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  | The Other Name (Septology I—II) by Jon Fosse (translated from Norwegian by Damion Searls) {Reviewed by THOMAS} and I see myself sitting and reading the thick blue book of two parts, not that thick, actually, and I have reached that point in the book, though it is not in fact a point in the book for there is nothing in the book that would mark such a point, but rather a point in my reading of the book, which just happens to be around page seventy-five, that I came to realise that the book is written entirely in one sentence, one slow, patient, uninterrupted flow of words, no, I think, that is not correct, the book is written in two parts, though each begins with the word And, but neither part ends, each rather just leaves off, so it would not be correct that the book is written in one sentence, or in two sentences, one for each part, but rather in no sentences, one, or two, slow, patient, uninterrupted flow, or flows, of words, that much at least I got right, I think, just the kind of thing I like, but done with such virtuosity and with such little display of virtuosity that I had not realised until page seventy-five or thereabouts that there are no full stops to be found in this book, or no full stop, I am uncertain if this absence should be singular or plural, possibly both, this Jon Fosse and his translator Damion Searles having built these words without one misstep, or missomething, the metaphor seems mixed and I has not even realised that it was a metaphor, I must be more careful, capturing the flow of thought, so to call it, and speech, realistically, seemingly of the narrator, a middle-aged painter named Asle, living, I am almost tempted to put, as such people do, in a small town in western Norway, driving in the snow to and from a city on the western coast of Norway, the city of the gallery which shows, which is a euphemism of sorts for sells, his paintings, but also the city in which lives a middle-aged painter named Asle, resembling both in looks and clothing, if clothing is not part of looks, the narrator, the narrator narrating in the first person and this other Asle, the alter-Asle if you like, this alter-Asle to the thoughts and memories of whom the narrator-Asle has extraordinary access, though there is no evidence of any reciprocal mechanism, we are, I am sure, never given an instance of the alter-Asle even being aware of the existence of such a person as the narrator, this alter-Asle, being confined to the third person, and, I wonder, what sort of trauma confines a person to an existence only in the third person? presumably a trauma, I think, this alter-Asle being also an alcoholic and a person who “most of the time, doesn’t want to live any more, he’s always thinking that he should go out into the sea, disappear into the waves,” but not doing so because of his love for his dog, there is, I think as I am reading, some relationship between the two Asles, well, obviously there is, my thought, or the thought I have, being that the alter-Asle is the actual Asle and the narrator-Asle is the Asle that the alter-Asle-who-is-actually-the-actual-Alse would have been if he was not the Asle he became, which, I think, I have made sound a bit confusing, and the opposite of an explanation, not that that matters, on account of whatever trauma, or whatever it is that I speculate is a trauma, that confined him to a third-person existence, the characters being one character, all characters being one character as they are in all books, I speculate, though in this book The Other Name, almost all the characters have, if not the same name, almost the same name, which tightens the knot somewhat, if I can be forgiven another metaphor, though I will not forgive myself for it at least, I will try to avoid, I think, thinking of the relationships between these persons-who-are-one-person, or, in any rate, describing the relationships between these persons-who-are-one-person, in any way other than a literary way, whatever that means, nothing, I think, the person that Asle could have been sees the Asle that Asle became, though Alse cannot know him, the person that Asle could have been rescues Asle when he has collapsed in the snow and takes him to the Clinic and to the Hospital, and takes the dog to look after, who knows, though, if the third-person Asle, the one I was calling the alter-Asle until that became too confusing, at least for me, survives, neither we nor the first-person Asle know that, but after the first-person Asle goes to the city and rescues the third-person Asle from the snowdrift, how could he know where to find him, I wonder, he begins, in the second part of the book, to have access to some deeply buried memories of the Asle that perhaps they once both were, memories all in the third person, for safety, I think, memories firstly of Asle’s and his sister’s disobedience of their parents in straying along the shore and to the nearby settlement, a narrative in which threat hums in every detail, a narrative in which colour impresses itself so deeply upon Asle that, I think, he could have become nothing other than a painter, a narrative that seems searching for a trauma, for a misfortune, a narrative assailed by an inexplicable motor noise as they approach the settlement but which resolves with a misfortune that is anticlimactic, at least for Asle, a trauma but not his trauma, what has this narrative avoided, I wonder at this point, what has not been released, or what has not yet been released, I wonder, Fosse is a writer who writes to be rid of his thoughts, I think, just as his narrator says, “when I paint it’s always as if I’m trying to paint away the pictures stuck inside me, to get rid of them in a way, to be done with them, I have all these pictures inside me, yes, so many pictures that they’re a kind of agony, I try to paint away these pictures that are lodged inside me, there’s nothing to do but paint them away,” and, yes, when the narrator lies in bed at the end of the book and is unable to sleep, he does recover the memory, a third person memory, the memory of the trauma that split the Asles and trapped one thereafter in the third person, the memory that explains the awful motor noise that intruded on the previous narrative of disobedience as the children approached the locus of the trauma, and, I think, all the sadness of the book leads from here and to here |
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NEW RELEASES
"Machado De Assis is the writer who made Borges possible." —Salman Rushdie
"The greatest writer ever produced in Latin America." —Susan Sontag
"'Another Kafka." —Allen Ginsberg
"A great writer who chose to use deadly humor where it would be least expected to convey his acute powers of observation and his penetrating insights into psychology. In superbly funny books he described the abnormalities of alienation, perversion, domination, cruelty and madness. He deconstructed empire with a thoroughness and an esthetic equilibrium that place him in a class by himself." —New York Times
"Machado de Assis was a literary force, transcending nationality and language, comparable certainly to Flaubert, Hardy or James." —New York Times Book Review
>>The greatest writer the world has never heard of.
