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 | The Kiosk by Anete Melece {Reviewed by STELLA} If you sat inside a kiosk all day what would you dream about? Olga dreams about a place far away, watching a beautiful sunset. Olga has worked in the kiosk in a busy city for many years; some may think too many. Every day regular customers come by with their wants and needs, some like clockwork, running past at exactly 10:35 am to buy water, and others collecting their morning papers or magazines or just stopping for a chat. There are always tourists who have lost their way and Olga is adept at giving instructions on how to get to the art gallery or museum. Every night Olga settles down with her magazine about faraway places and armchair travels. Olga has worked in the kiosk for so long she can no longer fit out the door. One day the bundled newspapers are left a little further away from her door than usual. While she reaches out with a stick to drag the papers closer, two boys take the opportunity to grab some goodies from the front of the kiosk! Olga in her attempt to stop them topples over, bringing the kiosk with her. Upright again, she goes about making order in her small world and surprises herself. She can walk about—and so she does! She goes for a walk, encased in the kiosk. It’s a fine feeling, even if some of the locals look either startled or a bit bemused. All is fine until she meets one of her regular customers, the man with the excitable dog, on a bridge across the river in the park. The dog runs around her feet and she topples over into the water. Olga floats, which is a good thing—the kiosk is proving to be a suitable vessel—but where will she end up? Let’s just say it involves ice cream... Anete Melece’s illustrations are delightful, with plenty to seek out in the pictures adding to this simple but charming tale. Whether it’s the expressions on people’s faces or the funny magazine covers (No Time) or the bird’s-eye-view pages of the city or Olga floating on the river, each page is lively in content and colour palette. The front of the book has a square cut out—the window to the kiosk—while the back is, of course, the door. Open the cover and the front endpaper is Olga’s wonderful home inside. She’s happily eating a biscuit and reading a travel magazine (palm trees and sun) surrounded by toilet paper rolls, bags of chips, lotto cards, lollipops and so on. The text is both funny and a little melancholy, but this story is mostly joyful and has a wonderful ending—you never know where an unexpected incident may take you! |
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 | Good Morning, Mr Crusoe The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, published in the year MDCCXIX, which for 300 Years has instructed the Men of an Island off the Coast of Mainland Europe to Contemn all Foreigners and Women by Jack Robinson {Reviewed by THOMAS} When Robinson Crusoe in Daniel Defoe’s novel of the same name discovers the footprint of a stranger on the margins of the island he considers his domain, he builds defences and prepares violence. He wants to keep for himself his table, made with his own hands, his rude bowl, likewise the project of a man who has brought to DIY the gravitas of a spiritual exercise, and his parasol, but even more he wants to keep for himself the puritanical practices of useful labour, useful thought, austerity and self-restraint—he made a very small amount of rum last for ten years!—that are both the expression and the perpetuation of his isolation. He remains resistant to all that is not him. When given the opportunity, upon a suitably disadvantaged other, he shows himself prepared to teach but not to learn. The propagation of Defoe’s novel as an English classic over the centuries has both epitomised and contributed to a particularly noxious strand of Anglo-Saxon masculinity compounded of an arrogance and a superiority complex on the one hand and a concomitant deep insecurity and fear on the other, resulting in an instinct to devise rules, build defences and prepare violence. Jack Robinson, in this quick and subtle little book, not only sketches the deleterious effect upon English society of this thread of Englishness, leading to the Brexit crisis resulting from the projection of threat onto difference, but also traces the literary offspring of Ur-Crusoe, so to call him: Robinsons in books by Franz Kafka, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Muriel Spark and others, and in the films of Patrick Keillor, each either or both perpetuating or degrading the character with whom they are inescapably associated. ‘Robinson Crusoe’ remains a central topos for reactionary British nativism. It is no coincidence that, in the space of populist disaffection resulting from Conservative