Quiddity of Delusion

My Month in Books, Part One (Jan)

2012-01-29T00:00:00.000-08:00

1. Muriel Barbery — The Elegance of the Hedgehog

This begins as an acerbic, feisty and clever novel but falls apart through faulty structuring and undue mawkishness. The heroine is the concierge of an upper-middle-class apartment block who masks her contempt for the privileged and wealthy residents by secretly teaching herself how to discourse like a philosophy professor in her spare time. She shares the novel with a precocious twelve-year-old girl who is equally upset at the unfairness of kismet and plans to kill herself and burn down her parents’ apartment. The novel’s strengths lie in protagonist’s fiery humour and articulate disgust, and her moments of flighty insight into the hell of it all. As the novel progresses, however, the meeting between the concierge and the girl seems forced—we are meant to believe they share a kinship after a late meeting in the book, which despite the psychic connection between them on the page, doesn’t convince when they meet “in person.” Likewise, the pace flags in the middle when the balance between intellectual ponderousness and pushing the plot forward goes haywire, forcing a great deal of significant activity to the back end of the novel, where it falls back into sentiment for a ludicrously overegged climax. I’d recommend the book, alas, however, to those looking for something a little more sour than sweet in their bestselling French literary novels.

2. David Foster Wallace — Oblivion

I don’t think collections serve Foster Wallace well: it seems to me his stories would read better as stand-alones on some thoroughly modern internet webshite, with accompanying artwork or explanatory hyperlinks, rather than modishly festering on some fading acid paper alongside all the other fuddy-duddies. (PS Abacus, your paper is cheap and lousy). Case in point is ‘Mister Squishy,’ which seems to cry out for its own accompanying glossary, appended addenda and so on, but sits uneasily on the page in all its hypermodern dazzle. Nevertheless, the gang’s all here, from the disquieting hometown horror of ‘The Soul is Not a Smithy’ to the absolutely staggeringly wonderful exploration of a mind locked in a recursive self-critical philosophy, ‘Good Old Neon,’ to the blithering incomprehension of ‘Another Pioneer’ which I did not understand AT ALL.

‘The Suffering Channel’ is a brilliant novella about a pretentious style mag based in the World Trade Centre a few months before impact, and explores the peddling of suffering and faecal matter under the guise of an acceptable counterculture. Like the other pieces in this collection, it mimics the language and tone of its world with beyond pedantic perfection, without losing the detached overlord tone that keeps Wallace’s style distinctive. It is telling that the sentence that made me quiver the most was the unexpectedly direct insertion, on a one-word line of dialogue, of the simple statement: “She had ten weeks to live.” Oh God, I think my bones done froze themselves. How does he DO that?

The other pieces here are excellent, including the dramatic rush of ‘Incarnations of Burned Children’ which is a story it seems about narrative perspective, the short and endearingly odd ‘Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,’ and the title piece is a bamboozling voice experiment using a form of dreamlike language where the narrator is perpetually indecisive about word choice, and where words and their meanings are continually being challenged by infernal quote marks. The end result almost seems like a slightly canny self-parody or coyly embedded meta-comment, but who knows? It’s a difficult story to get through (along with the opening piece) but perseverance will be rewarded.

This collection will frustrate you and tantalise you in equal measure, but don’t worry: you’ll feel it in your nerve endings.

3. Colette — Ripening Seed

I have restricted access to books up here in the snowy Highlands, hence my reading this short novel plucked at random about melodramatic teenagers in love. Colette writes eloquently about nature in relation to human biology but this story has been told a thousand times before and with fewer obnoxious little brats involved. Did you know, incidentally, that since I’ve been up here I’ve had the worst cinematic experience of my life? I was made to watch the absolutely abysmally horrible film Patch Adams starring Robin Williams. If you’ve never seen this movie, it expresses so much contempt for the viewer and mankind, it’s practically nihilistic. I won’t go into the details, but it’s pretty much an A-Z guidebook for emotionally manipulative clichés, braindead slapstick humour and screenplays written by committees who should be shot. Horrendous.

4. Michel Faber — The Fahrenheit Twins

A rather readable batch of stories written in an edgy yet extremely cosy style, i.e. a shoo-in for Canongate. The writer is an Aussie of Dutch origin living in the Highlands who writes largely about Scottish characters, so my shelving him in the general European section is mostly biological pedantry. If you want a masterclass in how to win literary awards in this country look no further than these pieces, among them the weirdly spooky ‘All Black’ and ‘The Eyes of the Soul,’ the contemporary slices ‘The Smallness of the Action’ and ‘The Safehouse’ and darker digressions ‘Someone to Kiss it Better’ and ‘Finesse.’ The collection is consistently strong and never falls into a repetitive voice, partly due to the concision and warmth of each story. His ability to utilise the same voice and style without becoming dull is a rare commodity nowadays so Faber easily knocks most literary collections into a cocked hat. The title piece is the longest and least interesting story in the collection, though ‘Explaining Coconuts’ also pushes the dullness levels at times despite the coco-perversion. OK. I liked the collection. There are some beauteous pearls in here.

5. Suchen Christine Lim — The Lies That Build a Marriage

I sat opposite this writer at a dinner one evening and we never exchanged a word. I wish I had made an effort to chit-chat since her history is rather fascinating. But what do sixty-year-old Singaporean writers have in common with twenty-three-year-old Scottish solipsists? Not much. Suchen Christine Lim has been publishing since the 1980s having started fiction relatively late in life, and this is her most recent collection of stories based in modern Singapore. As the title makes clear, these stories challenge the country’s inane censorship laws by discussing homosexuality and same-sex adoption in a way that has never been discussed in Singapore before. The stories generally deal with shrewy mothers and wives, the failure to succeed financially and support a family without being gunned down by some bitchy wife’s wicked tongue, and generally vicious matriarchs who whomp their offspring for not obeying orders. The overall world evoked is extremely negative on the side of women, barring the children and eccentrics, but the stories are not short of humour or lightness, despite the surprisingly relentless female cruelty.

