Just William's Luck

The Tunnel - Ernesto Sabato

2012-01-24T09:32:00.002Z

'a sordid museum'

translated by Margaret Sayers Peden

I can't remember who it was now who recommended this but it sat on the shelf, as any good classic should do, until such time as I fancied it, not sure of course exactly what it was beyond Robert Coover's precis on the cover 'the brief, obsessive, sometimes delirious confession of a convicted murderer' and the appearance of the word 'existentialist' on the back. I do know that my excursions into Southern American literature have always been interesting at the very worst, and sometimes downright exhilarating. I'll place Sabato's first novel at the lower end of that spectrum, a book that has occasional moments of caustic wit, moments where the reader laughs in spite of themselves, but which remains a cold read with a chilling narrator who is not just unreliable but downright deluded.

"It should be sufficient to say I am Juan Pablo Castel, the painter who killed Maria Iribarne", an opening sentence that provides us with perhaps the only certainty in this novel and a clear indication that what will follow is a confessional. Holed up in prison after his trial Castel determines to set it all down so that we (and that includes him) might understand why he killed. But this isn't really a novel about motivation or the application of logic (though god knows he tries), as we follow our narrator on a tour of the art scene in Buenos Aires and his pursuit of the one woman he feels may understand him we also go on a journey into the dark recesses of his mind, a place where anger, jealousy, intolerance and loneliness combine to leave him with no choice other than to destroy his one hope of salvation.

I...would characterize myself as a person who prefers to remember the bad things...I remember so many catastrophes, so many cynical and cruel faces, so many inhumane actions, that for me memory is a glaring light illuminating a sordid museum of shame.

Not perhaps the most encouraging introduction to your guide but it is at least honest (he does also give an early get out clause to those wearied by his dark digressions - 'Besides, anyone who wants to stop reading this account may do so now. He should know immediately that he has my unqualified permission.') and fair warning for what is to follow. To describe Castel as an unsympathetic narrator would be an understatement, in fact he's so unpleasant that it may stop some people from enjoying the book at all. He first sees the woman he will kill at an exhibition of his own work. She spends some time looking at a painting and in particular a detail in one corner of a solitary woman staring through a window at the sea. Then all of a sudden she is gone and Castel is left dejected, miserable and forever altered. Having not taken the opportunity to speak to her how can he hope now to find this stranger amongst all of the inhabitants of Buenos Aires. What follows is a rather hilarious section in which he hopes to bump into her again, haunting his own exhibition, hoping for a chance meeting in the street, all the while paralysed by his own insecurity and all the scenarios he has played out in his head. Eventually they do meet again and what follows are a series of tense, enforced meetings where Castel's fervour is always at the highest pitch as he seeks to convey why Maria is so important to him and his work.

...think of the captain of a ship who is constantly charting his position, meticulously following a course toward an objective. But also imagine that he does not know why he is sailing toward it. Now do you understand?

When they see each other more frequently Castel analyses her every move, gesture, smile and silence. One minute he is happy that she loves him, the next he is convinced she deceives him. They argue incessantly and after one such confrontation when he has called he something terrible (we presume 'whore') he weeps, begs forgiveness, berates himself but then becomes suspicious when she no longer shows distress but smiles at him instead - 'No woman should be able to shift moods so quickly; unless there was a certain truth to what I had said.' In another conversation when he speaks with cruelty once again we get an insight into the split in his personality.

Before the words were out of my mouth, I was slightly repentant. Behind the person who wanted the perverse satisfaction of saying them, stood a purer and more compassionate person preparing to take charge the minute the cruelty of that sentence had reached its mark...Even as the words left my lips, that suppressed person was listening with amazement, as if in spite of everything he had not seriously believed the other would say them. And with each word he began to take over my consciousness and my will, and he was almost in time to prevent the sentence from being completed. The instant it was (because in spite of him the words came out), he was totally in control, demanding that I beg forgiveness, that I humble myself before Maria and acknowledge my stupidity and cruelty...While one part of me strikes a pose of humaneness, the other part cries fraud, hypocrisy, false generosity. While one incites me to insult a fellow being, the other takes pity on him and accuses me of the very thing I am denouncing. While one urges me to see the beauty of the world, the other points out its sordidness and the absurdity of any feeling of happiness.

There is a claustrophobia to this relationship which is in direct contrast to the loneliness of the narrator. Or perhaps it would be truer to say that one begets the other. So lonely and isolated is Castel that he attaches undue significance to Maria, deludes himself as to what they share and finally destroys the one person who might have been able to help him. The tunnel of the title is an image that could be used to illustrate many different things, all of which Castel the artist has envisioned. I felt slightly oppressed by it as a reader and perhaps that is because, as he slowly realises, that Castel never really escapes from it.

...it was as if the two of us had been living in parallel passageways or tunnels, never knowing that we were moving side by side, like souls in like times, finally to meet at the end of those passageways before a scene I had painted as a kind of key meant for her alone, as a kind of secret sign that I was there ahead of her and that the passageways finally had joined and the hour for our meeting had come...What a stupid illusion that had been! No, the passageways were still parallel, as they always had been, only now the wall separating them was like a glass wall, and I could see Maria, a silent and untouchable figure...No, even that wall was not always glass; at times it again became black stone, and then I did not know what was happening on the other side...I was even convinced that during those moments...the whole story of the passageways was my own ridiculous invention, and that after all there was only one tunnel, dark and solitary: mine, the tunnel in which I had spent my childhood, my youth, my entire life. And in one of those transparent sections of the stone wall I had seen this girl and had naively believed that she was moving in a tunnel parallel to mine, when in fact she belonged to the wide world...

Julia - Otto de Kat

2012-01-19T08:54:00.000Z

'un-freedom'

translated by Ina Rilke

MacLehose Press are prolific publishers specialising in literature in translation. The problem is that they're so prolific (or have been so generous in making titles available to read and review) and their list so varied and wide-ranging that making a decision about which books to actually read can prove to be almost paralysing. What was it that made me finally opt for this slim novel from former publisher Jan Geurt Gaarlandt? (Otto de Katt is a pen name which to some English readers might make him sound a little like a cartoon character - or is that just me?) Perhaps that it was slim, or that something about it's cover and title immediately drew me in (de Kat himself has described it as the most beautiful edition he has seen of one of his books), or that the word masterpiece appeared on the front. Whatever it was that worked its magic I'm glad that I did finally open it up.

The story begins when Van Dijk, a driver, finds his employer Chris Dudok dead at home. A box of tablets and a bowl of porridge are nearby, 'suicide for the posh' he surmises before calling the doctor who when he finally arrives delivers a verdict of suicide with a single word

"Painless."
Still there must have been a fair amount of pain before getting this far.

The key to that pain is lying on the desk in front of him: a German newspaper from 1942 with a list of names on the front page circled in red. There is also has Dudok's diary, left on the backseat of the car the night before when he asked to be dropped off early so that he could walk the rest of the way home (this in itself might have been a warning sign from a man who would have been driven 'right into his study, had that been possible.') From this end point de Kat then goes back to tell Dudok's story in three different times. We go back to Lübeck, Germany in 1938 where Chris is sent by his father to gain some factory experience before taking over the family business back in Holland. He's sees the native fervour with an outsider's eye.

The spirit of the times seized him by the throat. Crazed masses rallied on a whim, marching and parading with soldierly discipline, Lübeck thrumming with excitement for the leader's new teachings. There was no getting away from the man. He appeared not to be taken so seriously in Holland, as though his ravings were put through a strain at the border. But the artist from Vienna was crafty, in his opinion, barking mad, but very clever. The radio seemed invented expressly for him, forever blasting into people's sitting rooms. Nobody thought to switch him off.

Whilst there he meets a female engineer, Julia Bender, who may be a German but sees the Nazi regime with the same distance as Chris - 'I don't belong anywhere; I have no desire to belong.' - and he falls in love with her. Any hopes of a satisfying love story are delayed by Chris's tentativeness and then interrupted by the provocative actions of Julia's actor brother who enrages the regime, putting them both in danger, at a time when Nazi violence is about to reach a definitive moment.

That night, Kristallnacht. The echo of his own name in the first syllable....it sounded so cheerful, conjuring visions of lavishly decked dinner tables with crystal glasses and burning candles, the epitome of bourgeois gemütlichkeit. A misapprehension. There were flames, but not of candles. Dinner tables, chairs, shops, homes, synagogues, Jews. All ready fuel for the conflagration. The stampede of jackboots in the streets, precisely directed, precisely timed. And the bystanders recoiling into the dumb silence, their passiveness never to be redeemed.

Julia insists that Chris leave Germany and return to Holland, leaving her behind. His desire to please her means that he obeys her order, turning his back on a woman he was only just beginning to know and yet whose feelings he won't bgin to comprehend until many years later. This is to be the action that in many ways defines his life, or perhaps more accurately: his death. In the second strand of the novel we see Chris move into middle age at home, into a marriage that falters, into his enforced tenure at the head of the family firm, a life that seems to follow along a set of tracks as fixed as those that took him away from Germany and from Julia. The third and final strand follows Chris on that walk home on his last night as he gives his life a final reckoning. The way in which de Kat moves between these three separate viewpoints is as seamless and fluid as memory and his prose throughout is spare (as I have come to expect from Dutch novelists of late) but with moments of wonderful poetry. In a novel about freedom and its opposite he helps us to see that though Chris is fortunate enough to be able to escape the growing horror in Germany we have to question how much or in what way he was able to escape it at all.

The un-freedom he suffered from was of a different order. How to free yourself from the happiest months of your life? From memories of life-changing events, and of a parting that robbed you of your soul? How?

Habibi - Craig Thompson

2012-01-17T09:52:00.190Z

'the Divine Pen'

I love it when a publisher says 'Do you know what, this book is beautiful, we should make sure it looks really beautiful.' The pleasure from Craig Thompson's latest graphic novel comes as soon as you pick it up. In fact it comes even before you do that. A soon as you see its beautifully designed cover the old pleasure receptors start firing and once it's in your hand then you can add a sense of import to the pleasure. It's fitting that this book, which I was aware drew on stories from both the Qur'an and Bible, has a biblical heft to it. Over 650 pages are contained within the intricately detailed, embossed and foiled cover and holding a book of that size feels very significant. A quick glance at the pages within and you can see you're in for a treat. This is a big, bold and ambitious book about love, religion, storytelling and mythology and it contains the very best and the very worst of human behaviour. Arabic calligraphy combines with religious symbols, spiritual visions with nightmares, opulent harems with pollution-choked slums. The novel manages to be ancient and modern at the same time so that the primacy of storytelling comes to the fore. We feel for most of the book as if we are reading an ancient story of slavery and redemption until the latter stages when the modern world intrudes making its themes suddenly very contemporary.

In a land choked by drought nine-year old Dodola is sold into marriage by her parents. Her husband is a scribe who teaches her to read and write and through his work she learns 'the Sacred Qur'an and the hadiths, One Thousand and One Nights, and the woks of the great poets.'

These amazingly detailed panels at the beginning with their decorative frames are gorgeous but the idyll they describe and come from is rudely interrupted when her husband is murdered and she is abducted. About to be sold for the second time in her short life, this time into slavery, Dodola manages to escape with an apparently abandoned baby boy, Cham. The two of them make a home for themselves on an old boat 'afloat on an ocean of sand' in the desert and when Cham finds a small spring of water Dodola renames him Zam after the well of Zamzam found by Ishmael, son of Abraham. This change of name is symbolic for Cham, named after the third son of Noah who was born black and later cursed, and represents freedom as much as their escape into the desert. Dodola becomes mother, sister and teacher to him, passing on her own knowledge of writing and storytelling to her eager young pupil (whom she calls Habibi or beloved one). His discovery of a source of water is also as significant as that created by the kicking feet of young Ishmael. Water is incredibly important in this novel as a source of life, salvation and power.

The two of them manage a relatively safe and isolated existence in the desert, Zam protected from the knowledge that their supplies come from Dodola's visits to the travelling caravans and the exchange of her body for food. In fact it isn't the outside world that threatens to ruin their solace but the natural changes that come from within as they grow older and in particular as Zam nears adolescence. Having always been able to share both bed and bath, Zam's quite natural burgeoning desires threaten the safe roles they have been assigned. When he is 12 he becomes aware of what Dodola has been doing to keep the two of them fed all these years. His anger at the sexual violence of other men and his guilt about his own desires lead him to undertake the journey out of the desert to find supplies in her stead. When he returns, Dodola has been abducted once again and the two of them will remain apart for many more years.

Separated from one another each undergoes their own extraordinary and physically torturous journey. Dodola becomes part of a Sultan's harem, prized as the 'phantom courtesan of the desert', challenged to satisfy the famously fickle Sultan for 70 nights in a row to earn her freedom and, after she only just fails to do that, later to turn a jug of water into gold for the same prize. This latter challenge is a fabulous set-piece in which Dodola draws on her learning and ability to read at first and her cunning and guile when she is frustrated. Zam in the meantime is forced to leave the desert when starvation threatens his survival and falls in with a group of eunuchs in the city. It is amongst them that he is introduced to the idea that he might be able to purify himself of the thoughts that he sees as responsible for driving them apart.

I don't think it's a spoiler to say that the two of them will be reunited (the cover illustrations show them older together) but I won't specify exactly how or what happens then. What is important is that these two 'orphans' who looked after one another in a world of scarce resources find themselves just as much at the mercy of them when they emerge into the thoroughly modern looking environment of the novel's final third. Water, which has always been precious, is now bottled as a commodity, its discarded plastic containers contributing to the waste and pollution that chokes the natural waterways. In fact there is a huge environmental message underneath this tale and panels which echo those created by Nick Hayes for his book, The Rime Of The Modern Mariner, which carried a similar warning. Thompson shows throughout the novel how humans exert power over each other by controlling those resources and how men in particular can exert their power over women. What chance is there for the meek in a world like that? Zam and Dodola are allowed a measure salvation but only after having paid a huge price personally. The reader is left exhausted and exhilarated by such an arduous journey, a witness to all the suffering who cannot help but be uplifted by the glimmer of hope offered in the closing pages.

Many graphic novels feel like well-realised shorts. By being pictorial the number of pages shrinks in reading time so that even some of the better ones can still feel a little slight. Habibi is epic in every sense. A big book, yes, but also a grand one with ambition, range and detail to make it a satisfying read from cover to cover and a treasure trove to delve into afterwards. Some of the larger panels have enough detail to keep the eye happy for minutes at a time, the manner in which Thompson threads themes and combines stories is quite brilliant and the structure of the novel as a whole is immensely satisfying, eschewing a straightforward linear trajectory for one that moves backwards and forwards in history just as memory does. If Christmas hadn't already passed then I'd be recommending this as a brilliant gift. There's nothing to stop you getting it as a gift for yourself of course...

Coltrane - Paolo Parisi

2012-01-12T08:20:00.139Z

'In the beginning, there was sound.'