The haunted doll has long been a trope in horror movies, but like many fears, there is some truth at its heart. Dolls are possessed—by our aspirations. They're commonly used as a tool to teach mothering to young girls, but more often they are avatars of the idealised feminine self. (The word 'doll' even acts as shorthand for a desirable woman.) They instruct girls what to strive for in society, reinforcing dominant patriarchal, heteronormative, white views around class, bodies, history, and celebrity, in insidious ways. Girls' dolls occupy the opposite space of boys' action figures, which represent masculinity, authority, warfare, and conflict. By analysing dolls from 17th century Japanese Hinamatsuri festivals, to the '80s American Girl Dolls, and even to today's bitmoji, Doll reveals how the objects society encourages girls to play with shape the women they become.
>>Other books in the excellent 'Object Lessons' series.
>>Other books in the excellent 'Object Lessons' series.
VOLUME FOCUS : Women
A selection of books from our shelves.
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 | Aug 9—Fog by Kathryn Scanlan {Reviewed by Thomas}
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 | Not to Read by Alejandro Zambra (translated by Megan McDowell) {Reviewed by THOMAS} “I am writing with a great deal of ease and fluidity. One must distrust that,” wrote Clarice Lispector, quoted by the Chilean Alejandro Zambra in one of the essays in this highly enjoyable collection of literary observations on, ostensibly, some of the more interesting largely (but not exclusively) Latin American literature of the last quarter century, literature that distrusts, as Zambra dismisses, the clichéed fluidity of the ‘Magic Realists’ most readily (and lazily) associated with Latin American literature by Western readers. Zambra instead values literature that is hesitant, inventive, always aware of new possibilities, mentally and linguistically supple, striving always towards new forms. “All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one,” wrote Walter Benjamin (not quoted by Alejandro Zambra (at least not in this book)). Because the reviews collected here are often of books the reader of Not to Read has not read and by authors with whom the reader (at least this reader) is unfamiliar, the reader at the outset may think they might skip quite a bit of the book, to make reading faster, but Zambra’s book is too interesting, too nicely written, and too enjoyable. There are indeed considerations of many authors the reader has not heard of, but the essays deliver the same fascination as reading Borges’s studies of nonexistent books (Borges thought it more worthwhile, and faster, to write about books that do not exist than to write the books themselves), with the added benefit that, just possibly, works by these authors may already be, or may one day be, available in English. At the very least, one reads to read about the writing and reading of texts, which is, after all, the most interesting thing to read about. The reader might have thought that skipping might save time, but the text runs so lightly and so sprightlyly that the reader is in any case carried forward more rapidly by following the text than they would have proceeded had it been possible to skip. The essays and reviews included in Not to Read also function as a sort of literary autobiography of Zambra himself, his concerns, approaches, influences and motivations, and provide a greater appreciation of his other work, direct yet subtle, playful yet poignant, personal yet politically and socially acute, compact yet wonderfully expansive. Zambra recommends books we are sure that we will like, even though we may never get to read them, but, more importantly, the reasons for his recommendations, his observations on and his responses to these books, provide a portrait of a reader we come quickly to admire, and who we as readers may well wish to be more like, as well as of a writer alert to the possibilities of writing. Zambra is frequently very funny, as he is in the title essay ‘Not to Read’, which starts out as a review of Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Have Not Read, which Zambra has himself not read, and carries on to become a deliciously prickly lampoon of opinions formed of books without reading them, intercut with seemingly very valid reasons not to read some writers’ books. Zambra’s concision and lightness (Zambra is an exemplar of the literary qualities Italo Calvino thought most important in his Six Memos for a New Millennium) can produce beautiful sentences, such as this one on Santiago, quivering with a sensitivity that undercuts ease and fluidity and leaves us utterly aware: “It’s the city that we know, the city that would follow us if we wanted to flee from it (from ourselves), with its permanent architectural eclecticism, with the dirty river, almost always a mere trickle, cutting the landscape in half, with the most beautiful sky imaginable in those few days of autumn or winter after it rains, when we rediscover the mountains.” |