6. Cormac McCarthy — No Country For Old Men

Ah sureas hell aint foolish enough to write this here review in dialect cause ah sureas hell know itll sound like ahm fixin for a spankin from the real deep south folks, but ah caint resist the urge when the whole damn novel sounds like this, an why the hell not? Ah mean were in some southern location maybe Texas aint we? But cain ah keep up the dialect for the whole review? No, I sure as hell can’t. So let me review in my usual arch and brusque manner and dispense with these dialectical fripperies. This is a novel about a man who shoots everyone who crosses his path between the eyes and espouses this activity as a determinist philosophy. It’s also about a man who accidentally makes off with a swag bag o’ cash and accidentally gets himself and his wife shot between the eyes and misleads us into thinkin he’s some kinda hero. There’s also an absolutely useless sheriff—sorry, sherrf—who waxes philosophical in dialect and who fails to solve the crime and who looks like Tommy Lee Jones even in the book. I aint sayin I disliked it but I aint sayin I got it neither.

7. Michel Faber — Under the Skin

Caution, spoilers! A modern fable on any number of potential issues—animal cruelty? corporate greed? human brutality?—set in a version of the Highlands where multiple people hitchhike each day (I go frequently to the Highlands and I’ve never seen no hitchhikers—maybe Faber ate them all?) The story begins with our big-breasted heroine Isserley picking up a series of unemployed assholes and stabbing them in the buttocks with a stun chemical activated via her dashboard. She drives her victims, known as vodsels, to a secret plant where they are carved up and turned into gibbering grunting animals to be farmed for boutique meat. The story focuses on Isserley’s desire for freedom—she fled her homeland and her own kind (some human/bear hybrid creature) to take the fresh air of Scotland—as she struggles to adapt to her new vodsel body (her kind call themselves human beings) and fight the tyrannising corporate machine of her hometown, where she began life as a slave. The story is endearingly strange, extremely brutal, and is left pantingly open to interpretation. As a lapsed vegan I read the story from an animal perspective: vodsel farming being almost as brutal as cow or chicken farming (but not quite). On the whole: Faber invokes the warped worlds of Will Self, especially Great Apes, David Twohy’s underrated sci-fi thriller The Arrival, and early Gene Hackman flick Prime Cut. It’s all here in this subcutaneous chillerfest.

8. Lucy Ellmann — Man or Mango?

Eloise, with umlaut, is a self-hating woman of private means who loathes leaving the house. Speaking to the mailman causes her hours of trauma, as do basic phone or street interactions, particularly those with negative outcomes. She curls up with her cats making lists when she isn’t fretting about washing her hair. George, her ex, is an American poet composing an epic on ice hockey whose chauvinism is coming to an end with an acute case of writer’s block. After a hundred pages of existential cramp, the action switches to Connemara, Ireland, where a slew of oddities muscle into the narrative for a deeply disappointing murder mystery weekend experience. Ellmann’s third novel is her weakest—a shambling arrangement of back-and-forth character destructions with flipping narrative positions, replete with embedded quotations from Yeats, Melville, and bee studies. The emotional truffles on offer include the prickling hints at Eloise’s guilt at helping murder her parents, and the beastliness of her hermit grandmother, but ostensibly this is a story about two mad people who stop being mad for two minutes to realise they’re painfully in love. Some delightfully acerbic, compulsive and manic writing here. (And if you haven’t done so yet, go and read Dot in the Universe).

9. Émile Zola — The Kill

If I had to sum up The Kill in one clause (and this clause is coming up now so get ready) I’d say it’s about Haussmannisation and incest. Baron Haussmann transformed Paris during the Second Empire—a period of absolutely fantastic debauchery—where francs flowed in the streets and enterprising capitalists were free to make a monetary killing. So we have Saccard, a heartless but forgiving cash-seeker interested in power and lucre, who marries into wealth to prevent a scandal. He marries Renée, a carefree sensualist taken with Saccard’s effeminate son Maxime, a rotter who pleasures himself beneath the skirts of society ladies. This novel is the most exhausting Zola so far (except Germinal—don’t get me started), stuffed with long spooling descriptions of the old buildings, some exquisite, some supersize. A few chapters in the semi-incestuous romance becomes the dominant plot, and Zola’s remarkable depiction of Renée’s descent into debauched behaviour is intoxicating and thrilling. Unlike most characters of this ilk, she doesn’t collapse spread-eagled at the altar of Jesus and repent her frolics to all passing monks. She retains her pearly wonder after her husband’s fleeced her fortune and she’s doomed to a wintry cabin with nothing but the thoughts of romping in the hothouse with her stepson. I loved Renée. Anyway. Great novel.

10. Kurt Vonnegut — Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons

This collection of nonfiction demonstrates amply why so many people fall headlong in love with Vonnegut—all aspects of his cranky humanity, his unimpeachable morality, his hard-won cynicism are on show over these twenty-five pieces. The title isn’t particularly catchy: readers of Cat’s Cradle will recognise the terms which Vonnegut says represent his dabblings in nonfiction. Not so. Among the brilliance here includes his take on SF as a literary art, his ornery take on the moon landing and a loving portrayal of mystic Madame Blavatsky. The subtitle here is ‘opinions,’ and fierier pieces include ‘In a Manner That Must Shame God Himself’ which napalms the Nixon presidency, a provocative piece on Nigeria ‘Biafra: A People Betrayed,’ and a brief homage to Hunter S. Thompson ‘A Political Disease,’ where Vonnegut invents Thompson’s Disease for those betrayed by their leaders to the point of mental collapse (Thompson cured himself of his disease with a shotgun in 2005. So it goes). The inclusion of several public speeches and throwaway shavings detract from the urgency somewhat, but the Playboy interview ends the collection on a marvellously lucid note. Ah, the days Playboy was a respected literary organ! I hope Nicole Ritchie’s favourite book is Slaughterhouse-Five, I really do. A must-read for ALL Vonnegut fans. That’s you!