austerity policies, a prominent contemporary British fascist adopted the pseudonym ‘Tommy Robinson’ in his xenophobic campaign for “respect for British heritage, values and tradition.” Robinson Crusoe, despite circumstances that make his attitudes increasingly ridiculous, cannot help but insist, with increasing violence, that he is master of ‘his’ island. Jack Robinson’s quarrel “is less with Defoe than with Crusoe and the uses which the book has been put to.” He observes that “Crusoe has amassed such gravitas—or rather, his emblematic status in British culture became so far reaching—that the natural development of his descendants was inescapably stunted.” Can this be healed? In Crusoe’s unthinking adherence to ‘heritage, values and tradition’, he is incapable of change or growth or understanding, incapable of opening himself to new experience, of accepting as an equal anyone different from himself. When Crusoe leaves the island he remains the slaver and misogynist he was when he arrived. All he has done is survived. “Defoe denies Crusoe self-doubt, which is another way of infantilising him. His blind trust in God shuts off all radical introspection.” Without that self-doubt and introspection there is no hope. |
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BOOKS @ VOLUME #215 (5.2.21)
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 | Spellslinger by Sebastien de Castell {Reviewed by STELLA} Looking for a bit of magic and wit? Then Spellslinger might just be the next teen read for you. Kellen from the House of Ke is ready to face his four trials to become a spellcaster. The only problem is that his magic has gone. His bands haven’t sparked and no one seems able to help. Neither his powerful mage parents, his friends who try to help him duel, nor his teacher. Yet Kellen is cunning and able to perform tricks. Maybe it’s all trickery anyway? Why can’t he keep up with his friends or even his younger sister? If he doesn’t succeed, it's a life of shame and servitude as a Sha’Tep. As the trials progress, Kellen has more questions than answers—if he can’t make it in the Jan’Tep world is there a place for him in his hometown? Why can’t he summon the magic when he needs it? And what’s behind all this anyway? Shadowblack. A curse—a powerful one. One which is feared and abhorred. This fantasy builds and twists moment by moment. Kellen is an excellent sixteen-year-old: useless and brilliant by turns—wanting to fit in but ultimately knowing he’s different and will become an outcast. But not so fast in this fantasy world (a series that gets better as it goes on), as we are introduced to our main players. Enter Ferius Parfax—a mysterious redhead cardshark—an Argosi wanderer with a curious pack of painted cards and some sharp-edged ones useful in a fight. She’s sardonic, clever and not above playing dirty when needed so long as it meets her Argosi code of ethics. Why is she here and why is she keeping an eye on Kellen? Even more strangely, Kellen finds an unlikely partner in a squirrel cat. Reichis, who loves stealing baubles and loves an enemy—especially if he can eat their eyeballs, has his own issues and is keen to avenge the Jan'Tep. Reichis will consistently lead Kellen into trouble and always fight alongside him—it's a love/hate bond with each suspicious of the other's motivations and simultaneously deadly loyal. Ultimately, Kellen is destined for the Spellslinger road with his explosive powders, perceptive mind, and small sparks of magic. For answers, he will have to journey further. Luckily there are six books in this series, each more intriguing. Dangerous, exciting and hugely enjoyable, Sebastien de Castell blends ancient civilisations with the wild west in a fantasy that is sure to please. |
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 | Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick {Reviewed by THOMAS} “Fact is to me a hindrance to memory,” writes the narrator in this remarkable collage of passages evoking the ways in which past experiences have impressed themselves indelibly upon her. The sleepless nights of the title are not so much those of the narrator’s youth, though these are either well documented or implied and so the title is not not about them, but those of her present life, supposedly as “a broken old woman in a squalid nursing home”, waking in the night “to address myself to B. and D. and C.