Graphic novels I've read. Graphic memoir, graphic reportage, even graphic novel/travelogue/cookbook. But this is my first graphic biography. Right at the outset I have to say that I had concerns about the suitability of the form to the content. We are used to seeing great doorstops of books in the biography section; how could a graphic treatment provide anything other than the sketchiest of details? Perhaps by choosing the right subject. John Coltrane was a well-known jazz saxophonist, the iconic image on the cover a copy of that from his Blue Train album, recognisable to even those with the scantest interest or awareness of Jazz. I knew next to nothing about his life however and whilst my initial worries about this book are born out (I would still need to pick up a weighty tome to really know the details of this man's life) that would be to criticise it for not being a book it never claimed to be. What it does achieve is enough biographical detail to entice you to pick up a more thorough book but also within its 118 black-bordered pages, to create something of the sound of Coltrane, something of the feeling behind his music, and a real shot at the spiritual dimension behind that innovative sound.

Immediately I thought of another graphic book, Bluesman by Rob Vollmar and Pablo Callejo, which uses the structure of a traditional twelve bar blues song, three sections each with four chapters, to frame its narrative (I say this without having read the damn book which I keep meaning to do, I'm waiting for Max over at Pechorin's Journal to write a post about it and convince me). A book on Coltrane, one of the pioneers of free jazz, has no such order to it. We zoom about from one period to the next; different bands, different problems, different rhythms. This free association takes us from Coltrane's highs to his lows; moments of unity to moments of solitude; love, pain and addiction; but always, always: the music.

It is of course incredibly tempting to put some of his music on whilst reading and if you have the chance this can only enhance the experience, especially when looking at those panels in which he and his band play. It also helps to (almost) make sense of the book's structure and for those who aren't that keen on jazz I think it might help them to take the music more seriously. Reading about Coltrane's poverty-stricken and discriminated childhood you can't help but get behind him when his extraordinary talent begins to show itself and offer a way out. His personal troubles, both physical and emotional, are seen in a greater context when the spirituality of the music is added to them (how many great artists have struggled to be great human beings?). So perhaps a graphic treatment of his life makes some kind of sense after all. The book isn't enough on its own to be a proper biography and it may fall between two stools: too slight for those who already know him and never going to convince those who have little knowledge or interest. Personally it piqued my interest in the man and was enjoyable enough to read. Will I follow up on it however...? I'm not convinced.

All Quiet On The Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque

2012-01-10T09:27:00.305Z

'it must never happen again'

translated by Brian Murdoch

I should really have read this classic novel of war well before now; not just because it was recommended reading when I first joined the comapny of War Horse over two years ago but also because it was the title I chose to give away to 48 lucky members of the audience on the innaugural World Book Night last year. I've said before that you sometimes need a bit of planetary alignment to nudge you towards reading a particular book and when the technical rehearsals for the latest cast change at work (traditionally a good time to get some reading done) happened to fall the day after Remembrance Sunday and after a fortnight of collecting for the Royal British Legion then there really did seem to be no excuse any longer.

So, where to begin? Remarque's novel, based on his own experiences at the front, is a classic piece of war literature, importantly providing for all of us British readers a German perspective on the bloodshed and even more importantly than that a voice of dissent from the trenches. It is this that made the book so notorious in his native Germany, that encouraged the Nazis to add it to the list of books to be consigned to the flames, and that makes it such an important novel today as we approach a century since the war to end all wars began. The novel is narrated by Paul Bäumer, whom we follow with a few of his school friends as they are encouraged to enlist and are sent to the front to fight. Instilled with homespun rhetoric and the idealism of their teachers and elders it isn't long before the realities of conflict alter their view. Not only has schooling provided them with little of practical use in a war zone ('Nobody taught us at school how to light a cigarette in a rainstorm, or how it is possible to make a fire even with soaking wet wood - or that the best place to stick a bayonet is into the belly, because it can't get jammed in there, the way it can in the ribs.') but all of the certainties, their very reasons for fighting in the first place quickly fall away.

While they went on writing and making speeches, we saw field hospitals and men dying: while they preached the service of the state as the greatest thing, we already knew that the fear of death is even greater...all at once our eyes had been opened. And we saw that there was nothing left of their world. Suddenly we found ourselves horribly alone - and we had to come to terms with it alone as well.

What we gain from the narrative is not so much specifics about the military campaign (I was never entirely sure where I was along the western front, nor which specific battles where being described) but an insight into what it felt like to be one of the confused, young men in those trenches. The different sounds of the various munitions, the poor conditions, the new values that make tobacco or rare foodstuffs worth more than all the money in the world, the camaraderie, the humour, the landscape where a hundred yards of brown, churned-up earth can contain the whole world.

...the power to defend ourselves flows back into us out of the earth...The earth is more important to the soldier than to anybody else. When he presses himself to the earth, long and violently, when he urges himself deep into it with his face and with his limbs, under fire and with the fear of death upon him, then the earth is his only friend, his brother, his mother, he groans out his terror and screams into its silence and safety, the earth absorbs it all and gives him another ten seconds of life, ten seconds to run, then takes hold of him again - sometimes forever.

For these young men who 'had just begun to love the world and to love being in it' the effect of being forced 'to shoot at it' is an almost immediate alienation. Isolated from civilisation, brutalised by fighting, numbed by bombardment, the idea of progress disappears to be replaced by nothing other than the belief in war itself. When that happens even the terror of fighting recedes into the background; these once green recruits find themselves feeling like experienced soldiers, amazed in turn by the inexperience and inadequate training of the next batch coming through. There is also time for other highlights to shine through; the men's visit to a house over the river to see three French women, their revenge on the brutal corporal Himmelstoss, and Kat's frequent ability to scavenge food whenever required including a goose at one point which he and Paul roast. This last event provides a moment for Paul to reflect on the unlikely intimacy of war.

What does he know about me? What do I know about him? Before the war we wouldn't have had a single thought in common - and now here we are, sitting with a goose roasting in front of us, aware of our existence and so close to each other that we can't even talk about it.

Perhaps the defining moment of the novel is Bäumer's trip home on leave, which is almost unbearably moving. There are tears as soon as he walks through the door but the awkwardness of his renewed contact with his family is brilliantly described by Remarque. His mother is dying from cancer and the two of them have so much they might say to each other but can't, his father doesn't know how to speak to his son of his experiences and Bäumer finds that the place where he grew up is no longer a one where he feels he belongs. For fellow bibliophiles there is a telling moment when Bäumer goes through the book collection that once gave him so much joy and finds that he can't read any of them - 'Words, words, words - they can't reach me.'

The true impact of this trip home is felt when he returns to the fray. First comes the return of fear, particularly in one scene that finds him stuck in a shell hole during a bombardment, paralysed by that fear of death, rescued finally by hearing voices in the trench behind him ('Those voices mean more than my life, more than mothering and fear, they are the strongest and most protective thing that there is: they are the voices of my pals'). Then comes his first real engagement with the reality of fighting when he kills a French soldier in hand to hand combat and watches him die slowly. Realising how little separates them he makes a vow.

'Your turn today, mine tomorrow. But if I get out of all this, pal, I'll fight against the things that wrecked it for both of us: you life and my -? Yes, my life too. I promise you, pal. It must never happen again.'

This might have led to Bäumer becoming some kind of crusader for reform or political settlement post-war but as his friends are slowly picked off by Death a hopelessness sets in and we see how Paul has been utterly destroyed by his experience. All the more reason to make sure that we heed the vow he made, for this great war novel is of course a great anti-war novel. One that retains a devastating impact and fully deserves its classic status.

The Misfortunates - Dimitri Verhulst

2012-01-05T09:19:00.000Z

'a funny kind of love'

translated by David Colmer

I discovered Verhulst by accident after taking a punt on his rather wonderful novella Madame Verona Comes Down The Hill. I knew back then when I read it that it was something of a departure from Verhulst's previous output and Portobello Books are now publishing the autobiographical novel that he published in the same year. At the bottom you will be able to see a trailer for the film version from 2009 which confirms the shorthand precis on the back of my proof: Think Shameless with mayo on the chips. This coming of age tale is narrated by Verhulst himself (yes, he uses his own name) beginning at the age of thirteen when he lived with his father, his uncles and his grandmother in the onomatopoeically named Aresendegem (presumably the arse-end of some small town) in Belgium, 'a town the great cartographers forgot, an ugly backwater, but a great place for drizzle and pigeon fancying.'

Now, I nearly gave up on this one, I'll be honest. After the first couple of chapters I got the sense that what I was going to read were a series of vignettes based on Verhulst's own chaotic upbringing. Colourful characters, entertaining set-pieces, all very good but not enough to maintain my interest throughout. What comes along to save it at first is the set-piece to end all set-pieces. We've all played some kind of drinking game in the past I'm sure but the Verhulst's have slightly larger ambitions. In a chapter entitled The Tour de France an extraordinary drinking competition is created by the young Girder, ruled out of the official world-record drinking competition by his age, in line with the famous bike race. 19 stages with 5km equal to a standard glass of alcohol, meaning that 'even a reasonably short stage of 180 kilometres would involve drinking 36 standard glasses of alcohol. Against the clock' There are even three jerseys to earn.

The yellow jersey was for the leader and eventual winner...the greenn jersey for the explosive sprinter: the neck-it king. And the polka-dot jersey could be captured in the mountains, where you proceeded by guzzling strong drinks like whisky and vodka.

What follows is a drinking marathon of epic proportions during which Girder's mother, seeing her son return home each night looking 'as pale as a corpse and with a beard of dried vomit' worries about his new found enthusiasm for cycling and buys him a brand new racing bike (which eventually finds its way to scrap metal dealer to help pay for all the booze). The descriptions of this sustained drinking binge come with all the seriousness of sports commentary and for Girder it is all about the pursuit of what Dino Buzatti called The Idea, all of this mock-seriousness providing plenty of entertainment for the reader.

There is another strong chapter to follow in which, after a visit from the bailiffs and the removal of their television, the family visit the house of some Iranian neighbours ('So these were foreigners') so that they can watch Roy Orbison's comeback concert, A Black and White Night, Dimitri's father being a die-hard Orbison fan. What follows is something of a culture shock for the Iranians and an emotional high point for the Verhulsts, one of the many episodes in which joy and triumph are found in the most unlikely situations. These peaks and the liberal sprinkling of humour are important in what could have been a grim book and even something like the memory of helping his mother (absent now and referred to as a whore) with her moustache removal - 'an enormous operation that always made me think of a religious rite in a country I don't ever want to visit.' - is one filled with some kind of love.

And that's what this novel ends up expressing: a funny kind of love. Near the end we hear the famous family story about Dimitri's birth, how his father was down the pub after too many false alarms, finally cycled to the maternity hospital and left 5 minutes later with baby in hand to take his newborn son on a tour of the town in the basket of his bicycle.

Sister Philomena in the corridor, barking at my father: 'Where do you think you're going with that child?'
Me in his arms.
'It's my son, I'll take him wherever I like.'
'Mr Verhulst, he was only born this morning.'
'He's my son. If you want kids of your own to boss around, chuck your wimple over the hedge and hike up your dress, the rest'll take care of itself.' And he carried me out the door.

This is not a particularly responsible family and yet they have their moments. For all the high jinks there are of course serious moments. There is no doubting the concern on the day when his father announces he wants to go into rehab.

My father now tasted like beer and his armpits smelled like it too. Maybe he had already noticed the whites of his eyes growing yellow, his steady loss of weight. A drinker's coffin is seldom a heavy burden, undertakers are always glad to carry them, and our family would have saved a lot of money if we'd been able to pay for our funerals by the pound.

And along with death it is of course the promise of new life that also heralds the need to grow up and become responsible. When Dimitri stupidly gets someone pregnant it marks the beginning of a new life, particularly as it is someone whom he doesn't really love and with whom he has no future.

How could I have been so sure, for all those years, that my fertility would adjust itself to my convictions, that the unwillingness in my brain would metastasize in my testicles? A character like me could only have been devised by Greek tragedians or by the scriptwriters of the kind of soap operas that put the logic of character development on the back burner in favour of general stupidity.

There is a general stupidity to this novel and a sense that it isn't really a novel at all, falling somewhere between memoir and short stories, all of which means that I wasn't nearly as enthused by this book as Madame Verona. That said, I'm glad I gave it a chance. Like the Tour de France it has various stages, some of which suit some riders better than others.

All Is Song - Samantha Harvey

2012-01-03T08:59:00.000Z

'Here I am'

Harvey's debut, The Wilderness, received some impressive critical responses when published, the general consensus being that it didn't read like a debut at all but the work of a far more established writer. I haven't read it, but after reading her new novel I don't feel like I need to in order to proclaim her a writer every bit as promising as that debut suggested. All Is Song is a novel of great intelligence and understanding, the kind of book in which very little actually happens and yet which grips from first page to last with its philosophical, spiritual and emotional explorations. In this way Harvey is the natural heir to Iris Murdoch who I was reminded of when reading this book. Human and humane in its examination of personal responsibility, a small cast of characters become incredibly close to the reader so that it becomes a very moving reading experience, one that despite featuring as the first review of the new year I fully expect to see on my list of books of the year in 12 months time.

It's so good in fact that settling down to write this post I wonder which of its many strands I should write about. This is a complex novel, not because it features many characters or a multi-layered narrative, but because it gets under the skin of its small cast and really wrestles with its themes and ideas. At its centre are two brothers, and filial love is one of the things Harvey writes about so fearlessly.

How could it be that a person's face - simply the way the weight and light fell around their face - could prompt indivisible love? For all that one's family could irritate and infuriate, their mirrored genes and minds of shared memories broke down every defence. There they were, and things were perfectly simple.

Leonard Deppling has spent the last year on sabbatical from his work as a religious studies teacher to care for his dying father. His brother William was absent from the funeral and at the beginning of the novel Leonard joins William and his family in their north London home, these two orphaned brothers looking to re-establish their close bond, something we know will be difficult - 'For all their closeness over the years they still didn't know how to negotiate the extremes of one another, and as soon as the I think became I feel, they faltered, as if they were constrained by the awkward fact they were human.' Leonard also has on his mind the dying wish of his father to find out how involved William was in a campaign of violence that emerged during the Poll Tax Riots.

William is an extraordinary character, a perfect counterpoint to his brother. These two sons of a priest have always been different and in their adult choices we can see this quite clearly. Leonard may teach religion but he has no faith or belief in God himself. William on the other hand is a former activist who now spends his time with former pupils, painfully aware of the state of his ignorance, always questioning, never settling for the easy or obvious conclusion but always bolstered by a very real faith in God. If the character of Adrian in Julian Barnes' The Sense Of An Ending hates 'the way the English have of not being serious about being serious' ('I really hate it.') then he might have loved William. It isn't quite contrariness, although he is prepared to take a conversation to the most uncomfortable places, but a refusal to take anything for granted. His faith also means that he feels an innate fellowship in Man, who despite being 'born from unity.... divide into isolation.' Having 'dreamed themselves clear of Him.' he feels the pull back towards the comfort of that unity but also the need to wake up from the dream. And sometimes that requires a shock. The plot of this novel follows the consequences of one of William's pupils following his line of thought to its obvious conclusion. But that plot is only interesting in as much as it provides conflict between the characters and an arena for the discussion of one of the novel's major themes: responsibility.