11. Ali Smith — The Seer

Ali Smith is also a playwright of local note, and before I discuss her only play in print, I want to express my vexation at the word playwright. This one, more than any other word in the English language, is designed to confuse bad spellers, dyslexics and first-time learners. Why must the second syllable be a mash-up of ‘right’ and ‘write?’ Where’s the logic there? A person who writes plays should be a play playwrite. The play writer isn’t always right—in fact, most of the shows I see at the Edinburgh Fringe are so wrong there should be a second category of playwrongs for appalling writers. Ha. How droll. Enough! This play was performed in 2006 in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland (the Islands are some of those crusty bits not attached to the Scottish mainland, the ones that aren’t merely hills with sheep), and brings Smith’s inventive humour to the form. Of course, this being Smith, she’s determined to bring something fresh and clever to the stage, hence the fourth-wall breaking larks going on here. It has the wisdom and charm of an Alasdair Gray play, but brought into the 21stC with a slight shade of lesbianism. I’m sorry I missed it. Ali’s other performed plays were Fifteen Minutes and Just.

12. Mikhail Bulgakov — A Country Doctor’s Notebook

No one likes going to the doctor, even if the doctor is a hunk with the most fabulous cheekbones (like mine), or a hottie with the prettiest ass this side of the donkey sanctuary (like yours). When we look back at the history of medicine, we realise, although (in America) being sick costs money, at least we aren’t having leeches shoved down our pants, amputations sans anaesthesia, or teeth extractions done by nurses. Bulgakov’s short fictions are drawn from his time as a doctor in a provincial backwater treating thick peasants, where patients bitch out the doc for a syphilis diagnosis, ignorant mothers refuse to let him save their children, and millers take twelve doses of medicine at once to speed things up. Idiots! Several stories read like deleted scenes from Casualty (or ER), and the longest ‘Morphine’ is a stark portrayal of addiction. My favourite, ‘The Blizzard,’ tells of a snowstorm where poor Mikhail nearly loses his toes. ‘The Murderer’ is also gently subversive and ironic, telling of an army doctor who blows holes in his Captain. (Bastard had it coming!) These are less contentious stories from the master satirist, but well worth a read.

13. Kurt Vonnegut — Palm Sunday

The sequel to the bestselling smash Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons contains an unholy amount of Vonnegut’s semi-profound public speeches (semi-profound as a good thing), hewn together with a great deal of amiable rambling and autobiographical detail. For a thorough account of Vonnegut’s impressive lineage—descended from prosperous Germans, no less—and illuminating accounts of his early life (far less torturous than the gloss he gives in some of his prefaces), this is an indispensable collection. A self-interview, as quoted in Oriana’s review, and several contentious digressions about the writer’s life are of interest to eager MFA students who want to slurp up his brilliance, and for anyone less who can listen to Vonnegut lovingly for hours and months and years. (Me). On a less interesting note, I read this book entirely on a Sunday. Next up, John Barth’s The Friday Book entirely on a Friday. Go tedious conformism!

14. Mikhail Bulgakov — Diaboliad & Other Stories

Four stories. ‘Diaboliad’ is a farcical satire on bureaucratic absurdity, a surreal reworking of Dostoevsky’s The Double that clouds the narrative’s clarity with too many oddities. ‘No. 13—The Elpit Workers’ Commune’ is even more strange, an over-the-top blackly comic story about a collapsing building and the ensuing casualties. The tone is extremely uneven and lacking in a narrative viewpoint or point of focus. ‘A Chinese Tale’ is a little too time-specific to have any contemporary value. ‘The Adventures of Chichikov’ is the redeemer: a brisk riff on Gogol’s Dead Souls with some light metafictive flickers. Some editions contain the novella The Fatal Eggs which is a brilliant SF dalliance and one of Bulgakov’s most successful satires. Shame this one didn’t.

15. Vladimir Nabokov — Look at the Harlequins!

Vladimir was such a scream in his dotage! Honestly, everyone’s favourite arch stylist could fill the Apollo with this material. This is his final novel (barring the recently published index cards arrangement), and Vladimir goes laughing to his grave with a devilishly clever riff on his own life and works. From his early days as an extremely wealthy sophisticate, ripping his first love’s never-to-be-completed noir novel to pieces, to his time as a lecherous old professor lusting after his own daughter, all the myths about the man are lampooned in his customarily exquisite prose. His succession of wives form the meat of the novel, especially the tender portrayal of his first wife (as expounded in his debut novel Mary). All aspects of the Nabokov canon are sent up, from the enfeebled English translators of his Russian works (Vladimir would end up translating a bulk of his work himself) to the nympholepsy for nymphettes that would tar him as literature’s Dirty Old Bastard. So yes: those glorious, unwinding sentences are in evidence, dripping with irony, wordplay and mean wit. See also the brilliant novella Transparent Things.

Peeping Tom 2-1-3-4 [4]

2012-01-26T10:41:00.000-08:00

1-2-3-4 → 2-1-3-4 → 3-1-2-4 → 4-1-2-3

Window 4

Dude is back in the kitchen again, this time unwrapping a ready meal, tossing it in the microwave. Very studenty approach to cooking. Must be on his own, or sharing with a friend. He’s got his laptop on the work surface and he’s typing furiously and smiling a big banana grin. Probably on one of those “social networking” sites on the internets, writing in text abbreviations about something perfectly daft. He’s got green dye in his hair, it looks absurd.

When the meal is ready, he lifts it sloppily from the microwave, dumping the rice and chicken on a plate, not mixing up the components. He must like them separate: most people mix the rice and sauce together, though it is served separately in restaurants. He takes it through to the main room: pitch dark save for a TV beaming in the distance, hard to make out. A minute later he grabs a knife and fork, types on his laptop, then takes them through. The kitchen door closes again and he resumes his typing. And laughing.

Peeping Tom 2-1-3-4 [3]

2012-01-25T15:32:00.000-08:00

1-2-3-4 → 2-1-3-4 → 3-1-2-4 → 4-1-2-3

Window 3

A dark bedroom. Dark for a long time until a light goes on, blinding bright. The child blinks his eyes, turns the lamp away so the bulb shines into the wall. He pulls back his bedclothes and slides out, limping to a mirror. He rolls up his pyjama leg and studies his calves, where bruises mottle his pale skin. An accident while out on his bike? Play fighting that got out of hand? He takes some cream out a drawer and squirts a blob on his finger, dabbing it onto the bruises: he prods and pokes the bruises, winces. It clearly hurts.