—those whom I dare not ring up until morning and yet must talk to through the night.” As if the narrator is a projection of the author herself, cast forward upon some distorting screen, the ten parts of the book make no distinction between verifiable biographical facts and the efflorescence of stories that arise in the author’s mind as supplementary to those facts, or in substitution for them. Elizabeth the narrator seems almost aware of the precarity of her role, and of her identity as distinct from but overlapping that of the author: “I will do this work of transformed and even distorted memory and lead this life, the one I am leading today.” Hardwick writes mind-woundingly beautiful sentences, many-commaed, building ecstatically, at once patient and careering, towards a point at which pain and beauty, memory and invention, self and other are indistinguishable. Spanning over fifty years, the book, the exquisite narrowness of focus of which is kept immediate by the exclusion of summary, frame or context, records the marks remaining upon the narrator of those persons, events or situations from her past that have not yet been replaced, or not yet been able to be replaced, by the ersatz experiences of stories about those persons, events and situations. “My father…is out, because I can see him only as a character in literature, already recorded.” Hardwick and her narrator are aware that one of the functions of stories is to replace and vitiate experience (“It may be yours, but the house, the furniture, strain toward the universal and it will soon read like a stage direction”), and she/she writes effectively in opposition to this function. Observation brings the narrator too close to what she observes, she becomes those things, is marked by them, passes these marks on to us in sentences full of surprising particularity, resisting the pull towards generalisation, the gravitational pull of cliches, the lazy engines of bad fiction. Many of Hardwick’s passages are unforgettable for an uncomfortable vividness of description—in other words, of awareness—accompanied by a slight consequent irritation, for how else can she—or we—react to such uninvited intensity of experience? Is she, by writing it, defending herself from, for example, her overwhelming awareness of the awful men who share her carriage in the Canadian train journey related in the first part, is she mercilessly inflicting this experience upon us, knowing it will mark us just as surely as if we had had the experience ourselves, or is there a way in which razor-sharp, well-wielded words enable both writer and reader to at once both recognise and somehow overcome the awfulness of others (Rachel Cusk here springs to mind in comparison)? In relating the lives of people encountered in the course of her life, the narrator often withdraws to a position of uncertain agency within the narration, an observatory distance, but surprises us by popping up from time to time when forgotten, sometimes as part of a we of uncertain composition, uncertain, that is, as to whether it includes a historic you that has been addressed by the whole composition without our realising, or whether the other part of we is a he or she, indicating, perhaps, that the narrator has been addressing us all along, after all. All this is secondary, however, to the sentences that enter us like needles: “The present summer now. One too many with the gulls, the cry of small boats on the strain, the soiled sea, the sick calm.” |
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For better or worse, Wagner is arguably the most widely influential figure in the history of music. Around 1900, the phenomenon known as Wagnerism saturated European and American culture. Such colossal creations as The Ring of the Nibelung, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal were models of formal daring, mythmaking, erotic freedom, and mystical speculation. A procession of writers, artists, and thinkers, including Charles Baudelaire, Virginia Woolf, Isadora Duncan, Vasily Kandinsky, and Luis Buñuel, felt his impact. Anarchists, occultists, feminists, and gay-rights pioneers saw him as a kindred spirit. Then Hitler incorporated Wagner into the soundtrack of Nazi Germany, and the composer came to be defined by his ferocious anti-Semitism. His name is now almost synonymous with artistic evil. Wagnerism restores the magnificent confusion of what it means to be a Wagnerian. The narrative ranges across artistic disciplines, from architecture to the novels of Philip K. Dick, from the Zionist writings of Theodor Herzl to the civil-rights essays of W. E. B. Du Bois, from O Pioneers! to Apocalypse Now. Neither apologia nor condemnation, Wagnerism is a work of intellectual passion, urging us toward a more honest idea of how art acts in the world.
>>How a Wagner opera defined the sound of Hollywood blockbusters.
>>What is decolonisation?
>>With stories, anything is possible.
>>Why colonisation is bad for everyone.
>>Where to next?
>>Why colonisation was bad for Pākehā too.
>>'Decolonisation, Irish summer camps and my dumb Māori Dad.'
>>Why decolonisation is good for everyone.
>>Matters arising.
>>Your copy.
>>Other BWB texts.
