite sure what he had done, other than think about banana leaves, thoughts he wished now that he had not thought, or written about at least. So much for mental time and mental space, he thought. |
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     | 'Tales of the Otori' by Lian Hearn {Reviewed by STELLA} My obsession this week has been the 'Tales of the Otori' series. Initially published from 2002, these books have lived on the shelf at home for several years (Founders Book Fair finds). The week began with Across the Nightingale Floor and ended with Brilliance of the Moon (and now I’m on to the sequel - Harsh Cry of the Heron.) Set in feudal Japan, a young boy has a carefree life in the hillside village of Mino until it is attacked by the Tohan forces. He is one of the Hidden, a non-violent and insular group who do not adhere to the beliefs or principles of the warring factions that surround them. Tomaso (soon to be renamed Takeo) is the only survivor and escapes into the hills with two warriors on his tail. Just as the men gain on him, he is grabbed on the path by a man in travelling clothes. This man becomes his protector and purpose. Lord Shigeru, the legitimate heir of the Otori clan, takes Takeo into his home, adopts him and begins instructing him the way of the warrior and, through Kenji (a Muto tribe leader), in the ways of the mysterious and dangerous Tribe — the expert spies and assassins. Takeo is descended from the Kikitu family who have superior and fascinating abilities — exceptional hearing, second self and ‘invisibility’. The Tribe expect complete obedience (something that the young man Takeo finds counter to his upbringing) and Lord Shigeru also has plans for him in his endeavours to retain his rightful inheritance as the head of the Otori clan. Yet this is not only the tale of Takeo. While some lords play at war and military might, others seek and gain power through alliances, marriage and the taking of hostages. One such hostage is the young and beautiful Lady Kaede, the eldest daughter, from the Shirakawa family. Given as a hostage and guarantee of obedience as a young girl to a minor and contemptible warlord, Kaede has spent half of her fifteen years in captivity at his castle. As she matures, her beauty and reputation precede her, and Kaede becomes a pawn in the games between the warring clans. A marriage is arranged between Lady Kaede Shirakawa and Lord Shigeru Otori at the insistence of the powerful leader of the Tohan, Iida Sadumu — a marriage which Kaede fears and which is a trap for Shigeru. Pull in Shigeru’s lover, Lady Maruyama Naomi, and a blossoming attraction between Takeo and Kaede, along with intrigue, secrets and danger, and the scene is set for a dramatic and drastic outcome. In the first book, both Kaede and Takeo must find the inner strengths and utilise all their intellect and physical advantages to overcome powerful leaders, often working blind in a situation where they do not know the rules or the plans of these overlords, and the deadly lengths they will go to retain or gain power. As you can imagine, both Taeko and Kaede make it through the first book, but their woes will continue, and greater trials and danger ensue in Grass for His Pillow and Brilliance of the Moon. Now Takeo has a prophecy: five battles — four to win and one to lose, and his death will come at the hands of his son. Does he believe in this prophecy or is it mere superstition? And where does he stand in the world when his lineage is split across three paths — Tribe, Otori and Hidden? This is an excellent series — gripping and intriguing; a story of suspense, love, loyalty, double-crossing, mystery and revenge. So good that I'm going back to Book 4 immediately so I can be immersed in the world of the Otori. |
 | Species of Spaces by Georges Perec {Reviewed by THOMAS} The page. The bed. The bedroom. The apartment. The building. The street. The neighbourhood. The town. The mind moves out from its location, its centre, towards the universe, towards 'outer space', through a series of conceptual concentric 'spaces', and whatever is beyond the mind presses in upon it, from these and through these concentric spaces towards their conceptual centre, the mind of whoever conceives of spaces, towards, ultimately, the page. Georges Perec, amiable company for a mind out for some local exercise, is ever aware of the peculiar relationship between objects and language (could we conceive of one without the other?), ever aware of the freighting of objects both with memories and with preconceptions. He treats the objects on his desk or the contents of his street as would an archaeologist, carefully recording both their objective qualities and the associations and memories that adhere to them. What is an object divested of memory, association, meaning, preconception? We cannot see clearly because we have become habituated to what we find familiar, we have become blind to precisely what is essential about our situations, we notice only the exotic and not the endotic, we crave the extraordinary and no longer see the ordinary other than an absence of the extraordinary, we do not look within the ordinary to discern the infraordinary particulars that are the true texture of our lives. Why should only the abnormal be significant? “(In spite of yourself, you’re only noticing the untoward, the peculiar, the wretched exceptions; the opposite is what you should be doing.)” Perec strives in writing for “true realism: to rely on a description of reality divested of all presumptions.” He instructs us to “get rid of all preconceived ideas. Stop thinking in ready-made terms. Force yourself to see flatly. Carry on until the scene becomes improbable, until you have the impression, for the briefest of moments, that you are in a strange town, or, better still, until you can no longer understand what is happening or is not happening, until the whole place becomes strange, and you no longer know that this is what is called a town, a street, buildings, pavements…” The truths revealed by this observatory rigour are not profound but banal (there are no profound truths), never unfamiliar but often surprising. In only this way can text become evidence of what it is like to exist, clutchings of moments and particulars in the face of forces of erasure. Evidence persists where memory fails to suffice, or fails to suffice without it. The penultimate section in Species of Spaces reproduces a letter from an SS officer at Auschwitz detailing the trees required to provide Nos 1 and 2 crematorium ovens with “a green border”. This letter has particular if unstated relevance for Perec, whose mother was consumed in one of Auschwitz’s crematoria when he was a child (his father had already been killed). The final sequence intimates the desperate poignancy that underlies all of Perec’s writing, even his most linguistically playful: “I would like there to exist places that are stable, unmoving, intangible, untouched and almost untouchable, unchanging, deep-rooted; places that might be points of reference, of origin: my birthplace, the cradle of my family, the house where I may have been born, the tree I may have seen grow (that my father may have planted the day I was born), the attic of my childhood filled with memories. Such places don’t exist, and it’s because they don’t exist that space becomes a question, ceases to be self-evident, ceases to be incorporated, ceases to be appropriated. Space is a doubt: I have constantly to mark it, to designate it. It’s never mine, never given to me, I have to conquer it. My spaces are fragile: time is going to wear them away, to destroy them. Nothing will any longer resemble what was, my memories will betray me, oblivion will infiltrate my memory.” For Perec there was only one possible response: “To write: to try meticulously to retain something, to cause something to survive; to wrest a few precise scraps from the void as it grows, to leave somewhere a furrow, a trace, a mark or a few signs.” |
>>"It's difficult for my parents to understand that I'm not the girl they raised."
>>"My stories all come back to the loss of my brother".
>>An interview with the translator, Michele Hutchison.
>>The dairy farmer who wrote a best-seller.
>>'Grief Eaters'.
>>If you read Dutch.
>>Your copy will be delivered to your doorstep as soon as the lock-down has been lifted.
>>See the other books on the Booker International Prize short list.