He looks to the door, sits bolt upright like a gazelle. Leaps back into bed, switches off the light. A moment later the door opens and the tall mother(?) with the tight ponytail looks in, her stern face shaded by the dim hallway lights. Checking he’s in bed as he’s supposed to be! She must have her hands full with that one. The mother stands there for a minute, unmoving: is she going to catch him out, a peeping eye under the covers? She slinks out the door, closing it a little too forcefully: a little joke to show she knows he’s awake?

Peeping Tom 2-1-3-4 [1]

2012-01-23T15:40:00.000-08:00

1-2-3-4 → 2-1-3-4 → 3-1-2-4 → 4-1-2-3

Window 1

Two men holding beers or lagers before a football game. The fat one’s in his usual chair with usual cushions, the other one’s only visible from behind: a thick crop of black hair, skinny frame. Fat man makes hand gestures: explaining in his own rambling way the game’s strategy, no doubt: “See, he should’ve played so-and-so and used a 4-4-2 defence, etc.” The compelling whatever-it-is of football takes over and the men sit rapt for five minutes until the skinny one leans forward, waves his beer then leaps up.

“Goaaaal!” is probably what he’s saying. He’s not crying out in pain or having a stand-up orgasm. When he spins around and “pumps the air” it’s clearly the man next door, the one who wept on the toilet, like his lover(?) did tonight, unknown to him. While she cries he celebrates, chinking beers with fatso, who’s remained seated throughout the whole goal ordeal. Rapid words flow—convinced of a victory for their team?—and the man next door goes to the fridge and pulls out a few more beers, as though he lived there.

Peeping Tom 2-1-3-4 [2]

2012-01-21T14:31:00.000-08:00

1-2-3-4 → 2-1-3-4 → 3-1-2-4 → 4-1-2-3

Window 2

The woman enters the bathroom and pulls down her skirt, smooth along her vase-like hips and thighs. She sits on the toilet and urinates, her arms cupped around her knees. She sits there awhile, tilting her head until it hovers above her legs—a difficult bowel movement? Soon she starts to shake . . . it becomes clear she is shaking with emotion. The window is open. A few minutes pass and she responds to an outside noise, a knock at the door, perhaps? She rips some loo paper, dabs herself then shimmies up her skirt: for a second her genitalia is exposed, buried in a shrub of ginger pubic hair. She dabs her eyes then checks her perfect face in the mirror, steadies her enormous rock of hair.

It’s her from the flat opposite: what is she doing here? Her bland shiny face, as though smeared in Vaseline, withers beside the soft skin of the woman, the lady. Both are in the bathroom now, talking. Now she’s sobbing again and her next door is consoling her, kneading her greasy fingers along the lady’s sensuous shoulders, muttering things. Manipulating? “He doesn’t love you. Why don’t you leave him?” Or: “You’d be better off without him.” Soon it makes sense: she’s a lesbian. “Why don’t I move in for a while? I’ll help you through it, honey, I’ll always be there for you, unlike him.”

Peeping Tom 1-2-3-4 [4]

2012-01-18T15:21:00.000-08:00

1-2-3-4 → 2-1-3-4 → 3-1-2-4 → 4-1-2-3

Window 4

Some dude with a trendy haircut—sort of wavy sides and spiky slicks, half-army half-punk—stands cutting a carrot, bobbing his head to music coming from the white rectangle tucked into his belt. Behind him a pot bubbles over quite quickly, sloshing hot water down the cooker and onto the laminate floor. The dude chops rhythmically, pleased with himself. He reaches for his belt and pushes a button to skip a track. The water pools around his feet and he looks over at the pot and shouts, clearly: “Shit! Shit! Shit!”

He minces around the monster pot, still spitting water, grabs an oven glove and lifts the pot off the hob. He turns his head and shouts something into another room, reaching for a dishtowel to mop up the water. As he bends down, the white rectangle drops out his belt and dangles from the headphone cables in his ears, saved by a swift grab as he stands up again. He tosses the dishtowel in the washing machine then checks the pot. He calls through to the room again and pokes the contents of the pot with a wooden spoon.

Peeping Tom 1-2-3-4 [3]

2012-01-17T15:59:00.000-08:00

1-2-3-4 → 2-1-3-4 → 3-1-2-4 → 4-1-2-3

Window 3

A child in a room with three lamps—big bright bulbs in each—sits on the floor before a video game. On screen, a car zooms around corners faster than the eye can process, but the child takes control and passes a big blue bumper car. A young girl walks in with a teddy bear clutched to her chest, fiddles with her long brown hair. The boy shouts across to the girl, his sister? Could be: “Get out, I’m trying to concentrate!” The girl, to her brother? “Can I play?” A car streams ahead as the track straightens out towards the finish line. The race ends, the boy seems distraught and throws down the pad.

He’s furious, kicking his legs and shouting. The girl backs out the door, upset but gone before the tears start. A minute later a tall mother(?) in a business shirt and skirt towers over the boy, switches off the console and wags her finger. The child sits and sulks, the mother repeats a question: “Is that clear? Do you understand me?” A little nod of the head. The mother leaves, he sprawls across his Spiderman bedclothes and buries his head in the pillow. Is he sad at being told off or upset that he didn’t save the game?

Blog Carnival — Come Ride My Elephant

2012-01-15T00:00:00.000-08:00

I struggled with this ‘language’ prompt for several weeks—all good writing to me makes language intrinsic to its purpose, how could it do otherwise? Then I thought about amusing misunderstandings had with people from different countries. None. All the people I’ve met from Italy, France, Africa, America, even Wales, have spoken clearly and without fault. My own incompetence with identifying accents is slightly amusing—I once mistook an Englishman for an American (hahaha) and corrected a French Jehovah’s Witness’s grammar for a ten minutes (hahaha—priceless!) OK. Not that funny.

Instead, this post is about unspoken languages, conversations we have with people in our heads that comprise an entirely subconscious system of communication conducted with ourselves that we hope other people might share and respond to via telepathic intuition. This will make sense as the piece progresses, I hope. If not, think bad things about me.