With William and his pupil, responsibility comes with planting an idea and refusing to walk away from it even when it is taken too far. William's refusal to accept the escape options laid before him is frustrating but only the logical extension of his own arguments earlier about intention and consequence - 'I assume I'm innocent because I meant no harm, but is it enough to mean no harm?'

'...the law is clear - there's either enough evidence or there isn't - but the law is just the surface of the water, and nothing that happens there happens on its own - the colours, the swell, the bubbles that break, they're all caused by things above or below the surface - and I don't know enough about those things.'

Leonard has just spent a year exercising his responsibility to his father, executor now to his estate and even glossing the story of his final moments so that it includes some kind of reconciliation with William. Now living with his brother he feels a strong responsibility towards him also. This however comes into conflict with his father's dying wish and the tension between these responsibilities keeps the novel taut as a bowstring.

As you might expect from a novel that leaves two brothers suddenly without either parent there is a fair amount of looking back. This is particularly true for Leonard who has seen his partner move on with another man and has been left feeling rather rootless ever since. Comparing once again with Julian Barnes' novel about time and memory there are plenty of potent symbols here as well, which Harvey uses with devastating precision. The prospect of owning an old car for example can carry the memory of Leonard's failed relationship, his brother, and the deaths of a family friend as well as both his parents.

The old Austin! In which he'd been with Tela, in which William had learnt - or tried to learn - to drive. Just to think of its cranky black engine that had outlived Jan's heart, his mother's heart, his father's. To get in it would be to get into a piece of stilled time and to drive it would be to to carry that stilled time around with him...

Returning to filial love, it is amazing how much love infuses this novel as a whole. William for example claims not to 'see single people, I see people. I don't love or hate discriminately, I just try to give myself equally to all for as long as what I give is wanted. And always, Leo, always this act of giving is vulnerable and my heart gets knocked about.' What looks like a kind of detachment, as though he has never really been in love for example, is actually he claims the fact that he has never really been out of love with one person or another. For Leonard it is much more specific and though through much of the novel he is wrestling with his failed relationship or the death of his father this is really a book about his love for his brother. A brother who always saw the world differently, so much so that he was sent to doctors of both the head and heart; whose actions, though consistent, remain baffling to even his own family, for how of course do you quantify another human being.

Here I am, William had written on that brain cross-section on the wall, and it was ironic of course, as if to deride their father for supposing that the enormity of a life - his life, or any - could dwell there between skull and grey matter. Leonard stared at it and then hung his head; it wasn't the enormity of life that overwhelmed him then but the distance of it, which was to say the distance between one life and another, which couldn't be navigated physically or even spiritually, no matter how optimistic one sometimes allowed oneself to be. How could it be that he'd stood through two funerals of both parents without crying when just then, in that moment, he thought he might cry and not be able to stop?

When defending his need to stand by the absolute truth of what he has said, William compares speech to the written word, expressing his preference for the former because it forces us to defend immediately what we say and preserves its genesis whereas what we write can be interpreted and twisted until it no longer resembles what we had meant at all. 'We have too much hope for the written word,' he says 'Too much hope for it and too much faith in it.' Writers like Samantha Harvey restore your faith in the written word all over again.

2011 - Books of the Year

2011-12-15T07:43:00.037Z

Yes, you may have already noticed that 2011's end of year post is just about books rather than also including my favourite music, films and other cultural highlights. The reason for this is quite simple: I've barely listened/watched/been to any as any regular readers will have noticed over the year. It has in fact been all I could manage to maintain a steady stream of book reviews this year and I have my fingers crossed about being able to do the same next year. It hasn't been easy. But every time I think I'm about to throw in the towel something comes along to make me persevere and I'm always glad that I do. The books below are all brilliant for different reasons and a couple of them are so good that they're worth writing the blog for alone. And then of course there's you and your comments.....

Many thanks to every single one of you who has read my blog this year and a seasonal hug and kiss to everyone who's left a comment. I can't tell you how much I appreciate it.

A Taste of Chlorine by Bastien Vives

It may be at the bottom of the pile in the photo above but this graphic novel is right at the top of my books of the year. If you want to read a graphic novel that truly uses pictures to tell a story that words wouldn't have been able to then this book is perfect. The story of a boy using swimming to help treat curvature of the spine is all about body-language, gesture and movement. There's hardly any text and yet volumes are spoken in Vives' exquisitely drawn panels, with the underwater environment particularly well presented, you can almost smell the chlorine. Like reading a perfect short story it is enigmatic, moving and left me with a warm glow in my heart.

The Death Of The Adversary by Hans Keilson

A genuine masterpiece about tyranny and control from a writer who may only have produced two novels in his long lifetime but who made sure they were both in their own ways completely brilliant. This novel examines the symbiotic relationship between a man who is clearly Jewish (though never named as such) in 1930's Germany (though this is never made explicit) and the leader, or adversary, (clearly Hitler though again he is not named) who tyrannises him. Brave in its hypotheses, brutal in its psychological insights and honesty, this novel is a classic because it manages to be about all situations in which one group makes a pariah of another. Indispensable.

Great House by Nicole Krauss

This novel is by no means perfect but its failings come from ambition rather than lack of talent which Krauss seems to have in spades. There is a feeling that comes from reading the work of a mature writer, an ease that you are in the hands of someone who has something to say. This usually comes from writers far more experienced than Krauss but her maturity is just one of the attractive features in this novel about a desk and the various hands it passes through, characters created with such detail that they cease to feel like characters at all, and the novel as a whole written with a complexity that forces the reader to slow down and appreciate the thought, intelligence and humanity that has gone into creating it.

The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake

A collection of stories so unique, so specific, so perfect as to need little more than that from me to send you straight out to buy a copy. Pancake died without ever really knowing just how good a writer he was and too young for us to know just how good and influential he might have become. As it stands several writers cite him as an influence and the warmth and reverence with which they do this is worth noting. His stories embody the area of West Virginia in which Pancake grew up, with authentic details and voices but these aren't simply stories rooted in a particular geography so that we can indulge in a kind of literary tourism, he also shows with a couple of stories just how formally inventive he might have been. Just buy the damn book, ok?

The Summer Of Drowning by John Burnside

I have no shame in admitting that I am a fan of Burnside and take a small amount of pride in being one of the voices that has helped convince John Self over at Asylum to read more of him and realise just how good he is (although in his own end of the year round-up he mentions that he did so in order to shut people like me up). This latest novel shows a writer at the height of his powers returning to a story he failed to complete a decade ago and delivering a novel filled with atmosphere, unease, myth, storytelling, artistry and writing so good it sometimes make you want to take a moment and nod your head in appreciation. Set in the Arctic Circle and drawing on the folk myths of the area this is a book infused with the spectral light of the midnight sun; deeply unsettling, wonderfully complex, another weapon in my arsenal to make sure that you all make the effort to pick up one of his books. Soon.

The Rules Of Civility by Amor Towles

An unalloyed pleasure from first page to last, Towles debut is a perfectly mixed dry Martini. Set in 1920's New York it tells the story of a life-changing year for Katherine Kontent, the only fictional character I have ever fallen in love with. Taking inspiration from Walker Evans' candid subway photographs Towles effortlessly recreates an era and peoples it with characters in which I believed totally and couldn't hope to forget. It's the kind of novel where you genuinely care about what happens to them and can't help but wonder what happens to them after the final page. Witty, funny, smart and beautiful: that's just Katey Kontent, but also a good description of the novel as a whole.

Lazarus Is Dead by Richard Beard

One of the most exciting reads of the year for the way in which its form was hard to pin down, Beard's 'novel' is a re-examination of the story behind one of Jesus' miracles. By taking an almost forensic approach Beard manages to tell the story more fully than ever before, bravely hypothesising about the childhoods of both men, drawing inspiration and evidence from other artistic sources, research into the period and of course the invention of the author. Structured around the number seven the chapters count down to Lazarus' death and then back up again after his resurrection, where Beard is brave enough not just to imagine what happens to the story of Lazarus after its usefulness in the Bible ends but to posit an even greater significance for the man who came back from the dead. If you want to know why fiction can still be exciting then pick this book up.

New Finnish Grammar by Diego Marani

If I had a pound for every novel that takes a male protagonist, wipes his memory and then starts from there then I'd have a load more money to spend on books, but this novel from linguist Marani is ingenious and far smarter than most. A man is found badly beaten on the quay in Trieste in 1943. When he comes to he has no memory of who he is or even which language he speaks. The Finnish doctor on a German hospital ship that treats him presumes that he is also Finnish after spotting a name inside his coat and an initialled handkerchief and so begins to re-teach him his language in the hope it will unlock memories and lead him to recover his identity. This relatively slim novel covers huge themes around memory, identity and truth and manages to intrigue even further with the perspective from which it is written. Exactly the kind of novel I would hope to unearth on this blog (although Nicholas Lezard gets the credit on this one).

I Am A Chechen by German Sadulaev

A book that melds memoir with fiction, folk tale with fantasy, Sadulaev's account of the conflict in Chechnya doesn't fit into any easy categories and is all the more exciting for it. It may not be consistent but the early sections in particular are stunning in the way they weave Chechen myth with personal testimony to create something that manages to be grand and specific at the same time. Infused with the guilt of a man who wasn't there when things were at their worst, Sadulaev uses his creativity instead to speak on behalf of a people and give voice to a conflict the like of which all too easily passes us by on the ticker tape of rolling news.

The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker

This is hardly news to anyone as the book was already well regarded by the time I came to read it at the very beginning of this year but it has remained very strong in my mind, a perfect example of why we should all read more literature in translation. Bakker's novel is written with the kind of quiet confidence that let's the reader relax in the knowledge that they are in safe hands. Reserved to the point of repression, the prose mimics the flat landscape of rural Holland but gives little hints along the way of the power that lurks beneath the surface. A farmer and his father inhabit a lonely farmhouse and the son's appalling treatment of his father leads us to wonder what might have happened in the past. Bakker expertly releases fragments from the past in his examination of love, loss and the special bond between twin brothers.

The Horseman's Word by Roger Garfitt

I don't tend to read an awful lot of non-fiction but I'm lucky that when I do it tends to be first rate. This memoir was literally forced into my hand by an excited publicist and her enthusiasm wasn't misplaced. The prose is beautiful as you might expect from a poet and its evocations of childhood innocence are heart-warming and comforting. When it follows Garfitt's misadventures at university and beyond it becomes a fascinating portrait of a mind unravelling and the writing shows the tissue-thin barriers between lunatic, lover and poet. A book that took many years to write and hone, and the passion of one publisher in particular to finally bring to print, this is a labour of love and madness that rewards the effort.

Disgrace by J M Coetzee

Over a decade after it was originally published and won the Booker Prize I finally get over my Coetzee hoodoo and discover just why this book, and writer, are so well regarded. A Cape Town university professor is forced to leave in disgrace after an affair with a student and goes to stay with his daughter on her smallholding. When the two of them are subjected to a brutal assault by three black men South Africa's fragile new politics are laid bare for examination. A brave and uncomfortable read that retains its ability to shock, this is a novel filled with anger and love, containing so many ideas and themes that you could happily discuss it for hours and hours. It has also of course made me want to read more Coetzee. Ah well, there's always next year....

And a few books that came close and deserve honourable mentions: At Last by Edward St Aubyn, A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, From The Mouth Of The Whale by Sjón and Today by David Miller.

'Who said there were no surprises left in life?'

2011-12-13T09:00:00.000Z

The Sense Of An Ending
by Julian Barnes

Each year there is often a fervour amongst book bloggers to try and get ahead of the Booker game and guess what books might make the longlist, then to read read the entire longlist (or shortlist if you're a wuss) so that you can pick your winner before the panel of judges. I've never fancied a Bookerthon myself, mainly because it seems, in spite of the seemingly wide variety of books that can appear on the list, an unnecessary narrowing of one's reading for a good portion of the year. I happened to read a few by chance and yet weirdly the one I probably should have read, based on having enjoyed his writing before and its eminently digestible size, was one that I didn't get around to until after it had already won the prize. It was seen by some as the only winner capable of mollifying the critics who had picked up on the rather unfortunate phrases used by the judges at various points in the process. As someone who was disappointed in varous ways by the books I read before the announcement I can say now that the eventual winner has its own failings but is a book we can be happy to see brought to more readers, and welcome recognition for a writer who deserves plenty of praise (although maybe for other books......discuss!)

The first thing to enjoy about this book is the feeling of calm and comfort that comes from reading the work of a well established writer (actually the first thing to enjoy is the delicious muted cover design, the dark edged pages...). No tricks or gimmicks, plenty of mature observation and detail, sentences and paragraphs filled with insight that make you want to stop for a moment to savour their import. This short novel wastes no time in introducing its major theme of memory, the opening sentence 'I remember, in no particular order:' followed by six images of relative normality, all of which will be illuminated in the pages that follow. That too is another joy, the way in which Barnes can take an image and make it mean so much more by adding to it experience and loss. Each memory as it is reclaimed and re-examined only highlights the way in which loss and remembrance go hand in hand, for 'Memory is what we thought we'd forgotten."

Our narrator Tony Webster has reached the point in his life where the stasis he always aspired to has been reached. A career ended in retirement, a marriage ended in amicable divorce - 'I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded – and how pitiful that was.' Then comes a letter from solicitors dealing with the estate of his childhood friend Adrian, informing him that Adrian's diary has been left to him, although it is currently in the possession of another figure from his past, ex-girlfriend Veronica. The reappearance of these names from the past is nothing less than an exhumation, literally in the case of Adrian who committed suicide, and metaphorically in the case of Veronica who left Tony so hurt he decided to practically erase her from his life (the scant details he passed on about her to his wife have rendered her a caricature - 'The Fruitcake') and whilst this forces him to examine once again his school days and first relationships the diary promises some kind of secret or revelation that may shed light on his whole life. If he can only get a hold of it.

Let's not worry about the plot any more though. As I mentioned in my review of Sebald's Austerlitz there seems to be far more pleasure in the effort to remember than in what is actually remembered. The revelations in this novel, the 'twist' that you may have heard mentioned in other reviews, are probably the parts that I liked least (someone else, who shall remain anonymous, said it was tantamount to the ending of an episode of Eastenders), it is the insight into the idea of remembering, of the narrative we tell ourselves about our life that engages more than the plot itself ('...the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but - mainly - to ourselves.'). Barnes also uses two or three recurring images to great effect in his exploration of time and shows also that the tiniest gesture can have the most profound meaning if we can only see it. As I said earlier, those fleeting images in the first few sentences of the book will all assume a greater significance.

Back in those school days where Tony and his classmates were filled with that confidence that comes with privilege - 'that they had ever been anything like us, and we knew that we grasped life - and truth, and morality, and art - far more clearly than out compromised elders' - he and his two closest friends marked their union in a simple way.

Another detail I remember: the three of us, as a symbol of our bond, used to wear with the face on the inside of our wrist. It was an affectation, of course, but perhaps something more. It made time feel like a personal, even a secret, thing.