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Curious and more curious, in Pure Colour Shelia Heti takes us further than she has before. If you’re a Heti fan, you will be used to her turn of phrase and oblique references as well as her wry absurdist touch. In her earlier novels, How Should A Person Be? Heti gave us a wild and wonderful exploration of a young person dipping her feet in the world, with all the bravado you would expect as well as the doubt; while Motherhood explored that moment in life when you ask the big questions about art, relationships and parenthood. In Pure Colour, Heti makes another jump and then plunges sideways. It’s more existential and probing, and flat bang in the middle the main character becomes a leaf. Seriously. Mira leaves home for college and studies art criticism, she works in a lamp shop and has fallen for the woman who works in the bookshop. She’s piecing together information and coming up with her own interpretations. People are either birds, fish or bears and respond according. Birds look down and see the world from above in an abstract fashion, thinking their way around it. Fish, being one of many, is more concerned with the collective whole, while Bear is particularly loyal to only a few or even one, and those in their ambit are completely secure in the Bear’s love. God’s got a lot to answer for in what Mira sees as God’s 'first draft', and there are some hilarious interludes about what God thinks/does: God “doesn’t want the criticism of the most dynamic parts of culture coming from someone in the middle of life… God doesn’t care what you think about a band”, and when Mira muses on why God didn’t make every face the same “A person can waste their whole life, without even meaning to, all because another person has a really great face.” The first draft is also real and scary — it’s too hot and much of life is pointless. Mira wanders through her life as though she is sleepwalking, and when her father dies she is pulled into a vortex of grief and an intense sense of her life as a leaf. She does emerge from the leaf, but life has moved on. Annie, the woman she is obsessed with, has moved on, the lamp store has gone and art critics who have been trained on paper are no longer as valid. She’s become one of the precariat and when she finally decides to up sticks and track down Annie, it’s too late. It was always too late — it was a mistake. Where is Shelia Heti going with this? Is she gently nudging us towards the inevitable second draft with Mira as our not-so-great-but-okay guide or is she simply playing another game in abstraction? Mira wonders “why she spent so much of her life… looking at websites, when just outside the window there was a sky”. Maybe Heti felt the same way. Pure Colour is intriguing and full of ideas that trigger more ideas, and you can decide whether you’re a bird, fish or bear if you play along. |
NEW RELEASES
In 2015, Bushra al-Maqtari decided to document the suffering of civilians in the Yemeni civil war, which has killed over 200,000 people according to the UN. Inspired by the work of Svetlana Alexievich, she spent two years visiting different parts of the country, putting her life at risk by speaking with her compatriots, and gathered over 400 testimonies, a selection of which appear in What Have You Left Behind? Purposefully alternating between accounts from the victims of the Houthi militia and those of the Saudi-led coalition, al-Maqtari highlights the disillusionment and anguish felt by civilians trapped in a war outside of their own making. As difficult to read as it is to put down, Bushra al-Maqtari's unvarnished chronicle of the conflict in Yemen serves as a vital reminder of the scale of the human tragedy behind the headlines, and offers a searing condemnation of the international community's complicity in the war's continuation.
"This is an extraordinary collection of testimonies. It’s almost unbearable to read, but averting your eyes from the suffering to which the book bears witness feels craven. Brave, painful, necessary and harrowing, Bushra al-Maqtari’s work confronts the reader with the devastation of the war in Yemen and gives a voice to those whose lives have been destroyed by it." —Marcel Theroux
"Bushra al-Maqtari's boundlessly humane project of collecting firsthand accounts to document the nearly decade-long Yemeni civil war – and the West's complicity in it – is unblinking in its moral gaze. Every single voice collected in these pages is a blow to the heart. By the time I finished this book, I was consumed by sorrow and rage. This is an act of witnessing, and of making us engage in the witnessing of a disgraceful, criminal war that will shake your soul." —Neel Mukherjee
>>"They robbed me of my children."
>>A locked room for loss.