1. Librarians

I have a telepathic communication system with librarians. The books I withdraw are usually ultra-cool, intelligent and amazing. That’s how I roll on the book front. No harlequin robots in Indian climes for me. Whenever I bring four or nine books to the counter, I absorb the begrudging respect behind their noncommittal glances. Each stamp, scan and swish I know means ‘what a cool guy, he’s withdrawing books I’ve never read, and I’m a freaking librarian!’ And when I return these books a week later and send them trotting off to fetch my reservations, I know they secretly rub the books against their crotches or press them into their skin so their essences waft at me from the pages. I know.

2. Pavement People

I have the most sorted walking style in the world. Instead of weaving all over the place, making way for others, letting old women or wheelchairs pass, I am the city stealth cruiser. Here’s my secret: I always walk extremely close to buildings, until I’m practically brushing against the walls. This gives walkers the impression I am forever about to turn into a shop, giving me right of way at all times, allowing me to walk in a straight line on crowded streets. Whenever I pass people, I see a gleam of admiration in their eyes, wishing they’d been so ingenious as to think up that foolproof way of never getting out the way. (Note: This technique works only if there aren’t things in way, which there often are).

3. Shoplad

When I lived in Edinburgh, I used to have problems at my local shop. There was a teenage boy who worked in there who, one night when I bought some spaghetti and Fruit Pastilles, remarked on the oddness of this culinary choice. At first vexed, I then realised he admired me with burning love. The next night I returned and bought rice and a bag of marshmallows. His little eyes swelled up, bursting with pride at such unconventional choices for supper material. Later, I blew his tiny mind when I went in there and bought a Mars bar, some hummus and a lemon. He’s a chef now, working under Heston Blumenthal.

4. Girlfriends

I’ve developed a form of reverse polarity with girlfriends. I will interpret every direct command as a plea for me to do the exact opposite. Whenever a girlfriend tells me to stop reading so much and look at her for a few minutes, I bury my head in a book and rarely acknowledge her existence. She tells me to go out and get some exercise, I lock myself in and read four books back to back. She tells me to stop recommending books to her because she doesn’t read, I tell her to read Alf MacLochlainn, Ewa Kuryluk and Micheline Aharonian Marcom. She tells me never to critique her writing and I give her detailed notes and watch as she storms out the door calling me an arrogant ballsac. Girlfriends!

5. Christopher Allen

When Christopher Allen reviews my stories, we have a secret understanding. When he tells me to move certain lines after dialogue one or two lines down, I delete the comment and then drink some cider. When we read pieces we’ve made notes on in print and we notice NONE of our suggested changes has been implemented, we cackle and drink bottled water. That’s how we do things in our crazy writing worlds. Thank you for reading and please check out the other posts in the carnival!

[Part of the Blog Carnival, hosted by Mister Christopher Allen at I Must Be Off!]

Peeping Tom 1-2-3-4 [2]

2012-01-13T15:41:00.000-08:00

1-2-3-4 → 2-1-3-4 → 3-1-2-4 → 4-1-2-3

Window 2

A man and woman in their late thirties early forties, one sits on the toilet, another the bath’s edge, backs turned. The end of an argument? The man sits in a white vest and blue shorts, the woman a black nightdress. For ten seconds their bodies remain still, no fidgeting or shuffling. The man moves his lips, mumbling. Perhaps the woman is speaking? “Yeah. Hmm. Yeah,” the man seems to be saying. He gazes into the street, his look one of profound boredom. Is she going on too long? Her head bobs, she turns around.

The woman is beautiful. Wide, passionate eyes and hair like flowing magma. The man is, frankly, lucky to have her. She twirls her knees out the bath, shuffles along the tiles and rubs the man’s shoulders. The man resists her touch then loosens up and turns to her. If this were TV, he might be saying: “I know, honey, it’s just so-and-so.” Or: “I’m scared, baby, scared about such-and-such.” The woman’s long fingers knead his bony shoulders like cooking dough, swaying gently as they lapse into silence.

Peeping Tom 1-2-3-4 [1]

2012-01-12T15:05:00.000-08:00

1-2-3-4 → 2-1-3-4 → 3-1-2-4 → 4-1-2-3

Window 1

A short fat man, thinning on top, sits in an easy chair flipping channels and eating kettle chips from a funsize bag. From the precision tilting of his chair and the cushions at his back and bum, one might assume he suffers from lumbar discomfort, brought on by too many nights before the TV in stiff-backed chairs or upright leather sofas. And to counter his back problems, he chooses to perpetrate the very act that brought him the pain, oblivious to the irony as he pops open a Coke and stuffs in more kettle chips.

Then a woman walks in, younger than him by twenty years or so, greasy skin and overalls. A daughter living with her father, or vice versa? Soundlessly, she pegs her pinny on a coathook and glares, hands on hips, accusatorily. One can imagine her thoughts: “Still sitting there, you fat slob? Why don’t you get some exercise, fatty?” Her body language shows disdain: stepping around his carpet crumbs, over his fat ankles and into a chair. She reaches for the remote then makes a face at his greasy fingerprints all over the plastic. The image on-screen changes to a singer “pumping the air.”

The Peeping Tom Project

2012-01-09T14:25:00.000-08:00

I started a novella inspired by Georges Perec’s Life A User’s Manual a few months ago—a grand statement about the importance of collaborative and fragmented narratives in a virtual world (a statement a decade or two out of date, since we’ve been living in that world since I was a zygote)—but my ambitions crumbled under their own weight. A sub-OuLiPo extravaganza was the plan, to be authored by ten or so different writers. Each writer would play a voyeur observing various shenanigans in a tenement block opposite, the purpose something to do with focusing intently on the minutiae or boring bits of life to achieve a more transcendent narrative (cribbed from David Foster Wallace). This despite the fact each paragraph was plump with unusual or suspect antics: a series of interlocking narratives with manic plots, like what standard fiction is sometimes, so not particularly original.