This image is typical of Barnes. It resonates immediately as truthful, acknowledges its own pretension straight away and also sets itself up for a payoff later; all in three short sentences. This novel seems to be filled with moments like this. Classroom discussions about who gets to decide what becomes history feedback into the personal relationships we follow. 'History isn't the lies of the victors...It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated' but they are presumably damaged and this is a theme that Barnes develops as Tony looks back on his relationship with Veronica.

I certainly believe we all suffer damage, one way or another. How could we not, except in a world of perfect parents, siblings, neighbours, companions? And then there is the question, on which so much depends, of how we react to the damage: whether we admit it or repress it, and how this affects our dealing with others. Some admit the damage, and try to mitigate it; some spend their lives trying to help others who are damaged; and then there are those whose main concern is to avoid further damage to themselves, at whatever cost. And those are the ones who are ruthless, and the ones to be careful of.

Tony's memories of his defining relationship with Veronica are filled with deliciously insightful comments ranging from where she and her family lived - 'in Kent, out on the Orpington line, in one of those suburbs which had stopped concreting over nature at the very last minute, and ever since smugly claimed rural status.' (This is Chislehurst, which is down the road from where I grew up, meaning that the sentence above had me guffawing on the train) - to the ability of a jilted partner to skewer his ex. When Veronica and Adrian partner up after the end of her relationship with Tony he writes a vitriolic letter which will become another of the documents of this novel. But after Adrian's suicide Tony is pithy in his analysis.

The bitch, I thought. If there was one woman in the entire world a man could fall in love with and still think life worth refusing, it was Veronica.

Ow. John Self covers some interesting ground with regard to regretting our harsh words in his own review of this book so I won't say any more on that but return once more to time and memory. Another of Barnes' recurring images is the Severn Bore, a natural tidal surge that sends a sizeable wave the wrong way up the River Severn (follow this link to see some amazing videos of the phenomena). If we look back through our lives, follow the river of our memories, we expect to always see time flowing in one direction. But as Tony is forced to look once again at his life, or the story of his life as told by himself, his very concept of time alters.

I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory. So when this strange thing happened - when these new memories suddenly came upon me - it was as if, for that moment, time had been placed in reverse. As if, for that moment, the river ran upstream.

Such are these revelations that some readers may be tempted into their own reversal, turning back to the first page to begin the novel again with a new perspective.

'Not a bad man but not good either'

2011-12-06T00:19:00.385Z

Disgrace
by J. M. Coetzee

I mentioned my trepidation when approaching Sebald in my review of Austerlitz last week but that was nothing compared to the downright anxiety I felt about making a start on Coetzee. I knew I had to read him but with each successive publication my sense of where to start with him got more and more confused. Step in the Folio Society with another lovely edition that gives the Booker Prize winning Disgrace a well deserved re-appraisal more than 10 years after its original publication. I still feel a certain anxiety about Coetzee but it is now that I will find his later work as intimidating as ever whilst secretly wanting to read more of his earlier work, so brilliant was this intelligent, brave, angry and confused novel. As someone who began to find their reading maturity on a diet of Philip Roth's more passionate novels I felt as though I had found a replacement source of that fervour now that Roth has begun to focus so much on mortality and death. Disgrace is every bit as risky and controversial as I expected but also richly symbolic, brutal and exhilarating. What an introduction.

The man at the centre of the novel is David Lurie, a professor in a Cape Town university where modernisation has seen him move from teaching Literature to 'Communications' a title that doesn't sit well with this lover of the Romantic poets. His life has achieved a kind of stasis; he has been married and divorced, remaining on good terms with his ex-wife; sex has become a transaction as easily managed as any utility bill with his weekly visits to a woman named 'Soraya'; and a personal project to write an opera about Byron is always simmering away on the back burner.

Is he happy? By most measurements, yes, he believes he is. However, he has not forgotten the last chorus of Oedipus: Call no man happy until he is dead.

This routine is ruptured when Lurie spots Soraya in the street with two children who can only be hers and the two of them catch each other's eye. This intrusion of her personal life into their private arrangement is never mentioned by either of them at their next appointment but they both know something has changed and their arrangement comes to an end. Lurie's solution to this problem is to fall back on the tried and tested formula of sleeping with one of his students. The girl he selects, Melanie Isaacs, is 20 years old 'small and thin, with close cropped hair, wide, almost Chinese cheekbones, large, dark eyes', and whilst he finds himself falling rather harder for her than he intended she never seems to be fully committed. One sexual episode in particular highlights what we might call acquiescence rather than real participation.

Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core. As though she had decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration, like a rabbit when the jaws of the fox close on its neck. So that everything done to her might be done, as it were, far away.

A complaint is made, probably by or at least at the encouragement of Melanie's boyfriend; a tribunal is held at which Lurie refuses to kowtow to the demands of some of the board to show penitence or do more than simply admit guilt and he is dismissed from his position, eventually leaving in disgrace to stay with his daughter on the smallholding she owns on the Eastern Cape.

This retreat doesn't offer the solace that he might have hoped for. Not only is there the slightly fractious relationship between father and daughter but in a moment of shocking violence the two of them are subjected to an ordeal that further polarises their positions as well as forcing the reader to confront an uncomfortable image of the new South Africa. As a reviewer I might chose to skirt around the details of the incident in order to avoid spoilers but Coetzee keeps things unclear by placing Lurie in a different room to his daughter as she endures what he presumes to be rape by one or all of the three (black) men who attack them in their home. Lucy's refusal to discuss what actually happened or seek any recourse to the law leaves Lurie baffled and frustrated but she is quite clear about her stance.

'...what happened to me is a purely private matter. In another time, in another place it might be held to be a public matter. But in this place, at this time, it is not. It is my business, mine alone.'
'This place being what?'
'This place being South Africa.'

Coetzee's genius is that an event that would be shocking and painful enough on its own is given a far deeper resonance by the circumstances that surround it. What kind of guilt or pressure is it that forces Lucy to endure her shame rather than challenge it? Is David right to question whether Petrus, the (black) neighbour who has gone from worker to co-owner of the smallholding, has any connection to the attack? How can David hope to talk to his daughter fully about her ordeal when we consider the charges that brought him to her home in the first place? It's no surprise that this book caused controversy in South Africa. In its bluntest interpretation we might see a brutal justice being administered to the white population after the end of apartheid, a vicious illustration that 'The past is never dead. It's not even past.' This metaphor becomes even more concentrated if we think that Melanie, whose ethnicity is never specified beyond the enigmatic description I gave above, might herself be black. If, within this tight narrative framework, we have seen father bear down on a black student and then his daughter assaulted by three black men we have a pressure of almost unbearable degree, a potent symbol of racial division as well as one of ownership, control and power. It is that kind of pent-up energy that had me thinking of (and rejoicing) Roth's angriest novels when reading this one. Lucy's personal disgrace is to endure the attack and then to hear the story version of it of it spread across the district unchallenged.

That is what their visitors have achieved; that is what they have done to this confident, modern young woman. Like a stain the story is spreading across the district. Not her story to spread but theirs: they are its owners. How they put her in her place, how they showed her what a woman is for.

And the question she is left asking herself comes when considering the personal animosity she witnessed - 'Why did they hate me so?' Surely only as a symbol of something wider.

And what are we to make of the novel's protagonist? Christopher Hope in his introduction gives us a little guidance in trying to seek out his motivations and wondering what kind of sympathy we might have for him as a character (it is also worth noting that Hope, who hasn't always given Coetzee the easiest of rides, is in no doubt about the virtues of this novel). We might consider the way Lurie speaks to his students about one of his life's passions, Byron, and the way in which Byron describes Lucifer in particular.

'He doesn't act on principle but on impulse, and the source of his impulses is dark to him. Read a few lines further: "His madness was not of the head, but heart." A mad heart. What is a mad heart?'

That is the question both we and Lurie must ask of him and nearer the end of the novel, when he begins to reckon himself it doesn't seem as if even that has been enough.

Not a bad man but not good either. Not cold but not hot, even at its hottest. Not by the measure of Theresa, not even by the measure of Byron. Lacking in fire. Will that be the verdict on him, the verdict of the universe and its all-seeing eye?

A novel then filled with potent images, difficult questions, complicated motivations and a good dose of anger (just my cup of tea); as challenging to read now as it was when published and a pleasure as ever to do so in this quality edition from Folio. Right, what Coetzee next...?

'the reverse of a shadow'

2011-11-29T08:47:00.315Z

Austerlitz
by W.G. Sebald

Well it took almost two years to make good on my promise to read some more Sebald after The Emigrants but I got there in the end. It took a fair bit of planetary alignment: a lovely hardback found in a charity shop for a bargain price of £3, a passing comment in a conversation I had with an author about one of my favourite books of the year, and the publication of an essay by James Wood in the LRB. All those nudges finally pushed me headlong into Sebald's final book before his premature death at just 57. In the spirit of the trepidation that accompanied my move to read it I have also been terrified of writing up my thoughts on it, this is after all a vast book by a supremely intelligent writer, chock-full of weighty themes and ideas and the considerable weight of the Holocaust bearing down on it too. I shall therefore focus on a couple of aspects that I found interesting and leave you safe in the knowledge that there is far more to discuss than I could hope to cover right here for the moment (if you'd like to read a lengthier post from another book blogger then may I recommend Tom's over at A Common Reader).

As ever we have a narrator that it might be too simple to presume is Sebald himself, this is 'fiction' after all, and a chance meeting that provides the book's narrative. In the late 1960's, during a period of regular trips to Belgium, Sebald meets on several occasions the same man, Jaques Austerlitz. The pair meet first in the waiting room of the central station in Antwerp where they discuss their shared interest in architecture. The anatomy of buildings, their cultural and political significance, the ways in which they express something about the humans who created and built them will all be discussed and as someone whose general interest in architecture extends to watching the odd episode of Grand Designs it's worth noting that some of these extended thoughts are fascinating. The grandness of some of these buildings is forbidding and yet at the same time, as Austerlitz notes, revealing.

Yet, he said, it is often our mightiest projects that most obviously betray the degree of our insecurity. The construction of fortifications, for instance....clearly showed how we feel obliged to keep surrounding ourselves with defences.

As the two men enjoy each other's company, bumping into each other repeatedly, we sense that we are being prepared for the real narrative and so it is twenty years later that the two men meet again, in a rail terminus once more, this time London's Liverpool Street Station, and Austerlitz reveals that he has been looking for someone 'to whom he could relate his own story, a story which he had learned only in the last few years and for which he needed the kind of listener I had once been in Antwerp.' This is because Jaques Austerlitz had actually been raised as Dafydd Elias, evacuated from Europe on the Kindertransport and raised by a pastor and his wife in Bala, Wales. It is just before his school exams that he receives the shocking news that the name he must legally write on the papers is not the one by which he has gone for so long, but a name which feels immediately alien.

At first, what disconcerted me most was that I could connect no ideas at all with the word Austerlitz. If my new name had been Morgan or Jones, I could have related it to reality. I even new the name Jaques froma French nursery rhyme. But I had never heard of an Austerlitz before, and from the first I was convinced that no one else bore that name, no one in Wales, or in the Isles, or anywhere else in the world.

His discovery soon afterwards that Fred Astaire was actually born to a Viennese father with the same surname comes as scant consolation. What Austerlitz is left with, what any of us would be left with where we to be told that everything we thought we knew about ourselves was built on shaky foundations, is a gigantic void which he needs to fill. I couldn't help but be reminded of one of my favourite books of the year, New Finnish Grammar, which tells the story of a man rendered a blank slate after a terrible beating, presumed to be Finnish, who learns from scratch the language he hopes will unlock who he really is. It is this aspect of Austerlitz that I found fascinating and it is a sense that there had always been something not quite right that he latches onto immediately.

It is a fact that through all the years I spent in the manse in Bala I never shook off the feeling that something very obvious, very manifest in itself was hidden from me. Sometimes it was as if I was in a dream and trying to perceive reality: then again I felt as if an invisible twin brother were walking beside me, the reverse of a shadow, so to speak.

In his search for memory, for that is what he must undertake in order to learn and understand from where he came, Sebald's trademark photographs play an important role. These photographs are presented throughout the text to illustrate people and places that 'Sebald' or Austerlitz make reference to. We cannot help regard at least some of them as genuine as the text that accompanies them describes the photo exactly as we see it and yet we know that apart from a few which look as though they have been taken by Sebald for the book, most of these images are found and have been appropriated for this fiction. That striking photo on the front cover for example of the young Austerlitz dressed for a ball, 'the unusual hairline running at a slant over the forehead...the piercing, inquiring gaze of the page boy who had come to demand his dues, who was waiting in the grey light of dawn on the empty field for me to accept the challenge and avert the misfortune lying ahead of him.' So convincing and yet of course Austerlitz is a fiction, this is some other boy, the only clue on the back of the photo in Sebald's archive are the words "Stockport: 30p" The book is filled with moments like this where we have to remind ourselves that what we are both reading and seeing is not real, but it is also worth reminding ourselves that whilst the construction isn't 'real' every episode of fear, exile and death within the book was someone's reality.

When Austerlitz travels to the Czech Republic, quite literally going through the phonebook Austerlitz's, and meets Vera, a woman who had served his family, a slew of photographs, testimony and memory comes back and with the pictures in particular we get a real sense of 'the mysterious quality peculiar to such photographs when they surface from oblivion.'

...as if the pictures had a memory of their own and remembered us, remembered the roles that we, the survivors, and those no longer among us had played in our former lives.

Photography is also used as a metaphor for memory itself.

In my photographic work I was especially entranced, said Austerlitz, by the moment when the shadows of reality, so to speak, emerge out of nothing on the exposed paper, as memories do in the middle of the night, darkening again if you try to cling to them, just like a photographic print left in the developing bath too long.

This emergence of memory is clearly a classic Sebald theme and the murk that surrounds it is repeated several times in the recurring image of the darkening light of dusk. When the two men first meet in Antwerp 'Sebald' has already compared the dusk of the station to the light in the Nocturama at the local zoo. The shadowy space of that waiting room has an otherworldy quality perfect for memories to emerge from and much later in the book, when the scene shifts to Liverpool Street Station, the concourse is cast as some kind of entrance to the underworld.

Even on sunny days only a faint greyness illuminated at all by the globes of the station lights, came through the glass roof over the main hall, and in this eternal dusk, which was full of a muffled babble of voices, a quiet scraping and trampling of feet, innumerable people passed in great tides...

The book is haunted by these passing ghosts; the weight of the Holocaust I mentioned earlier is a very real and oppressive thing, and in fact as Austerlitz's story is revealed I found myself becoming less and less interested in the actual details but rather more fascinated by the descriptions of the mechanics of their recovery. The waiting room in that metropolitan underworld for example becomes the place where memories come flooding back.

In fact I felt, said Austerlitz, that the waiting room where I stood as if dazzled contained all the hours of my past life, all the suppressed and extinguished fears and wishes I had ever entertained, as if the black and white diamond pattern of the stone slabs beneath my feet were the board on which the end game would be played, and it covered the entire plane of time.