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
 | Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey {Reviewed by STELLA} In Memorial Drive, Pulitzer Prize-winning US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey lays out the path to her mother’s death at the hands of a violent partner. Moving, compelling and insightful, the memoir is both raw and personal, as well as politically charged, revealing of a childhood in the South, her own and her mother’s. Opening with a dream, the poet’s use of language and imagination lead you into this story of tragedy and resolve. Gwendolyn Turnbough was born in New Orleans in1944. When her father, a naval officer never returned amid rumours of a new wife abroad, mother and daughter returned to Mississippi. A resourceful and strong-willed woman, Natasha’s grandmother brought her daughter up to push against the expectations of society and it was while Gwen was at college that she met her husband. It was the sixties, and despite coming of age in the Jim Crow era and the visible and real threat of the Ku Klux Klan, change seemed possible. Even when you have to marry in a different state. Moving to New Orleans so her father could study full-time, Gwen with a young child at home, felt isolated, and the racial prejudice they encountered as a mixed-race couple put pressure on their relationship. It wasn’t long until the couple parted and eventually divorced. Getting on her feet again, Gwen enrols to study social work and juggles motherhood, study and working nights. And she’s successful. At work, she meets the man who will become a life-changing figure in Natasha’s life—Joel Grimmett or, as Natasha nicknames him, Big Joe. At first things hum along, Gwen is doing well with her career and Joel seems happy to be part of the family. But something begins to sour—mixed with alcohol and a jealous streak underpinned by Joel’s need for power and control. Natasha describes the descent into tragedy, for her mother as well as herself. In Atlanta, there is a ring road, and as a form of psychological torture, Joel drives the young girl endlessly on it, threatening to leave her out there or never take her home. This road becomes a symbol of oppression for Natasha well into adulthood—a road she avoids most of her life. As her mother’s career blossoms and they move onwards and upwards in the world, their lives from the outside seem just fine. The reality is far from this and when Natasha, now in the fifth grade, overhears Gwen being beaten, the texture of the family changes. She knows, her mother knows, and so does Big Joe. Escaping into books and school-life can only last so long for Natasha, and as things get worse, Gwen finds a way out, but, unfortunately, the presence of Grimmett in their lives can not be erased, especially as his paranoia and sense of entitlement increases. The memoir is mesmerising. Trethewey’s descriptions of the women in her family, the fraught racial issues over several decades, the political landscape and the societal norms that allowed a woman to be repeatedly beaten, and the inability of the law to protect her when it mattered the most are not just this daughter’s story but the story of many, but Natasha Tretheway’s honesty, care, and her willingness to look this tragedy full in the face reveals something remarkable—the ability to not only endure but push back against a system of repression, to take a victim and make them whole again—visible to the world and to herself. |
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 | The Math Campers by Dan Chiasson {Reviewed by THOMAS} where the poet writes or wrote it was impossible to say it is impossible to say where faraway was or why the reader writes “it was impossible to say it is impossible to say where faraway was or why” to remember the words or avoid remembering but where the poet writes It may just be my mind, he thought. It may just be my mind. He wrote: “It may just be my mind.” how can the reader write or rewrite that he thought who never claimed to be a poet maybe once how can I write or rewrite all those wrotes within wrotes, nests within nests here the poet the reader thought writes or wrote about the writing of the poems he wrote or is writing or soon will either write or not the poem of how the poem is made or will be made or is then being made or could be made or not in some room of the poet’s mind or on some paper less likely or in the house of a dead poet more precisely literally On the upstairs deck, I read about The deck upstairs. In the daybed I read about the daybed. In the books I read about the books I read. the poet wrote the reader wrote or rewrote sharing the labour each expected of the other with the other their separation more a distance of time than a distance of person not that each is one person only the moments flicker because time as the poet’s past is the same age as his sons as the reader knows the poet knows each is not one person only He turned to meet me, but our element was time. He approached me, where I was standing, years later; and