"Álvarez does a neat job in this very short but nutritious novel of establishing the personalities of his characters firmly enough that it comes as a real shock when he upends our expectations of how they might behave." —Jake Kerridge
"A war foretold that never takes place. A death foretold that never takes place. And in the middle of this is the inevitable collapse of a family and a country. The Fallen is a subtle, intelligent and profoundly moving novel which sketches, in elegant and thoughtful prose, a rarely seen Cuban landscape." —Alia Trabucco Zerán
"Energy and passion fuels this harsh and beautiful first novel; Daniel Wiles connects us viscerally to the past we have buried, the history we choose to ignore." —Hilary Mantel
"Read this novel and marvel at its language, dark and gleaming as obsidian. Daniel Wiles channels the Southern Gothic into the vernacular of the Black Country and unearths from the past a tale of desperation that speaks to our current damnation. A striking debut." —Paul Lynch
VOLUME FOCUS : Katherine Mansfield
A selection of books from our shelves.
Strange Bliss: Essential Stories
The Garden Party: And Other Stories
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 | One-Way Street by Walter Benjamin (translated from German by Edmund Jephcott) {Reviewed by THOMAS} What form would literature take if it was the expression of the organising principles of an urban street rather than those of literary tradition? Between 1923 and 1926, Walter Benjamin wrote a series of unconventional prose pieces in which “script - after having found, in the book, a refuge in which it can lead an autonomous existence - is pitilessly dragged out into the street by advertisement and subjected to the brutal heteronomies of economic chaos.” On the street, text, long used to being organised on the horizontal plane in a book, is hoisted upon the vertical plane, and, having been long used to a temporal arrangement like sediment, layer upon layer, page upon page, text is spread upon a single plane, requiring movement from instance to instance, walking or, ultimately, scrolling across a single temporal surface, a surface whose elements are contiguous or continuous or referential by leaps, footnotes perhaps to a text that does not exist, rather than a structure in three dimensions. Even though Benjamin did not live to see a scroll bar or a touch screen or a hyperlink he was acutely aware of the changes in the relationship between persons and texts that would arrive at these developments.“Without exception the great writers perform their combinations in a world that comes after them,” he wrote, not ostensibly of himself. As we move through a text, through time, along such one-way streets, our attention is drawn away from the horizontal, from the dirt (the dirt made by ourselves and others), away from where we stand and walk, and towards the vertical, the plane of desire, of advertising, towards the front (in all the meanings of that word), towards what is not yet. It is not for nothing that our eyes are near the top of our bodies and directed towards the front, and naturally see where we wish to be more easily than where we are (which would require us to bend our bodies forwards and undo our structural evolution). In the one-way street of urban text delineated by Benjamin, all detail has an equivalence of value, “all things, by an irreversible process of mingling and contamination, are losing their intrinsic character, while ambiguity displaces authenticity.” The elitism of ‘the artwork’ is supplanted by the vigour of ‘the document’: “Artworks are remote from each other in the perfection [but] all documents communicate through their subject matter. In the artwork, subject matter is ballast jettisoned by contemplation [but] the more one loses oneself in a document, the denser the subject matter grows. In the artwork, the formal law is central [but] forms are merely dispersed in documents.” What sort of document is Benjamin’s street? It is a place where detail overwhelms form, a place where the totality is subdued by the fragment, where the walker is drawn to detritus over the crafted, to the fumbled over the competent, to the ephemeral over the permanent. The street is the locus of the personalisation and privatisation of experience, its particularisation no longer communal or mediated by tradition but haphazard, aspirational, transitory, improvised. Each moment is a montage. Writing is assembled from the fragments of other writing. Residue finds new value, the stain records meaning, detritus becomes text. In the one-way street, particularities are grouped by type and by association, not by hierarchy or by value. The here and now of the street is filled with referents to other times and other places. The overlooked, the mislaid, the abandoned object is a point of access to overlooked or mislaid or abandoned mental material, often distant in both time and space, memories or dreams. Objects are hyperlinked to memories but are also representatives of the force that drives those experiences into the past, towards forgetting. But the street is the interface of detritus and commerce. Money, too, enables contact with objects and mediates their meaning. New objects promise the opportunity of connection but also, through multiplication, abrade the particularity of that connection. Benjamin’s sixty short texts are playful or mock-playful, ambivalent or mock-ambivalent, tentative or mock-tentative, analytic or mock-analytic, each springing from a sign or poster or inscription in the street, skidding or mock-skidding through the associations, mock-associations, responses and mock-responses they provoke, eschewing the false progress of narrative and other such novelistic artificialities, compiling a sort of archive of ways both of reading a street as text and of writing text as a street, a text describing a person who walks there. |