Austerlitz is a book I could go on discussing for much longer as I said but I hope that what I have already raised is enough to recommend it. It isn't perfect by any means; some have suggested it is in fact his 'least best' book, and as well as having to surmount the challenge of the often relentlessly paragraph-less pages I definitely thought the book was strongest in the first third and collapsed under its own weight at times later on. But there is no doubt that Sebald is a writer who has to be read by any serious reader, I just hope it won't be another two years before I pick up another of his volumes.

'a veritable powder keg'

2011-11-24T10:12:00.000Z

Bye Bye Babylon
by Lamia Ziadé

When I was growing up I remember the news frequently made mention of Beirut and Lebanon accompanied by pictures of a city almost entirely devastated by shelling, rocket attacks and gunfire. I never had any real inkling of what the conflict was about or where it was happening, just that it seemed to be unresolvable and endless. This may be because the civil war in Lebanon began in the same year I did and continued almost until I left home and in any conflict that lasts that long, and that so devastates a region, it is easy to forget that Beirut was once a thriving and prosperous capital city. Lamia Ziadé was born in Lebanon seven years before the conflict began and moved to Paris at the age of eighteen where she became a fabric designer for fashion houses like Jean-Paul Gaultier and Issey Miyake as well as an artist and illustrator of everything from children's books to album covers. In this hybrid book, described as 'part artist's sketchbook, part travel notebook and part family album', Ziadé shows us Beirut in the first four years of the civil war through the eyes of a child seeing her city and family torn apart.

In 1975 I was seven years old and loved the Bazookas my mother bought for Walid and me at Spinney's in the Ramlet al-Baida neighbourhood.

Ziadé uses bright watercolours infused with a Pop Art sensibility, perfect in the opening pages to highlight the obsessions of a young girl in thrall to 'the best of what the Western world can offer' in Spinney's supermarket. Trolleys, escalators, marshmallows and Kellog's cereals are all lovingly recreated in their garish glory but just as we might be falling for the lure of nostalgia an upended bottle of blood-red ketchup heralds the beginning of violence and the pages of consumer goods turn into several pages of munitions, each described with the same verve, as if the allure of these weapons provoked the same feeling in the various militias around Beirut as the sugary sweetness of processed food did to Ziadé.
This feeling is important because what came before violence was the fervour of arming oneself up, the joy of getting more and more hardware, and the inevitability of violence when groups of men are fully equipped and dying to give it a go. The sheer number of different groups and their conflicting interests and aims may excuse in some part my immense confusion at the time this was all happening. And this is also the reason why Ziadé's account is so accessible, because she, as a child in that same period, was as confused as I was. Living as part of the Christian community, her father a lawyer, her grandfather the owner of a fabric shop in the Muslim area, she goes from living somewhere where two cultures seem to mix to a place divided along simple lines but with several factions fighting their own battles. At one point when she asks her father whether the Palestinians are indeed, as she has been told by her nanny, scum she gets a response which in its attempt at clarity only goes to illustrate the impossibility of that aim

He closes the door and right then and there I get a short, age-appropriate geopolitical class on the Middle East. Palestine, the English bastards, Balfour, Zionism, Jerusalem, the King David Hotel, David Ben-Gurion, the state of Israel, refugees, the Israeli bastards, the settlers, the camps, Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Six-Day War, Moshe Dayan, the Yom Kippur War, Hussein of Jordan, Black September, the PLO, the American bastards, terrorism, armed struggle, the weakness of Lebanon, the mistakes the Palestinians made, the Christian fears, the beginning of the war...

The various factions of the struggle are illustrated with characteristic colour, as are important objects from a period that involved virtual siege within one's home. So radios, batteries, camping stoves and Enid Blyton paperback's are all accorded the same iconic status in Ziadé's mind as the supposed icons of the struggle. The various leaders tend to be represented in far more muted tones for these are the villains of the piece, in fact Ziadé even goes as far as to develop their portraits into something far more sinister when comparing the heroes of her dreams to the serpent-tongued, bloody-clawed politicians. It isn't all naïveté though, some of the violence, especially in the head-rush of the early period is pretty gruesome and there is a telling moment when Ziadé considers the veracity of what she hears.

In Lebanon, the violence takes on legendary status...Torture and mutilations are common practice...The Phalangists carve crosses into their victim's skin while their opponents commit murder with axes...Walid and I hear these stories and other similar ones from Tamar, our nanny; from Salim, the grocer; or from neighbours gossiping in the kitchen. But I think they're wrong, as neither my mother nor my father ever talk about this sort of thing. I conclude that this information must fall into the category of tofnis, fabrications, and I don't dare speak to my parents about what I hear for fear of making a fool of myself.

We need to protect ourselves as children of course, perhaps I can use that as excuse for my own ignorance too, and whilst that means that this is an account that barely scratches the surface of the conflict (and lacks the kind of easy insight that makes Joe Sacco's work so indispensible) it is also the reason for the book's charm and appeal.

'You just got to pick the right time'

2011-11-22T09:34:00.157Z

The Devil All The Time
by Donald Ray Pollock

I didn't read Pollock's collection of stories, Knockemstiff, but after reading this, his first novel, I am sorely tempted. I was drawn in in the first place by the mention of Denis Johnson's name on the back cover quote and fan's of his writing and also that of Cormac McCarthy would be well advised to follow that lead. Pollock writes about a brutal world filled with physical and sexual violence, where life can be cheap and the chances to transcend it few and far between, but if you don't mind getting knocked about a bit and in fact find that there's something redemptive in the end about that kind of hard hitting fiction then whether you begin with novel or stories I think you may be in for a treat.

In a stunning prologue we follow Arvin Eugene Russell on a dismal October morning as he follows his father, Willard, through pasture and woods until they reach a clearing where the remains of a big red oak tree lies on its side.

Unless he had whiskey running through his veins, Willard came to the clearing every morning and evening to talk to God. Arvin didn't know which was worse, the drinking or the praying. As far back as he could remember, it seemed that his father had fought the Devil all the time.

Here at this 'prayer log' the two of them are disturbed by a couple of hunters, one of whom makes a few wisecracks about visiting Willard's wife whilst he's busy praying. Arvin is ashamed that his father continues his prayers and does nothing rather than standing up for himself as he had instructed Arvin to do in the face of some bullying on the school bus. But when later the two of them go for a ride to fill the truck with petrol he watches as his father comes across the two hunters, leaps out and beats the mouthy one senseless for a good couple of minutes before getting back into the truck.

"You remember what I told you the other day?" he asked Arvin.
"About them boys on the bus?"
"Well that's what I meant," Willard said, nodding over at the hunter..."You just got to pick the right time."

This becomes something of a maxim for Arvin who is the very thin cord that holds this novel together. Pollock has taken the approach favoured by many successful story writers, of creating characters with clear story arcs of their own and then tying them together. If we were being uncharitable we might accuse this novel of being little more than a series of stories tenuously linked together but how you fell about that might well depend on how integrated and whole you like a 'novel' to be. This is Ohio after Second World War, a semi rural community in the 1950's where relgion mixes with alcohol in competition for predminant pastime outside of work. WIllard has returned from the war traumatised to a degree by one thing in particular he saw while he was out there in the Pacific. Marriage and the beginning of a family bring him back to the world in part.

Sitting there watching his son, Willard suddenly had an intense desire to pray. Though he hadn't talked to God in years, not a single petition or word of praise since he'd come across the crucified marine during the war, he could feel it welling up inside him now, the urge to get right with his Maker before something bad happened to his family. But looking around the cramped apartment, he knew he couldn't get in touch with God here, no more than he'd ever been able to in a church. He was going to need some woods to worship his way.

But it will be a battle. Willard's fraught relationship with God will be tested by drink, disease and death; his search for 'peace and calm' constantly threatened. The personal relationship with God is one theme that unites the novel's characters and it will gve you an idea of the diversity of them if I mention quickly a pair of preachers, a serial-killing couple and a priest with a taste for young flesh.

Roy and Theodore are a curious double act, cousins who preach on the road where Roy speaks to the congregation and Theodore, confined to a wheelchair after drinking strychnine to prove his faith, accompanies him on guitar. The book's cover is adorned with the spiders Roy routinely pours over his head, to show how God cured him of his phobia, and which repay him occasionally with a nasty bite or two and accompanying infection. Theodore's paedophilia and Roy's increasingly extreme behaviour hustle them from one bad place to another. One moment of violence is so shocking because of the slow, inexorable build up to it and the innocence of the victim. As I said at the beginning, this is a brutal book which will not be for those of a sensitive disposition. I have my own qualm about it which I'll come to later.

Then we have Carl and Sandy, a pair of serial killers who use their frequent 'holidays' as cover for their murderous road trips. Carl is a photographer and Sandy, when she isn't selling her body out the back of the bar she works in is using it as bait to lure in the next victim. Whilst driving around they pick up hitch-hikers and slowly bring the conversation around to the idea of their passenger having sex with Sandy whilst Carl takes some photos. These pictures go on to document the men's deaths, something which the two of them have subtly different reactions to. It is never entirely clear why Sandy would go along with this way of life, apart from having little alternative and a seriously screwed up sense of her own self-worth. She gets satisfaction from the killing with some of them and from the sex with others. Carl meanwhile not only considers what he does art but also feels that the whole experience brings him closer to God.

To his way of thinking, it was the one true religion, the thing he'd been searching for all his life. Only in the presence of death could he feel the presence of something like God.

I mentioned that personal relationship with God as a unifying theme and it will come as no surprise that there is a pastor amongst the characters and he is just as deplorable as those characters who do not enjoy his elevated status. Preston Teagardin preys on his female congregation, particularly young girls, making it his mission to deflower them and his view of women as repositories for his lust, guilt and total disregard for women as anything other than objects makes him a truly horrific character. In a way perhaps only a man of the cloth can Teagardin gets off on his guilt finding that it is just this feeling that intensifies his connection to God, that gives it its drive and meaning.

To him such emotion proved that he still had a chance of going to heaven, regardless of how corrupt and cruel he might be, that is, if he repented his wretched, whoring ways before he took his last breath. It all came down to a matter of timing, which, of course, made things all that much more exciting.

All of these disparate characters are gradually linked together and a novel that has been filled with violence has a suitably bloody end. Pollock manages to make these deeply flawed and occasionally downright wicked characters more than just evil stereotypes. In fact you remain engaged and even occasionally entertained by them, the kind of complicity that makes you cringe every now and then that you are so enjoying reading about these horrific exploits. My one worry is about the portrayal of women. There isn't a single female character who isn't subjected to sexual violence, painful death or debasement of one kind or another apart from perhaps Arvin's grandmother, and even she is the one person left cleaning up the wreckage. I am always resistant to writers being accused of misogyny because a character of theirs has a misogynistic view but the hatred of women and the danger posed to them is so consistent in this book that I did feel a little uncomfortable about it by the end. Yes, Willard very much loves his wife and is driven to do some extraordinary things in order to prove that to God but it is that very fanaticism that ensures her death is as painful and degrading as it could possibly be. This aspect of the book is something that I am still wrestling with even whilst writing this review and it is not at all that I think it should stop anyone reading the book. On the contrary, it is the difficulty of that, and of the brutal world view of the novel in general that means I would recommend it, so as to be able to confront its demons head on and see whether we are prepared to accept or allow this vision of humanity.

'we must just face our fate'

2011-11-15T09:12:00.000Z

The Old Man And His Sons
by Heðin Brú
translated by John F. West

It's pronounced Hay-in Broo before you ask (or something close to that anyway) and if you ever get asked, in a pub quiz or during a lull in conversation with a particular kind of bibliophile, 'What author's novel was chosen by the Faroese as their Book of the 20th Century?' you'll be able to answer with confidence (and for a bonus point you can say it was actually the pen name of Hans Jacob Jacobson. And if you really want to be a smart arse you can add that he translated into Faroese works as diverse as Hamlet, The Tempest, Hedda Gabler, The Brothers Karamazov, Wuthering Heights, and the tales of the Brothers Grimm). Publishers Telegram are the marvellous folks that brought Sjon into English translation (whose two books I would recommend to anyone looking for a literary shot of something a little different) and so I couldn't resist when they sent me this novel originally published in Faroese in 1940 and finally translated into English thirty years later. It is this same translation by John F. West which we can read today, a further forty years later, and it stands up remarkably well. It may be describing a way of life that was slowly being eclipsed 70 years ago but the wit and verve of Brú's observations come through loud and clear and in our current economic climate, a perilous one brought about through a reliance on debt (both personal and state-owned), this novel actually couldn't be more relevant. You may not think that a novel about the fishing community on a small island halfway between Scotland and Iceland in the inter-war years had anything to say to you beyond its only local interests but you'd be wrong.

The novel begins with a fabulous opening scene as a school of two or three hundred small whales swim around in Seyrvags Fjord and the village descends, 'a vast, bustling throng of whale hunters.'

Over here, you can see sturdy old men clad from head to foot in their thick homespun, their heavy whaling knives at their belts. These are men who grew up at the oar, and trod out the mountain paths. For them, all journeys were long journeys and risky ones. They are all keyed up to meet any problems, and they take life very seriously. These men stride onwards with ponderous footsteps - strong men of few words.

We follow the 70-year old Ketil and his youngest son Kalvur as they make their way to be amongst the kill, Kalvur joining a boat on the water whilst his father joins the many onlookers on the shore. It is a frantic scene in which Kalvur is dragged down with his boat when a whale rears up and lands on its stern. Luckily he doesn't drown, escaping with a dislocated shoulder and wounded pride, but it's a measure of the frenzied atmosphere that his father initially misses the whole episode, being so caught up in the kill itself. This atmosphere is important because in the ensuing auction of the whales Ketil finds himself giddy with excitement and bidding way beyond his means, landing himself with a huge amount of whale meat but the burden of a hefty bill to come. Pride won't allow him to go back and admit he can't pay and so we follow the consequences of this moment of hot-headedness.

Ketil is a father to several son's who now have wives and families of their own (only the simple-minded Kalvur remains a burden), all of them more upwardly mobile than their father and through these relationships Brú is able to point up the different attitudes that separate the generations. The turf roof that adorns Ketil's house for example and which is in peril during every storm causes barks of frustration from one son who wants him to replace it with one of corrugated iron - 'Fancy having a damn roof that you have to ask folk to sit and hold onto, every time there's a real use for it!' After the frenzy of the whale hunt and the re-location of Kalvur's shoulder by the doctor Ketil makes an offering to him of a whale kidney. It is through the eyes of the doctor's wife that we see the contrast between old world and new.

He stood there in his home-made skin shoes, his loose breeches and long jacket. His blood-flecked beard hung down towards his belt, and on this hung a double sheath with a pair of white-handled knives, one above the other. And he was extending his earthy hands - holding up that bloody thing.

There are a couple of more humorous examples of the changing times, one occurring when Ketil and the extraordinary character of Klavus are disturbed first thing in the morning as they urinate outdoors by the slightly more progressive Tummas as he finds his way with a torch. It falls on Tummas to lets them know that folk don't do that sort of thing in public anymore, 'No, I suppose not - everything's got to be so classy nowadays' comes the reply. One person who feels the full effect of Ketil's impulsive moment is of course his wife and it is the shame of debt that worries her most, it being the one thing that worries her most about the next generation.