I approached him where he stood, but he was too far in the past. the pages turn the poems turn or turn again the poet is carefully squeezed out of the poem or squeezed in the poem changed slightly, crucially— because, you know why, because time this slow precise perfecting process as the poet writes as the reader reads unlike these lines tossed off if that is how to put it in less than a minute and unrevisited the reader can do no justice to the form but to be fair made no such claims in that direction towards the province of the poet he thinks I had no real name. I was the channel through which the mind passed, and then I was a gap, an absence, which frightened me. again this space this wound in time this crack where the words get in or out this rift between the poet and his past if only a moment passed between poet and poem which is to say the poet who breathes and stumbles and the one squeezed out of the poem or in from sleep to type We were held, suspended within the larger dream; we alternate coming into, then stepping out of, the light. the poet wrote the reader wrote if that makes sense then the world wakes up, enlarged— there is not nor can there be anything more than this |
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 | Weather by Jenny Offill {Reviewed by STELLA} A novel made from snippets of conversation, observations, facts and wry asides, Jenny Offill’s Weather is contemplative and challenging in its examination of human nature and climate change. You won’t see the dystopic disaster trail here, nor the high-minded rhetoric, as Lizzie, a university librarian navigates the minutiae of her Brooklyn world—mother, wife, sister, daughter, academic dropout, comfortable middle class—and the monumental nature of the changing environment. You will feel a sense of companionship with a woman who sees the approaching crisis but isn’t sure how to tackle it. Lizzie is self-deprecating and highly likeable—even when she puts her ‘recovered addict’ brother ahead of her own partner and child. Who hasn’t had a conflict of loyalty? Her wry observations of the regular library users and her immediate community—the school where her son is in the gifted class but it’s still a liberal heaven with its diversity and philosophy, the other parents, and the increasing polarised views she encounters in her side-line job—shine a darkly funny beam into this novel with serious intent. Employed by her friend, Slyvia, who has a popular climate change podcast, to answer questions sent to her, the letters and emails come from across the spectrum—from the left-liberals who want a solution to the preppers, the deniers, and the confused. These questions send Lizzie on her own quest to understand and counter her growing anxiety about the weather. Running alongside her desire to reassure others and herself is her commitment to her brother, who is battling his feelings of inadequacy in the face of being newly married (to a controlling—probably necessarily so—woman) and their newborn. Lizzie steps in, as she always has, to ‘rescue’ him—her own addiction. In the hands of a different author, this could be melodrama or heavy-handed prophesying but Jenny Offill’s episodic style and her cleverness makes Weather an unexpected joy to read. It’s a novel rich in ideas, both serious and playfully ironic. Like Lizzie, how do we have a sense of urgency when all is comfort with the occasional pinprick? |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
 | Extinction by Thomas Bernhard {Reviewed by THOMAS} “When I take Wolfsegg and my family apart, when I dissect, annihilate and extinguish them, I am actually taking myself apart, dissecting, annihilating and extinguishing myself. I have to admit that this idea of self-dissection and self-annihilation appeals to me, I told Gambetti. I’ll spend my life dissecting and extinguishing myself, Gambetti, and if I’m not mistaken I’ll succeed in this self-dissection and self-extinction. I actually do nothing but dissect and extinguish myself.” In the first of the two relentless paragraphs that comprise this wonderfully claustrophobic novel, the narrator, Murau, has received a telegram informing him that his parents and brother have been killed in a car accident. While looking at some photographs of them at his desk in Rome, he unleashes a 150-page stream of invective directed personally at the members of his family, both dead and living. Murau is alone, but he addresses his rant to his student Gambetti in Gambetti’s absence or recounts, however accurately or inaccurately, addressing Gambetti in person at some earlier time. Gambetti, in either case, is completely passive and non-contributive, and this passivity and non-contribution acts—along with Murau’s over-identification with his ‘black sheep’ Uncle Georg, an over-identification that sometimes confuses their identities—as a catalyst for Murau’s invective, as an anchor for the over-inflation of Murau’s hatred for, and difference from, his family. Without external contributions that might mitigate Murau’s opinions, his