The novella had its own complex structure where the narrator(s) would describe the actions in each window in groups of four (each group standing for 24hrs). I added a further complication by making each group include a character from a different window in the sequence 1-2-3-4 at all times. So if the order was 2-1-3-4, a character from window 1 would appear in window 2, a character from window 1 would appear in window 2, and so on. Already, you see the utterly unnecessary complications involved, and I’m not sure I understand them myself. The map looked like this:

Story Map

1-2-3-4 → 2-1-3-4 → 3-1-2-4 → 4-1-2-3

1-2-4-3 → 2-1-4-3 → 3-1-4-2 → 4-1-3-2

1-3-2-4 → 2-3-1-4 → 3-2-1-4 → 4-2-1-3

1-3-4-2 → 2-3-4-1 → 3-2-4-1 → 4-2-3-1

1-4-2-3 → 2-4-1-3 → 3-4-1-2 → 4-3-1-2

1-4-3-2 → 2-4-3-1 → 3-4-2-1 → 4-3-2-1

This unfinished piece seemed like a shoo-in for a brief blog series. Hence my plan to stuff this blog with regular excerpts from the permanently unfinished novella. I don’t expect anyone to read this (people reading stories on blogs? don’t be ridiculous!), but it’s either on here or in the wastebasket. I only completed the first four sets up to 4-1-2-3, so that’ll be our new story map. If I upload one window per post, I can generate sixteen posts over a few months. Go me! I hope these posts don’t upset my one reader. Love you Joe xxx.

My Month in Novels (Dec)

2011-12-30T22:00:00.000-08:00

1. Will Self — Cock & Bull

For those seeking a pass into the perverse otherworld of Britain’s one-man imaginarium Will Self, these polymorphous novellas are a fine beginning. In ‘Cock’ a provincial wifey sprouts a string-bean male appendage that envelops her femininity, turning her into a masculine beast seeking to part the bald hillocks of her hubbie’s buttocks for some anal adventure. In ‘Bull,’ sports hack John Bull acquires a set of fleshy she-lips on his backleg and starts a strange affair with a vaginally fixated, philandering GP. If these summaries don’t naphthalene your imagination then there really is no reason for you to read books. (Reading Self makes one inclined to use naphthalene as a verb—pardon me). Cock & Bull is a modern horror story—the horror of warped selfhood, how genital-gendering can lead to a strange transvestism of the self, can scramble our notions of wo/manliness so badly we don’t know whether to give or receive anymore. As usual, Self dazzles with his linguistic foreplay, taking us to a dreamy little climax with his powerful intellect and grotesque imagery. A sick treasure and one of my personal favourites, along with How the Dead Live. Bookspotters’ Note: This hardback edition from Atlantic Monthly Press circa 1993 has the best cover art. This is a re-read from a few years ago.

2. Harry Mathews — The Journalist

I love difficult fiction, since even if I don’t understand the author’s particular intentions, I can pick and choose meanings like at some ontological deli. The trouble with some OuLiPo work, alas—and more broadly in the novels of Harry Mathews—is that his novel-length games pose specific problems and solve them in specific ways, often using egghead algorithms I am too dim to comprehend. As with Tlooth, I was entertained for the duration, but could have used a detailed roadmap. [This is a roundabout way of saying I didn’t understand how this novel ended, and if anyone wants to enlighten me, please do so below].

The Journalist has a simple premise: a businessman recovering from a nervous breakdown keeps a journal of his post-recovery life, using a very pristine prose style akin to a certain Harry Mathews, that gradually descends into Nicholson Baker-like tracts of precise, exhaustive and tedious detail (as in The Mezzanine). He breaks all the categories of his day into sets and subsets, leading to an almost symphonic string of paranoid ramblings and pedantic detail. Gogol’s ‘Diary of a Madman’ springs to mind at once—the premise here is the same.

The novel is hilarious and oddly chilling. Yet it falls into that OuLiPo trap of obsessing on inanimate objects, like the most boring moments in Perec, or in Robbe-Grillet’s entire corpus.

3. The New Uxbridge English Dictionary

Some excerpts from the comprehensively reviled 18th edition (precisely) of the Uxbridge English Dictionary:

Analogy — something that makes you itchy and sneezy

Barbecue — long wait for a haircut

Climate — first instruction at mountaineering school

Diphthong — fondue underwear

Exceed — a plant

Flabbergasted — appalled at your weight gain

Gastric — lighting a fart

Hoedown — agricultural strike

Infantry — a baby oak

Jacuzzi — Italian version of famous essay by Emile Zola

Kitsch — a small kitchen

Laplander — a clumsy private dancer

Miasma — the reason I have an inhaler

Nobleman — eunuch

Optical — to giggle during surgery

Parapet — an airborne cat

Quest— the Jonathan Ross family coat of arms

Rambling — jewellery for sheep

Semolina — a system of signalling with puddings

Tailback — post-operative Manx cat

Undeterred — a skidmark

Vigilant — an insect that stays up all night

Weeding — Scottish handbell

X-rated — no longer appreciated

Yo — a yoyo that only goes one way

Zucchini — animal park enthusiast

4. Françoise Sagan — Bonjour Tristesse

First, a digression. (How can one digress before the story has even begun? Surely for a digression to take place, a tangible thread needs to be established? Well, what is this parenthesis exactly, if not a digression? Point proven). So: that digression I promised. My first brush with love was with a Scottish lassie named Emma (not a very Scots name, but if local flavour is required, let’s call her Agnes). So Emma-Agnes was the victim of my affections and the entire “passionate” encounter is best described a “polite” encounter. In fact, excessive politeness was responsible for our inevitable separation.

It happened thus. I had been friends with Emma-Agnes for a few years in school and decided to write a page-long summation of my feelings toward her, apologising for my inappropriate biological urges impeding on our friendship. I expressed regret that I was attracted to her, and understood entirely if she’d want to sever our union and banish me, even though we took the same train daily, the same classes, and a few tutorials. To my surprise, she wasn’t repulsed and we carried on as friends. A few months later I wrote a second letter asking if we might go to lunch together, if that wasn’t too forward, and I would pay for her meal, if that wasn’t too sexist an attitude to take. She agreed.