'I don't know,' she replied. 'Young people nowadays are never satisfied; they always want more and more. They want everything that folk have overseas...you all demand so much from life - you're never satisfied. In the old days, a poor man was content if he had something to eat and a roof over his head. Nowadays everything has to be so high-and-mighty. Everything you set your minds on, you have to have, whether you can afford it or not...And everyone's up to their eyebrows in debt...A fat lot of use it is having schools and books and I don't know what! In the old days we used to be a lot more reasonable.'

Above all this is the confusion that 'the folk who are in debt hold their heads as high as everyone else.' And that's one of the more interesting aspects for the modern reader, to consider when it was that everyone decided that credit was fine and the ability to pay it back almost secondary. Brú's keen sense of the shift between these two generations means that this novel manages to poke fun at both sides and that whilst the detail is entirely specific to a certain type of people in a certain place at a certain time he manages to say something to us today about the dangers of excess, of living beyond your means and where the true measure of self-worth and pride might be made.

'what kind of story is it?'

2011-11-10T09:13:00.000Z

Sandcastle
by Pierre Oscar Levy
and Frederick Peeters

I just love the cover to this book. It's disconcerting before you even open the cover and that should be fair warning to anyone who's intrigued to find what's inside. This is certainly the oddest graphic novel I've read in a while and quite possibly the oddest piece of fiction, graphic or otherwise, for quite some time too. With artwork from Peeters and storyline from film-maker Levy this is a graphic novel that seems to be in one kind of genre, switches to another and may possibly be in another category of storytelling altogether. That's quite a feat in a hundred pages.

The location is a beach, a haven amongst some rocky cliffs, and we watch as several characters make there way to it. One is already there, an Arabic looking man, who watches as a young girl undresses completely and goes for a swim in the sea. A couple of families make their way to the sand and whilst they bicker and banter a grandmother and her grandson make the gruesome discovery of the floating corpse of the girl we watched undress earlier. So we might be reading a crime novel and the patriarch of one of the families thinks he has it solved when he sees the Arabic man from earlier (he is in fact Kabyle but the casual racism of his accuser doesn't care about distinctions like that). But there is something far stranger going on and it is some time before the assembled company begin to notice the signs. One woman's children appear to have outgrown their swimming costumes despite only just having purchased them and on closer inspection she notices that her 'baby boy' of three looks for more like a child of five or six and has quite clearly grown in line with that. His older sister appears to have grown up too and when she walks off with the young boy from another family the two of them appear to go through a fast track adolescence and sexual awakening. When grandmother takes ill and then stops breathing the group begin to start asking what on earth is going on.

A writer is amongst them and when he reveals that it is science fiction he specialises in they want to know what possible explanation there could be for their apparent accelrated ageing and inability to leave the beach itself. His theories don't result in any kind of satisfactory solution and whilst the adults find themselves confronting their own mortality (with each half hour representing a year it is clear that some of them won't make it through the night let alone the next day) the children are experiencing the opposite, an explosion of sexual awareness and procreation energy that will see that young girl from earlier get pregnant, come full term and even give birth on the same beach on which she lost her virginity.

So it isn't crime and once we get past the slightly Twilight Zone feel of the device you can't help but wonder if this graphic novel isn't offering something rather more profound. This isn't quite a life compressed into a day but it isn't far off, and it's certainly the sudden end of life for many of the characters; and the different ways in which they deal with that, or the way in which it comes about, provide some truly moving sequences and images. To find a husband and wife slowly reconciled into a spooned hug, or to watch a once powerful man reduced to second infancy as he makes a sandcastle on the beach are just a couple of those highlights. And whilst the fast approaching death of these older characters might make this feel like a slightly hopeless book there is always the hope provided by new life and the promise for its future. Like I said, quite a feat to get you thinking about all that in just 100 pages and some lovely artwork in places too.

'When I was eleven...'

2011-11-08T09:19:00.001Z

The Dubious Salvation Of Jack V.
by Jaques Strauss

Being absolutely honest, I wouldn't have read this book (which came en spec from the publisher) if it hadn't been for a very favourable review at the ever-reliable Asylum. Even with that it languished on the TBR shelf until such time as a genuine pause appeared in my reading schedule (yeah, it's that bad) and I found myself finally taking a punt. I'm glad I did, books that are easily entertaining, witty, political and populated with sharp characters are a joy when they plop in your lap at the right time and it is the seeming ease of this book which makes it such a pleasurable read. The fact that it has received so little newspaper review space even with a big-name publisher is a little saddening, especially when I think about some of the books that have received lots of undeserved column inches (some from the same big-name publisher), but that's what us book bloggers are here for I guess.

The novel is a confessional from Jack Viljee; half English, half Afrikaans resident of 'a very nice street' in Johannesburg, looking back on the definitive moment from his childhood. As an eleven year old during the final years of the Apartheid regime in South Africa Jack is able to give an interesting perspective on the shifting politics of a country about to undergo momentous change. It is his dual ancestry however that provides the real interest for it allows him to point out the differences between the two cultures, their attitudes towards the black population and the way in which Jack's own mixed-race status, if we dare call it that, leaves him in an uncomfortable no-man's land between the two. A prologue sets the tone, several paragraphs each beginning 'When I was eleven...' and informing us of the preoccupations of any boy heading towards his teenage years. This is the period when he 'was stupid enough to try to have sex with a shampoo bottle' or 'old enough to know that peeing in the bath was disgusting but young enough not to care and do it anyway' but it is also the time '...I betrayed Susie, our housekeeper, my friend, my second mother, and perhaps in other significant ways, my first.'

The closeness of the relationship he enjoys with Susie is highlighted and indeed jeopardised by the arrival of her own son into the household but I don't need to go into any plot details as such, that isn't where the real enjoyment of this novel lies. Jack is an engaging, funny and perceptive narrator (particularly from his retrospective viewpoint - of which more later) and the sheer scope of his observations mean that this novel, which feels so light and easy to read, is actually packed full interest. By making Jack's 'distinguishing characteristic' the fact that he is half English and half Afrikaans, 'that I could slip unnoticed between the two peoples like a spy,' Strauss has lots of fun pointing up the differences between the two sides of his family, the Afrikaaner's obsessions with suffering and food for example, and creates a fabulous character in grand-matriarch Ouma who 'had the required quota of grief to make most quirks permissible; mild anti-Semitism, mild racism - nothing rampant or unseemly, nothing undignified.' It is Ouma's admiration for the 'debonair' Pik Botha that allows Jack to make one of his telling observations about the time when Pik Botha, whilst overseas, said that he would be happy to serve under a black president, only to change his tune when back in front of his president PW Botha.

It was a little bit like saying 'fuck' in front of your friends - for a while it seemed like a very brave, very manly thing to do, but unless you were prepared to say it in front of your mother it didn't mean much at all.

This kind of comment can only be made by an adult looking back on their childhood and is so much more perceptive and interesting than anything the child themselves might say at the time. This is why it remains a mystery to me why authors are so seduced by child narration. In the same way Jack can tell us about the very real pains of growing up: the embarrassment of growing awareness; that your parents don't necessarily like all their friends, that the relationship as it stands between whites and blacks makes you feel awkward and embarrassed in a way that it doesn't to your parents and some of your friends, that your desires can be surprising. Jack's burgeoning sexuality is rather brilliantly handled, allowing moments of comedy and painful revelation. Young boy's willy obsession achieves due prominence and a unique detail from Jack's dual-luanguage skills.

I guess around eleven we all thought that to coax our dicks out of hibernation we should stop calling them 'willies' and start referring to them as 'cocks', but my mother detested this word almost as much as the Afrikaans equivalent, vöel, which means 'bird'. Calling your cock a vöel was a very Afrikaans and manly thing to do. It was enough to make my willy look bigger and my voice sound deeper.

The selfishness of children is something of a recurring theme given even greater significance by Jack's privileged status. He has something of an obsession with deformity and disability (perhaps this comes from having a neighbourhood prosthetics shop) even finds 'something alluring about these broken children with missing arms and missing legs.'

And I wished that, for the afternoon, I might be without a limb too, so that I could be part of this orgy of tragedy, of heartbroken but proud parents, of the paraphernalia, the prosthetic limbs, the wheelchairs, the crutches, like Tiny Tim, the epicentre of sympathy and tragedy and poetry.

Jack has a tendency towards the grand gesture, particularly when it might atone for the guilt he feels for certain actions or simply for being white. These again come about from his privileged position so that the purchase of an ice-cream from the weathered (black) ice-cream salesman on the beach, or the donation of his pocket money to a homeless woman would allow him to 'act like a God.' And this all ties in with one of the great lessons he learnt from his childhood on the school visit to the Natural History Museum. The exhibit of a caveman family being attacked by a sabre-toothed tiger contains the rather graphic image of skull-piercing teeth to drive home the point that our survival 'was dependent on the suffering of some other innocent creature.'

...that life is an economy of suffering so that when we die, like my grandmother, we are an accumulation of those compromises, bones and loose skin, mildly anti-Semitic, mildly racist, nothing rampant or unseemly, having suffered and caused suffering, dying, I suppose, with a small credit but completely ravaged by all the exchanges.

Jack's story is a reckoning, but a hugely entertaining one. My only worry when reading it was that the ease in its telling was due to Strauss mining his own childhood for all the sparkling details, would that mean that his next novel would suffer from the depleting stocks of autobiographical riches? I have no idea whether this novel is in any way autobiographical and the only way to find out whether Strauss has real legs as a novelist is to read what comes next. I, for one, look forward to finding out what that is (and won't take so long to get around to it next time) and can only hope that these thoughts on a hugely enjoyable debut might tempt you to do the same.

'I will return'

2011-11-03T09:27:00.000Z

A Sky Full Of Kindness
by Rob Ryan

There's a good chance you may have seen Rob Ryan's work already. Greetings cards, posters, mugs, cushions, book covers, umbrellas, bags, and even vases and crockery have all been emblazoned with his distinctive paper-cut designs in gift ranges at stores like Liberty and Heals. He even has his own shop on London's Columbia Road where his work can be seen in many forms. There's no substitute for seeing one of his extraordinarily intricate paper-cuts in the flesh, even the mass-produced card I bought for my recent anniversary is a tactile beauty and the detail of some of his larger works is truly staggering.

He has also written, or created, one previous book, This Is For You, which concerned one man's search for a soulmate. His latest is described by Helena Bonham Carter on the back cover as 'a bedtime story for every age' and follows the fortunes of two birds who have a baby. The mother has an important seeming dream and soon finds herself undertaking an epic journey to discover its meaning. That's all you really need to know plot-wise; this fable or fairytale-like story uses the mother's journey to explore themes of friendship, discovery, freedom, release, reliance and the ways in which we need the help of others.

Ryan's artwork really is astonishing, it's hard not to turn each successive page and ask 'How does he do that?' Some pages have a decent bit of background colour to them and so you can feel the relative solidity of the page from which they were cut but others are almost impossibly fragile, it's hard to see how the lines of text, or twigs that make up a nest, the flocks of birds or clouds in the sky manage to remain connected to the rest of the picture so that the paper remains unbroken. The wonder of that really does sustain for the book's 64 pages. What I might question is the quality of the writing itself. It's hard not to think of the wisdom of greeting's cards when reading certain passages in this book, the vaguely comforting feeling that comes from vague and comforting phrases, and it makes the intricacy of the labour all the more extraordinary when you find that all the effort to cut out those words has been in the service of words that could possibly be improved on. This is similar to the effect of Brian Selznick's recent book Wonder Struck, whose beautiful pencil drawings were let down by some truly pedestrian prose. Ryan's book is way better than that, I'm having a relatively minor quibble, but it does just highlight that it isn't enough for a book to look beautiful and have its heart in the right place, I still want the quality of the writing itself to be as high as the craftsmanship that created it. That said, I can easily imagine plenty of parents getting as much pleasure from reading this book as their children will get from both hearing and seeing it.

'wounds that will never heal'

2011-11-01T09:11:00.281Z

Brodeck's Report
by Phillipe Claudel
translated by John Cullen

Another one from the Shelf of Guaranteed Literary Fulfilment (this is an actual shelf in my home, although it hasn't been actually labelled as such. Yet.) this book found its place there after my review of Claudel's more recent novella, Monsieur Linh and his Child, drew lots of comments from admirers of this winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Both books deal with the legacy of war and violence but whereas the title character in Monsieur Linh was most obviously an example of trauma brought about through conflict, Claudel uses the title character in this novel to look at themes of persecution, isolation and otherness.

A little as in the recently reviewed Death Of The Adversary, Claudel keeps many of the details hidden in this novel. A time period isn't specified but we can guess, the location too isn't named but seems to be somewhere in Alsace-Lorraine where a German dialect is spoken by the French population. This dialect is important for a couple of reasons: firstly because it highlights the way in which a country's borders are shown to be the arbitrary things they are when two countries find themselves at war and two regions on either side of that imaginary line, their age-old histories linked, have in common 'legends, songs, poets, choruses, a way of preparing meat and making soups, an identical melancholy and a similar propensity to lapse into drunkenness.' Claudel retains many of this dialect's words, explaining their sometimes ambiguous meaning, or rather his narrator Brodeck explains. Brodeck has been assigned the task of writing an account of the events that lead up to the murder of 'the Anderer' (or 'other'), a visitor to the village. He has been assigned this task despite thinking himself unequal to it - 'To be able to tell stories is a skill, but it is not mine. I write only brief reports on the state of the flora and fauna...I am not sure my reports are still reaching their destination, or, if they are, whether anyone reads them.' We needn't worry about that lack of confidence for Brodeck is a fine writer and there are even some extraordinary moments where his usual subject matter is perverted by the fact that this is a village that has recently been through a war and that he is a man who has been made to suffer more than any other resident of that village. The River Staubi for example that runs nearby, usually a place of animal life and movement became something else entirely at moments during the war when 'creatures other than fish were to be found floating in it, blue creatures, some of them still looking a little astonished, others with their eyes firmly closed, as if they had been put to sleep by surprise and tucked up in pretty liquid sheets.'

In putting together his account of the 'Ereigniës' - the thing that happened - Brodeck introduces us to the increasingly sinister inhabitants of his village. The very fact that so many of them were together on the evening of the murder and Brodeck absent highlights his isolation within the community, something only heightened by the job he has been assigned by them; a task that can only increase the sense of fear and guilt with which they already regard him. And what of the Anderer, what kind of threat did he pose when he wandered into their village '...dressed like a character from another century, with his unusual beasts [a horse and donkey] and his imposing baggage, entering our village which no stranger had entered for years, and moreover arriving here just like that, without any ado, with the greatest of ease. Who would not have been a little afraid?'

In a telling episode, when it becomes clear that the Anderer will be staying for a while rather than passing through it is decided that a proper welcome should be organised with a banner, music and some speeches. It is the banner with it's ambiguous message that gives us a taste of the tension that exists.