family appear as horrendous grotesques, exaggerations that here cannot be contradicted due to absence or death. Being dead puts an end to your contributions to the ideas people have of you—stories concerning you are henceforth the domain entirely of others and soon become largely expressions of their failings, impulses and inclinations. We can have no definite idea of ourselves, though—we exist only to others, unavoidably as misrepresentations, as caricatures. Murau states that he intends to write a book, to be titled Extinction: “The sole purpose of my account will be to extinguish what it describes, to extinguish anything that Wolfsegg means to me, everything that Wolfsegg is, everything. My work will be nothing other than an act of extinction.” Murau has not been able to even begin to write this account because his hatred gets in the way of beginning, or, rather, what we soon suspect to be the inauthenticity of his hatred gets in the way of beginning. There is no loathing without self-loathing. As Murau’s invective demonstrates, there can be no statement that is not an overstatement—every statement tends towards exaggeration as soon as it is expressed or thought. By exaggeration a statement exhausts its veracity and immediately begins to incline towards its opposite, just as every impulse, as soon as it is expressed, inclines towards its opposite. Only a passive witness, a witness who does not contradict but, by witnessing, in effect affirms—Gambetti in Murau’s case—allows an otherwise unsustainable idea to be sustained. In the second half of the book, Murau returns to Wolfsegg in Austria for the funeral of his parents and brother. Until this point, Murau’s ‘character’ has been defined entirely by his exaggerated opposition to, or identification with, his ideas of others, but when he is brought into situations in which others have a contributing role, Murau’s portrayal of others and of himself in the first section is undermined at every turn. Without the ‘Gambetti’ prop, he is responded to, and, in response to these responses, he overturns many of his opinions - about his parents, his brothers, his sisters, his mother’s lover, the nauseatingly perfectly false Spadolini that Murau had hitherto admired, and about himself—and reveals his fundamental ambivalence, an ambivalence that is fundamental to all existence but which is usually, for most of us, almost entirely suppressed by praxis, by the passive anchors, the Gambettis to which we affix our desperate attempts at character. We resist, through exaggeration, indifference and self-nullification. “We’re often led to exaggerate, I said later, to such an extent that we take our exaggeration to be the only logical fact, with the result that we don’t perceive the real facts at all, only the monstrous exaggeration. I’ve always found gratification in my fanatical faith in exaggeration, I told Gambetti. On occasion I transform this fanatical faith in exaggeration into an art, when it offers the only way out of my mental misery, my spiritual malaise. Exaggeration is the secret of great art, I said, and of great philosophy. The art of exaggeration is in fact the secret of all mental endeavour.” In this second part, Murau reveals his connection with Wolfsegg and his suppressed feelings of culpability in what it represents. “I had not in fact freed myself from Wolfsegg and made myself independent but maimed myself quite alarmingly.” Separation, or, rather, the illusion of separation, is only achieved by ‘art’, that is to say, by exaggeration, by the denial of ambivalence, by the denial of complicity, by suppression—a desperate negative act of self-invention. Once his hatred of his sisters, and of his parents and brothers, has been undermined by his presence and contact with his sisters and others at Wolfsegg, and without a Gambetti or Georg in his mind to sustain this hatred, the underlying reason for his hatred, a fact that he has suppressed since his childhood as too uncomfortable, the fact that has made “a gaping void” of his childhood, of his whole past, the fact to which he was a passive witness, a complicit witness, namely that Wolfsegg hid and sheltered Nazi war criminals after the war (Gauleiters and members of the Blood Order, who now attend the funeral of Murau’s father) in the so-called ‘Children’s Villa’ (which “affords the most brutal evidence that childhood is no longer possible. All you see when you look back is this gaping void. You actually believed that your childhood could be repainted and redecorated, as it were, that it could be refurbished and reroofed like the Children’s Villa, and this in spite of hundreds of failed attempts at restoring your childhood.”), can now be faced, and, on the final page of the book, at last in some way addressed. Murau also attains the necessary degree of remove to write Extinction before his own death, either from illness or, more likely, suicide. This, his last, is the only Bernhard novel I can think of in which the protagonist makes anything that resembles an effective resolution. |