And it progressed at this pace over the year. I eventually wrote her a letter requesting a lip-to-lip exchange, which occurred a month after the letter had been sent. Emma-Agnes already had a boyfriend at this stage, and would fall pregnant a few months later, but she kept up her side of the agreement. On an empty train carriage, I leaned in for the exchange. I hovered close to her face, then stopped to ask her if this was the correct angle for a satisfying “kiss.” She nodded and egged me on cordially. There was contact: her lips were a little sticky from lipgloss, so it was like kissing a Jelly Baby’s innards. After the peck, I was on the point of collapse. She was offering a second, more fuller exchange, but I decided that was enough for one afternoon. Absolutely marvellous. (You may baulk, but we shy people take what we get in this life, and when we love, we love like dying men crying out for morphine).

She left to have her baby a few months later and I didn’t see her again. It seemed she preferred the father of her child to me. I guess he was a little more assertive a lover. Ah well, the delirium of young love! This book is good.

5. Harry Mathews — Singular Pleasures

I am drawn to Harry Mathews—eighty-year-old Anglo-French poet, essayist, novelist and American Oulipian—largely because the Dalkey Archive Press publish a large wodge of his novels, and I respect the Dalkey Archive Press more than I respect all the world’s leaders and notable persons. So I am willing myself to love Mr. Mathews although his work is perched on the inscrutable side of potential literature—his games come with no instruction manual. Not so in this short collection of sixty-one vignettes of people masturbating across the world: here, these elegant little paragraphs are a characteristically (of the Oulipo) naughty formal experiment. Imagine that scene in Amelie where Ms. Tatou imagines everyone having sex in Paris at that precise moment, but in autoerotic terms. A lovely volume with watercolour illustrations from Francesco Clemente—it takes only twenty minutes to read, about as long as it takes to achieve climax. Or longer if you, you know.

6. Ben Marcus — The Age of Wire and String

Regard the mushroom people: their Vauxhalls are emblematic of an anti-inflatory ecosystem. To decode their literature, commit the following procedure. [1] Insert a zucchini into the Upper Ventilation Shaft, taking time to scalp the rogue dripping insidious seedpeople. [2] Suggest a mode of dance for the staplers. Do not describe their weevils as disrespectful. You risk criticism from the unholy arc of M.J. Nicholls—a disgraceful cannibal among the pigeons. [3] Caulk the skirting boards of the Shadek Temple for the arrival of Prince Edward Island, the foremost performers of foul-mouthed Scottish indie. When the sky tilts upwards, regard this review as a rather obvious parody, and scoff at grade nine, then torch the weak badgers: their sides are green. Fire a warning shot at the rich and overly educated author, Mr. “Ben Marcus,” and perhaps comment on his producing a work of such slick literariness after his five million dollar private education at Brown etcetera. Retract this comment as sour grapes or dour skates.When all is over, regardez-vous the debut as sub-Italo Calvino and dismiss it with a cavalier contempt, then go looting for peachier literary treasures amid the salt.

7. Jack Green — Fire the Bastards!

A “challenging” and “difficult” work of “experimental” criticism that shows me up as the third-rate wannabe hack who can’t close-read for toffee that I am. Jack Green was (or is, or was) an underground crank who wrote first-rate criticism in lowercase and no punctuation in his newspaper (ah—how things have changed . . . oh um oh hmm) and this work torpedoing lazy reviewing was published without his consent in the early nineties. The pieces date from the 1950s, and take Gaddis’s The Recognitions as their springboard to call all reviewer clichés into question: all of which exist today, all of which I have committed at some point. (Things such as comparisons to other authors, calling the writer “erudite” and the prose “challenging” or “something that will mature over several reads.”) The overall product is a pedantic, passionate defence of an uncategorisable novel (am I falling into the trap?) and a reminder that criticism should aspire to meticulous text dissection and laser-eyed close reading. Nowadays, only published authors review books in national papers: a step forward or a sideways lunge into incompetence? Jack would know, the bastard. [P.S. I don't want to read The Recognitions. It sounds bloody difficult.]

8. Stanley Elkin — The Franchiser

This frustrated and tickled me in equal measure. I adored the frenetic pace, the comedic chutzpah and cartwheeling craziness in the manner of Ishmael Reed or D. Keith Mano’s Take Five. The language was serpentine, maximal and gushed out like golden fonts from a tyke’s diaper (or nappy, if you’re British, which you aren’t, are you?) BUT. And here’s a big but . . . I like big buts and I cannot lie. This exhaustive style, in today’s hypertwitchy reading world, lends itself to the weary page-scan, the lazy skip-scan-skip until the dialogue kicks in or a paragraph break finally pops up from the descriptive shrubbery. So I think that’s Elkin’s downfall as a novelist: he’s too damn sesquipedalian in this age of the decircumlocutious.

But I thought the ride was a scream: Ben is a sublime comedic schmuck, a perverse inversion of the American Dream, and his adopted family of afflicted brothers and sisters tenderises the savage. BUT. There are moments of sexual wish-fulfilment (i.e. seventies retro stuff), a little tasteless satiric cruelty (killing off his cast of lovelies in ha-ha-disgusting ways), and that endless gush of words floods what would otherwise be a bitter and lean satire. Elkin’s own troubles with MS are channelled through Ben in a detached but “recognised” way, i.e. he doesn’t drown the problem in humorous abandon. But he leaves us too mired in his vast imaginative bog to touch a tangible emotion. I will read another Elkin. [P.S. This book has the ugliest cover Dalkey has ever designed! Look at it!]

9. William H. Gass — Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife

One of the funniest curios from 60s postmodernism, this typopathic novel has the bitchingest range of stretchy fonts and the craziest kerning of any apparently serious work still in print. An attempt to link “penetrating” a woman’s body to “penetrating” the body of a text, or something like that, it’s more an excuse to splice sexy nude shots of a dusky model with outrageously dated textual effects and high modernist gibberish. All right, William Gass would never accept that explanation, but hey, this was the sexy sixties—surely some of that avant-garde fairydust touched the recent writer of Omensetter’s Luck? Some of the textual effects, thought radical in Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, are used here in a more condensed form in this part dense literary novella, part Playboy special. (And yes, they appear to have airbrushed out the model’s navel on the cover, sexist pigs). A fun oddity for formfreaks.