"Wi sund vroh wen neu kamme" can mean "We are happy when a new person arrives." But it can also mean "We are happy when something new comes along" which is not the same thing at all. Strangest of all, the word vroh has two meanings, depending on the context: it can be equivalent to "glad" or "happy", but it can also mean "wary" or "watchful", and if you favour this second sense, then you find yourself faced with a bizarre, disquieting statement which nobody perceived at the time, but which has been resounding in my head ever since; a kind of warning pregnant with small threats; a greeting like a knife brandished in a fist, the blade twisting a little and glinting in the sun.

The Anderer doesn't do anything other than observe and make notes and enquiries into this village's life and its inhabitants are antagonised by this being held to account. He may not have ridden in on the donkey itself but there is something Christ-like about his arrival, impact and sacrifice. The village priest, a man driven to drink by the impact of war and all the filth that has been confessed to him over the years, doesn't make such an explicit connection but provides a useful image for Brodeck to consider.

That man was like a mirror, you see. He did not have to say a single word. Each of them saw their reflection in him. Or maybe he was God's last messenger before He closes up shop and throws away the keys. I am the sewer, but that fellow was the mirror. And mirrors, Brodeck - mirrors can only be smashed.

Brodeck's project may be about the Anderer but it is also really about himself and his own tragic history in this community. Having come from 'a country which had never appeared on a map, a country no tale had ever evoked, a country which had sprung from the earth and flourished for a few months, but whose memory was destined to weigh heavily for centuries to come' he has always been something of an outsider himself. When war came to the village with its desire to cleanse the area of undesirable elements Brodeck stood no chance. Sent of to a camp, from which he wasn't supposed to return, Brodeck managed to survive physically only by abasing himself, becoming 'Brodeck the Dog', kept as a kind of pet by one of the guards, led around on a collar, and crucially fed scraps of food that kept him healthier than his fellow internees. Spiritually he was sustained by the memories of his surrogate mother Fedorine and lover Emilia to whom he has promised to return. When he does he is haunted by the void of those two years away, something which has its own unique word in this dialect.

The Kazerskwir - that was because of the war: I spent nearly two long years far from the village. I was taken away like thousands of other people, because we had names, faces or beliefs different from those of others...Those were two years of total darkness. I look upon that time as a void in my life - very black and very deep - and therefore I call it the Kaserskwir, the crater. Often, at night, I still venture out on its rim.

This is a novel that bursts at the seams with themes but one last thing to mention is the way in which the legacy of conflict extends beyond Brodeck's personal experience. For those that survived the camps, those that escaped the attempt by neighbours and friends to wipe them from memory there is not only the burden of survival-guilt but the fear of uncertainty in the future.

We can never meet the eyes of other people without wondering whether they harbour a desire to hunt us down, to torture us, to kill us. We have become perpetual prey...I think we have become and will remain until the day we die, a reminder of humanity destroyed. We are wounds that will never heal.

'where's Robbie?'

2011-10-27T09:31:00.132+01:00

The Wrong Place
by Brecht Evens

As you can see from the cover above Brecht Evens graphic novel is a colourful affair. Painted in watercolour throughout the Belgian artist uses his palette brilliantly to delineate character, to create vast scenescapes, to capture movement and in a few pages near the centre to create possibly the only convincing sex-scene I've found so far in graphic fiction (you can see just how graphic below). In a book which is light on plot there is still loads to enjoy in its depiction of social interaction, akward personal relationships and the frenzy of an impulsive night out. The energy that is created by people desparate to have a good time is what drives this book along and that energy is just as likely to end up exploding in a moment of tragedy as of triumph, and how lovely and dangerous that is.

Two entirely mismatched friends are at the heart of this book. First of all we meet Gary, a drab persona rendered in grey who is hosting a party in his flat which many people (mainly female) seen to be attending because they expect his friend Robbie to make an appearance. Gary is the kind of guy who'd prefer it if you smoked in the kitchen and turned on the oven extractor fan. The kind of person who joins a conversation and effectively kills it, as we see him do several times in the opening pages. Through the awkward chats at his party we begin to form an idea of his friend Robbie, a man so infamous that he has several imitators, one of whom is even rumoured to have had plastic surgery to look more like him. Whilst Gary is the grey man, Robbie is an electric-blue satyr, a party animal par excellence who has managed to turn around the fading fortunes of a nightclub called Disco Harem through his attendance. But whilst he has managed to make that place the coolest in town by coming again and again, his no-show at Gary's party sends the assembled guests off into the night and Gary is once again alone in his drab apartment.

We then meet Naomi, recently dumped by her boyfriend but encouraged by a friend to go out on the town, even adorning a pair of kitten ears and even a new persona under the name of Lulu. Identified easily by her bright red colour, Evens creates some brilliant panels where a supposedly static wide shot of the nightclub actually contains several highlighted Naomis which track her progress through the room.

Naomi's night at Disco Harem lifts off when a case of mistaken identity brings Robbie himself hurtling into view. Naomi is literally swept off her feet and treated to exactly the kind of evening that her friend thought she needed, providing us with page after page of excitement as Naomi is swept from one location to the next, Robbie is pawed at by one person after another and the two of them finally fall into a room and upon each other to satisfy their carnal desires.

Then it's time for Gary to have his night out and at Disco Harem once again he hooks up with his incongruous friend Robbie. How these two ever became friends is a mystery but I'm sure you can think of a couple of people in your own life who really had nothing in common with each other and yet somehow hit it off and became inseparable. Such is the case with Gary and Robbie who have a catch up, pop up to another room to have a sword-fight (as you do) and then create the evening's climax in a moment of extreme crowd-surfing that will define the two men

On a first reading to be absolutely honest this book didn't make a massive impression. Perhaps it was the lack of any real 'plot' but I was able to flick through it quickly and be left with not much of an aftertaste when I got to the final page. Subsequent viewings however have shown up not only that brilliant use of colour I mentioned but also the way in which Evens is able to hide lots of complexity in seemingly simple brush strokes. On many pages and in many panels a character is really only depicted using a few dashes of colour and a couple of details and yet even with those restricting tools we can see sensuality, vulnerability, fear and ecstasy. It even takes a few viewings after that to realise that you are looking at work that is influenced by painters like George Grosz and deserves to be taken incredibly seriously for its artistic merit alone. As I've said before I cannot draw to save my life so I would never denigrate the talents of any artist but this isn't mere doodling, this includes some really fantastic watercolour work, particularly in the crowd and wider-angle shots and Evens deserves plenty of praise for those panels alone.

If the perfect night out is all about being in the right place at the right time then perhaps this book is more about the slightly jarring sensation that comes when things don't align quite so fortuitously, those nights when you might need a little help to piece together the exact sequence of events and find yourself shaking your head ever so slightly at the ways in which it seemed to be enjoyed by someone who wasn't quite you.

'words are suitcases with false bottoms'

2011-10-25T08:59:00.377+01:00

Death Of The Adversary
by Hans Keilson

When reviewing Keilson's other novel, Comedy In A Minor Key, I was quick to quote a review he received from Francine Prose in The New York Times. I'm going to do it again because it's funny as well as accurate.

For busy, harried or distractable readers who have the time and energy only to skim the opening paragraph of a review, I’ll say this as quickly and clearly as possible: “The Death of the Adversary” and “Comedy in a Minor Key” are masterpieces, and Hans Keilson is a genius.

Are we clear? Keilson's fiction may only extend to these two novels but they are both brilliant and if you thought I was impressed by the first one then this novel is the kind of book that makes you want to use words like seminal, definitive and, yes, masterpiece. In fact coming on the back of two other novels set in the Germany and Europe of the 1930's it highlighted all the more the difference between a novel that tells a good story and a novel that is a work of art. With the passage of time one can only hope that whilst there is plenty to enjoy in the former it is the latter that deserve to and simply must survive, for their loss or under-appreciation would impoverish us all.

The most obvious quality that marks this book out as a classic is its rejection of narrative specificity. There is a plot I suppose but as one fellow blogger once commented 'plots are for gardeners' and whilst it is clear that this is Germany in the 1930's and the adversary of the title is Adolf Hitler, neither of them is ever named and the novel therefore retains its power to apply to any time or place where one group victimises another because of difference. Our narrator explains at the outset that what we are about to read is a manuscript given to him by a Dutch lawyer, obtained along with other important documents from a German client who gave them away for safe-keeping. This lawyer has asked our narrator to have a look over them and so we too read the account of this man's symbiotic relationship with the leader who oppresses, degrades and eventually controls his life. The leader is only ever named as 'B.' but is also commonly referred to as 'my adversary', the 'author' remains anonymous and the identity of his people never explicitly named. The manuscript provides an extraordinarily insightful psychological account that suggests the relationship between Hitler and the Jews, and therefore that between any dictator and his chosen enemy, is tantamount to that of lovers for 'No lover can talk more possessively of the object of his love than he did of me, even though he was cursing me.'

We find him at first almost paralysed by this proximity, fixated to the point of obsession on his adversary's death.

It was the thought of my enemy's death which penetrated me and made me shudder as one does on an icy night. The death of my enemy - I think of it with all the joy a thought can have for those to whom a thought is something vital and alive. The death of my enemy - I think and experience it with all the gravity and sublimity which is due to the thought of an enemy who is worthy of one. At every moment of the day, part of my mind is dedicated to this thought...The death of my enemy - blessed be the thought of my enemy's death. People say that one should approach one's death with longing...But I have seen many who had slowly and painfully accustomed themselves to their own death, and were then destroyed by the death of a friend.

That last line is typical of the kind statement made from experience (Keilson was a German-born Jew who went into hiding, lost both parents in Auschwitz and then went on to become a psychoanalyst famous for his work dealing with trauma brought about through war and with orphaned children in particular), lines that immediately ring true and hit you squarely in the solar plexus with their insight. Maybe Keilson's own work with children informs the sections that deal with the author's childhood, a period where he felt the beginnings of his definitive relationship forming as he was ostracised at school, subjected to rougher treatment on the sports field, made to feel different to his classmates.

So I became more intimately acquainted with him through the insults and injuries of those who called themselves his friends, behind whom he stood, invisible, unknown... He taught me about loneliness, its pain and despair, and only later about its strength. But he himself remained motionless in the distance in which he had placed himself from the beginning, I would have had to aim at a shadow had I aimed at him.

As any child might collect pictures of their heroes and sweethearts the author finds himself scouring magazines for pictures of his adversary for him to study, 'Unblinkingly I stared into this mirror, until I believed that I could recognise there my own image.' As an actor I find that I have to find a way into any character I play. This can be particularly challenging when playing someone who might be easily dismissed as evil. You can't play 'evil' (well you can, it's just not very interesting) you need to find something to explain the humanity behind acts of cruelty and in his own way the author does the same thing with his adversary in his efforts to understand him. A friend makes the point that 'one could deduce from your efforts to think yourself into his mind and to search out and understand his motives that you are not insensible of a certain feeling of sympathy.' Some writers when suggesting that a Jew might sympathise with Hitler would find themselves in very dangerous territory but it is typical of Keilson's sensitivity and subtlety that it never feels sensational or forced. He goes even further into that dangerous territory when he questions the unity of the oppressed people. Apart from the obvious betrayal of those who collaborated I think we often accept that the Jewish people stood united in the face of their destruction but the author's personal approach even forms a barrier between him and others like him so that he resists the community of persecution.

'There is a community that is profounder than that of true believers and greater than that of party members...That of adversaries. The community of those who, in life and death, are indissolubly bound together in their struggle...'

But looking at his people as a group the author is told a fable-like tale that illustrates their plight and his central thesis. Germany's Kaiser was gifted a herd of elk by his cousin, the Czar of Russia. Despite placing them in an area that replicated the habitat they were used to he received, after some time, reports of their gradual deaths. Distressed, he sends for help from his cousin who sends an expert who confirms that everything that could be done for them is being done. Why then have they died out? "They are missing one thing," said the forester. "Wolves." Could it be that without their natural predator the elk had lost their will to survive, might even have died of grief for them? It is no wonder that such a dangerous idea sends our author off into a spiral of doubt and isolation.

Despite the lack of narrative specificity I mentioned earlier there are some very clear moments of drama and acutely personal reaction. In his pursuit of a girl our author finds himself in a flat which is soon filled with her brother and some of his friends. They, it transpires, are all sided with his enemy and one of them, a new young recruit, recounts his evening spent desecrating a cemetery. The horror of the situation is what comes to the fore rather than the horror of the act of violence (which is almost comical in its ineptitude, recalling the bitter tang of the comedy in Keilson's other novel Comedy In A Minor Key) and this extended chapter is a masterpiece of internal monologue as the author struggles with his own identity within this potentially dangerous group.

Keilson also offers a brilliant deconstruction of Hitler's oratorial style and technique in a scene that not only places our author in the same room as his adversary, wrestling with the desire to kill him there and then, but also shows just how symbiotic their relationship is. B. begins with the pronouncement of a few home truths that everyone must agree with and though no one had disagreed 'he behaved as though this nobody were present and had hidden himself somewhere in the hall.' Then come the daring truths, 'which one had to think over for a while, since they did not really make sense at first sight. But no doubt they contained a grain of truth'

Again he gave the appearance of carrying on an argument with the aforementioned nobody. He raised him to the rank of his adversary and began a duel with him before the eyes of everyone in the hall. What a performance!...He attacked, he accused, he ridiculed, tore down, hit out wildly left and right, refuted arguments nobody had put forward, and upset himself terribly. The other one had no one any more to speak for him. He, who had never existed, had been killed by the voice, and since he was silent, everyone assumed that he was dead.
Helplessly I sat in the lounge. I was the nobody in the hall, I was listening to my own extermination.

I've fallen into the trap of quoting huge chunks of this book with little more than a exhortation from me for you to just go out and buy the damn thing but it's that kind of book. If you were here with me I'd simply place the rather gorgeous hardback in your hand and send you off but in the year in which Keilson passed away at the age of 101 I can only ask you to make that short journey to bookshop, library or keyboard and order yourself a copy. It is a genuine classic because it speaks now of a specific tyranny but will continue to sound out in the future about the complexities and humanity of even the most evil kinds of interaction; something that may be difficult for us to read, but also crucial.

'if a picture paints a thousand words...'

2011-10-20T09:48:00.110+01:00

Wonderstruck
by Brian Selznick

Selznick's debut book made a huge impact (as the blurb on my Advance Reader's copy is keen to make clear) winning The Caldecott Medal, making it as a finalist in America's National Book Award and earning that all important No. 1 New York Times Bestseller position. I loved it too and we will all soon be able to see the film version as directed by Martin Scorsese (although judging by that trailer I'd give the film a miss and just get a copy of the rather lovely book) but after all that success you always wonder what an author, and illustrator, will do next. Selznick's new book tells two stories; one with words, one with pictures, the two eventually combining as the plots merge. Selznick may have dazzled with his artwork but does he have the prose to match it when the two are placed side by side?

The story begins with pictures, a pair of wolves run towards us, Selznick's 'camera-eye' zooming in up close to their eyes. After those few pages of pictures we are then in Gunflint Lake, Minnesota in the summer of 1977 and the written story of Ben Wilson. He awakes after a recurring dream where he is being chased by wolves. Ben was born deaf in one ear, has never known who his father was, and now lives with his aunt and uncle after the death of his mother. On a stormy night he finds a blue book amongst her possessions, a history of museums entitled Wonderstruck, with a dedication and a bookmark that suddenly provides what he thinks might be clues to his father's identity. This discovery will set him off on a journey of discovery but not before the power of the storm around him alters the way he will experience the world outside.

The pictures then transport us to Hoboken, New Jersey in 1927 and the story of Rose, a deaf girl who lives separated from her film-star mother virtually imprisoned by her strict father. Being deaf we experience the world just as she does through Selznick's black-and-white drawings as she makes her escape to New York City and the American Museum of Natural History.

I have included a couple of examples of Selznick's artwork just to give an idea of his lovely cross-hatched pencil drawings. His technique of zooming in close on facial features and details gives the book a very cinematic feel, something that ties in rather nicely with the era of silent film they evoke. It has to be said that those pictures that do take us in close are much better than the wider shots where the lack of facial detail actually makes Rose look completely different to the girl we know in close-up.

So how well do text and picture marry? Well, Selznick's prose is adequate but never leaves the reader wonderstruck, and although he has worked hard to link the different sections, so that as a door opens in one it can literally open in the other too, there is a curious rhythm to the reading experience as pages fly by in Rose's story and then plod along when we get back to Ben. When their stories merge and pictures and words begin to follow the same narrative the effect is actually to take away from the artwork which becomes merely illustrative of things we are reading about rather than the narrative itself, and this too at a point where the narrative is all about the revealing of past story.

So this book is a bit of a disappointment after Hugo Cabret, an easy-read and even an interesting one, especially after having read Selznick's acknowledgements at the back where he details what he discovered about deaf culture, the advent of talking movies and The American Museum of Natural History amongst other things, but nowhere nearly as impressive as the monochrome magic of his debut. To answer the question raised by the heading of this post; if a picture paints a thousand words then why write words at all?

'a vessel of memory'

2011-10-18T08:50:00.175+01:00

All That I Am
by Anna Funder

Following on from her acclaimed non-fiction debut, Stasiland, Funder's first novel has its roots firmly in fact, fictionalising the lives of real people, a group who provided resistance to the rise of Hitler's Nazi party in Germany, including Ernst Toller, Dora Fabian and Funder's own friend Ruth Blatt. Blatt spent the latter part of her life in Sydney, Australia where Funder lived and it is from here that she narrates her tale nearing the end of her life. There is something wonderfully genuine about the descriptions of Blatt in old age, a mixture of belligerence, that causes her for example to make the most of her full name, Dr Ruth Becker ('Ten years ago I decided I didn't like being treated like an old woman, so I resumed full and fierce use of the honorific'), and fragility ('I lift the fork carefully from plate to mouth, a distance which has increased with age and is now full of treacherous possibility'). She is set on the course of remembrance by the arrival of a copy of Ernst Toller's 'shamefully self-aggrandising' autobiography, I Was A German, with sheets of amendments thrust between its pages, these giving life to the one person he had excised from this official account, his lover Dora Fabian.

In his presence, and hers, I am returned to my core self. All my wry defences, my hard-won caustic shell, are as nothing. I was once so open to the world it hurts.

And so Ruth becomes 'a vessel of memory in a world of forgetting', there is something almost hallucinatory about the way in which her failing body and mind drag up these memories from the past in an attempt to piece together one more time what happened to her circle of friends in 1930's Europe.

'...occasionally, as on the edge of sleep, an obscure memory pops up, like a slide in a carousel. My friends and the other people slip off it and into the room, they breathe and fidget and open their mouths.'

Ruth isn't our only narrator however. Her sections alternate with those titled 'Toller' where we are holed up with the playwright in the Mayflower Hotel, New York in 1939, the time and place of his suicide. Before taking his life he is, with the help of a woman named Clara, making the revisions to 'the deceit of words' that Ruth will read several decades later.There are hints at the black depression from which he is suffering when he remembers his wife for example.

When I think of Christiane I feel the blackness coming; my nostrils fill with a stink which is not human but is not sulphur. It is burnt flesh, as in the trenches. I look to the bathroom and this time I catch the last dirty feathers scraping back under the door, dropping filth in their wake.

His worry that those black wings will 'foul this city' keep him confined to his room until he has finished his work. After that he knows that he will have to stop them.

With these alternating perspectives we learn of the group of friends who inhabited the left wing of German politics as Hitler's National Socialists slowly assumed total power. Blatt and her husband, journalist Hans Wesemann, Toller, Fabian and others provide eloquent opposition with the written word until the thuggishness of the Nazi's proves that action speaks louder than words. The Reichstag fire forces them towards exile in London from where they attempt to continue their acts of resistance, using all their available contacts to draw information out from behind the facade of propaganda, even staging their own trial in London to run alongside the show-trial in Germany that found the communist Van der Lubbe guilty and executed him. The threat of violence is ever present, the Gestapo managing to extend their fearful grasp to London itself, and with fears of betrayal also rearing their head the pressures brought to bear on this group of friends and lovers, who had always hoped to live their lives with an open heart and to extend that freedom to each other, reach a feverish pitch.

So with all of this fascinating factual material (there is intrigue, espionage, betrayal, murder, all the ingredients of a political thriller) why has Funder decided to fictionalise her account rather than follow the success of her non-fiction with another factual account. I'm not sure to be honest. Maybe I was looking out for it but there are the odd moments when the research is rather baldly presented and often when it isn't necessary. We can all surely understand hyper-inflation without Ruth explaining that she 'knew hyperinflation was caused by the government simply printing more currency to pay off its war debt, but it was still a shock to see the money worthless in front of me, dipping and tugging at the air.' This isn't always the case however and there are several moments where a well-chosen nugget has the power of documentary evidence to really hit home. We might feel that we already get the violence and cruelty of Hitler's police but sometimes you need a specific example.

When they found eight communists hiding in a cellar in Mitte they simply boarded it up. People walking to work heard their calls from the vent at pavement level but no one dared help. It took two weeks for all the cries to stop.

By focusing on this group of friends, comrades and lovers Funder shows how fear and the instinct towards survival combine to battle against principles and loyalty. The question we often ask about that period of history is how the German people could have allowed and even supported the Nazi project over that decade of systematic killing. Books like Alone In Berlin and Half Blood Blues have provided some interesting angles from which to view Germany from the inside and whilst I might quibble as to whether All That I Am finally succeeds as a work of fiction rather than non-fiction, it does make clear the volatility of regime that could change its mind in an instant. With that kind of an enemy, as it proved, it is almost safer to keep them as an enemy rather than to try and bring them in closer.

It is a mystery to me that people can believe they are being made safer when events clearly show that it is no safer to be a friend than an enemy, and that you might be switched from one column to the other on a whim.

'He deserves it.'

2011-10-13T09:31:00.131+01:00

The Death Ray
by Daniel Clowes

The Clowes titles are coming thick and fast from Jonathan Cape recently. After the mental brilliance of Wilson I was satisfied if not blown away by Mister Wonderful. The latter's letter-box format perfectly suited its strip-form genesis but this latest publication (originally published in Clowes' Eightball comic book series - #23) is a gigantic, souped-up hardcover. Does this, and the striking cover, mean that Clowes has written some kind of super-hero comic? Don't you believe it. It may well be some kind of super-hero story but it's a very Clowesian one and anyone who's read any of his work will have an inkling of what that means.

We first meet Andy in 2004 and in the opening two pages he seems like another anti-hero to add to Clowes' stock. Married twice, divorced twice, devoted friend to an eighteen year-old dog called Dianne, Andy's altercation with a litter-dropping pedestrian is much like the first panels of Wilson; personal responsibility is raised immediately as a theme and Andy admits that his attempts to do what's right have become harder than ever of late - 'How the hell does one man stand a chance against four billion assholes?'

We then zoom back to Andy's adolescence in the 1970's for what all super-hero stories require in a spread entitled 'The Origin Of Andy.' Both parents having died he now lives with his 'Pappy' and apart from best-friend Louie is a bit of a nobody in most people's eyes, getting most attention from school bully Stoob. His girlfriend is miles away, he fantasises about his grandfather's carer, Dinah and at 17 he's yet to even sample his first cigarette. And that proves to be the catalyst to his transformation. There are plenty of people who've thrown up after their first cigarette but I'm sure none went on to develop super strength. Pappy hands over a package from his father (a famous scientist) that explains about the experimental growth hormone that he was injected with, activated by nicotine, and also mentions the existence of the death ray.

Together Andy and Louie struggle to work out what to do with this new found power, activated whenever Andy smokes, but their concerns remain pretty small. Saving the world is further down the list than revenge on bullies and getting a girl but through their various bungled attempts we begin to see Andy wrestling with the responsibility that comes with holding the death ray, a gun that only Andy can operate that makes its target disappear in an instant. Louie is a kind of side-kick, there to keep him 'honest' but when only one of a duo has any powers there is bound to be conflict somewhere down the line.

Reading this review you may already have found yourself thinking about some of the classic comics of the past with their orphaned heroes, raised by elderly parents or relatives and even more so of the alternative vision of vigilanteism in Kick-Ass. Does this book aim to pay homage or mock, subvert or simply hijack the super-hero mythology in order to combine it with Clowes recurring themes of inadequacy, bitterness and failure in the face of stupid and cruel world? Whatever the answer to that question I'm afraid there is something deflating about it as a read, particularly when held up against the biting humour of Wilson. It's been diminishing returns with these releases I'm afraid so I can only hope that Clowes' next piece of new material is a return to form. The franchise could do with a re-boot.

Catch-22

2011-10-12T09:05:00.002+01:00

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Joseph Heller's Catch-22 Random House commissioned an animated video from illustrator Ian Higginbotham with audio excerpts from the book read by. . . erm, me!

'Ain't no man can outrun his fate'

2011-10-11T09:44:00.000+01:00

Half Blood Blues
by Esi Edugyan

He was a Mischling, a half-breed, but so dark no soul ever likely to guess his mama a white Rhinelander. Hell, his skin glistened like pure oil. But he was German-born, sure. And if his face wasn't of the Fatherland, just about everything else bout him rooted him there right good....

Hieronymous Falk, known as Hiero, is an Afro-German, a result of the French occupation of the Rhineland after the First World War, where soldiers from African colonies were sent instead of Frenchmen - dubbed The Black Shame - and any children fathered by them assumed to be the result of rape or prostitution. Once the soldiers went home their offspring were a reminder of that shame, just one of the cultural stains that Nazism would attempt to whitewash from history, but given a fabulous focus in this, my favourite Booker title so far. The novel is narrated by Sid Griffiths, an Afro-American 'so light skinned folks often took me for white' who happened to be in 1930's Berlin along with Hiero and bandmate Chip Jones. As the thuggery of Hitler's brownshirts begins to make life uncomfortable Sid and the rest of the Hot Time Swingers made their escape to France only for war to be declared and for them to have to go into hiding whilst exit visas and passports were acquired. Before they could all make their escape Hiero was arrested by the Gestapo, interned in a camp from which he was eventually released only to pass away shortly after.

In the Berlin of 1992 Sid and Chip are reunited to attend the screening of a documentary about Hiero and we begin to get a sense of the buried history and bitter secrets of these two men. Chip may only stand at five foot four but with a booming voice that 'overwhelmed the air, shoved it aside like oil in a cup of water' and his status as a now world-renowned drummer he has a bullying influence over Sid, a bassist for whom it never quite happened. The sense of unease that has been with Sid since he got to Berlin achieves something of a climax at the screening itself when he hears the voice of Chip himself name him as the man responsible for the arrest of Hiero over their competition of a woman. If that isn't enough Chip also has a letter. Hiero it seems may not have have died at all and Chip wants them both to travel to Poland to visit him; a journey that will force Sid to confront all those demons from his past and the terrible secret he has carried since then and also allow him to tell us the story of what really happened in wartime Paris.

Sid provides a enjoyable, idiomatic narrative voice, filled with jazz slang, where a man is a 'gate', a woman is a 'Jane' and the word ain't makes more appearances than in an EastEnders omnibus. Crucially this voice isn't overplayed, it never feels forced, which means that it rang true to this reader anyway. It works in much the same way as the dialogue in another music heavy narrative, David Simon's TV series Treme, where love of music and the language of the black culture it emerges from are given due prominence. I cannot stress how brilliant the dialogue in this book is. The banter between the men is hilarious, witty and brilliantly observed in terms of the way creatives know how to get a rise out of their contemporaries. The characters are well drawn too. There's a giant of a man and a Jew so blond and blue-eyed he looks like the perfect Aryan. There's the cheeky and outspoken Chip, ever confident of his viewpoint no matter how misguided it might be. Hiero remains an almost silent presence throughout, not saying much unless it's with his horn, with which he can render almost anyone silent and awestruck. Sid struggles with the limits of his own talent and his recognition of what Hiero represents and in fact it isn't until quite late in the novel that accepts what the real difference is between them.

...cut him in half, he still worth three of me. It ain't fair. It ain't fair that I struggle and struggle to sound just second-rate, and that damn kid just wake up, spit through his horn, and it sing like nightingales...Geniuses ain't made, brother, they just is. And I just was not.

The theme of talent and genius is developed throughout the book and the performance of jazz music and what makes it genuine or not is made painfully clear in Hitler's Germany where a state-sanctioned jazz band is rightly regarded by our heroes as going entirely against the grain of what jazz music is all about. For the Hot Time Swingers, exiled in Paris, and with a lead trumpeter effectively rendered stateless by the colour of his skin, jazz is a form of resistance, a protest, and nowhere is this more evident than in their attempts to subvert the Nazi Party anthem into 3 minutes and 33 seconds of jazz greatness, the Half Blood Blues of the title. This idea comes from their meeting with the great Louis Armstrong himself, a meeting which again allows us to consider the attributes that make a man great.

A man ain't never seen greatness till he set eyes on the likes of Armstrong. That the truth. Those hooded lids, that blinding smile: the jack was immense, majestic. But something else too: he looked brutally human, like he known suffering on its own terms. His mouth was shocking. He done wrecked his chops from the pressure of hitting all them high notes over the years. His bottom lip hung slightly open, like a drawer of red velvets. He lift a handkerchief to his mouth, wipe off a line of spittle. I seen something in him then: a sort of devastated patience, a awful tiredness. I known that look. My mama had it all her life.

I don't want to say any more about the plot, there's plenty of it and the book is wonderfully structured in the way it alternates between the two time periods, revealing its secrets along the way. We know that Sid is journeying towards a reckoning of some kind but it doesn't make the reveal of it any less painful. Like Armstrong, these men are also brutally human, each have suffered in some way and there is something very touching about the way in which time and suffering interact. Treme worked for me because its love for music was infectious and the music itself became a way of expressing not just joy and love but anger and hatred too. Half Blood Blues shows how music can be a protest against oppression and a cry for equality, even whilst those who make it struggle to accept each other. I don't want to put the mockers on it now but if this book were to triumph on the 18th October I'd be very happy to know that more people would read this entertaining, informative and ultimately moving novel.