10. Curtis White — Memories of My Father Watching TV

Curtis White’s father fixation reaches its summit in this short novel, blending parodies and shifting forms to create what David Foster Wallace calls a “witheringly smart, grotesquely funny, grimly comprehensive, and so moving as to be wrenching” piece of work. This is what Jack Green might call in reviewing terms a “boner”—quoting someone else’s words to pad out the review instead of having to formulate an opinion. But I’ve been reviewing all over the place this weekend and, I might add, on my own here in the GR offices—no one else has read one single book this weekend out of one hundred-odd friends. Is anyone reading this December? This is another digression to stop me having to speak about the book. OK. You win. Curtis White is terrific—his work runs largely on comic vignettes that pass into the “wrenching” and personal, with a style somewhere between the ironist excesses of Sorrentino and the trickery of Coover. Jack Green would call that a boner also—playing the comparison game to cover an absence of useful analysis. Ah. Who cares. What’s on TV?

11. Paul Murray — Skippy Dies

I find growing up such a strain, partly since I’ve hit my middle twenties and I can’t seem to get on with it. All the routines of life—unemployment, infidelity, alcoholism—I look upon with wry amusement, as mere targets for my satiric inner child to mock from my ivory tower. This novel paints a cynically accurate portrait of teenagehood (at least among rich Catholic kids) as texting thugs driven by spite, sex and sleeping pills. And the adults too are misguided souls, aimlessly searching for an elusive whatever in a disappointing and cold world. But for the duration, Skippy Dies is a manic not-really-coming-of-age-at-all novel written in a range of delicious close third-person narratives, flipping between breathless teenage babble, a convenient scientific genius (helps add cosmic heft), and an adult pedagogue with a wandering penis. The sublime comic energy that infuses this novel guides the reader through its giddying 600+ density, through its crass humour, teenage theatrics, comic caricature, towards the unusual ending where it withers into oblivion like the sequel to Carrie. Now back to my miserable life . . .

12. Émile Zola — The Dream

Here’s something to warm the cockles this Christmas (what are cockles anyway? do cockles fit in a stocking and are cockles an acceptable present for a nephew?)—a Zola novel with a happy ending! Happy, that is, if you happen to be a pious foundling embroiderer with aspirations to sainthood who wins her Prince Charming after having her heart crushed and submitting to her parents’ pessimistic wishes and God’s will, who is brought back to life two minutes from death by a snog from an archbishop who also happens to be future hubby’s father. I think that qualifies as happy, or indeed a cogent English sentence. I want cockles for Christmas. Please send this starving boy all your cockles!

13. Denis Diderot — The Nun

I’m applying for positions of paid work at the moment (known as a “job”—so I’m told), and after about a month of no replies I’m about ready to sign up for the convent. I would love to be a nun! Provided I had computer and broadband access, and was permitted to read any book I so pleased, I’d put on my habit and sing the sacraments! Unfortunately all the nun positions are filled at the moment, despite me faking three months nunning experience on my CV. (I’m considering changing the name on my CV to Jeffrey Archer, since everything else on there is made up—British joke, Google the bestselling turd). This book is amazing! Diderot is such a fiendishly funny satirist, wiping the floor with all his 18thC cronies. The Nun takes us from a sadistic convent regime of starving and torture into a sumptuous world of desirous shephebes (my coinage—hire me someone!), in breathless first-person prose: excellent rhythm, pacing and plotting. And a wee bit titillating. The book was originally orchestrated as a hoax, which makes me love Diderot even more.

14. Jonathan Littell — The Kindly Ones

So . . . the war. The Second one. Or is that the Second One? Do we capitalise all Things Pertaining to the War? I think it’s appropriate to capitalise when referring to the Greatest Atrocity in All of Mankind . . . or if not appropriate, respectful. And people, well, people keep writing books about It. That War. That Pesky War! This near-1000-page novel is the rambling testament of SS officer Dr. Max Aue, devoted Hauptsturmführer (Captain), later Standartenführer (Major), semi-repentant monster and lunatic, following his humble beginnings liquidating all non-Aryans to his time, uh, liquidating all non-Aryans.

The novel is written in a flat first-person prose, heavily factual with some surgical dissections of the narrator’s complex emotional life. The breadth of research on display is outstanding (Littell spent five years researching and less than a year writing the book) and the reader gets swept along in these rhythmic flows of gruesome insider information—blandly descriptive horrors keep the reader going through shock, acting as an unfortunate emotional catalyst. Largely, however, the book is about the collapsing bureaucracy of the Nazi regime, rendering absurd their illogical brand of single-minded barbarism as a kind of Weltanschauung through cold unbiased fact.

Critics of the book complain about the narrator’s obsession with excrement, but excrement acts as an unpleasant metaphor for his disturbed mental state, for the rotten world of wartime Europe—Max Aue might have murdered his mother and stepfather, and still holds a torch for his sister whom he sodomised as a teenager. This warped one-way romance builds to a devastating pitch 900 pages in (worth the wait) where he falls into a perverse erotic fantasy, merging his body to his sister’s by writhing in her bed sheets, imagining himself back in the snug seat of his mother’s womb. The suggestion being Max, nor his colleagues, should have ever left the womb, or ever ceased being infants.

Plus, critics hate long novels. They have to review four or five per week, they can’t be doing with 1000-page monsters with conflicting moral messages. This Novel About the War, however, is an absolutely breathtaking piece—a fresh and contentious addition to an already bursting market. Sure, it has its flaws: suffocating marshes of micro-detail and long dialogues between SS officers of an often tedious nature, but the overall execution is coolly done, as if JG Ballard had written about the War. Oh, hang on . . . So, if you have a spare 25 hours this week, make this one a priority. A modern classic? No. But damn good.

15. Kurt Vonnegut — Mother Night

As a deliberate contrast to Jonathan Littell’s 1000-page monster The Kindly Ones, I re-read this early Vonnegut masterpiece. The 1997 Robert B. Weide adaptation with Nick Nolte is one of my favourite movies, and where the novel is structured in typical nonlinear fashion, the movie embellishes and adds colour to the novel in its linear form. The two mediums complement each other perfectly, so if you haven’t seen the film version, do it soon! And if you haven’t read this brilliant novella, the confessions of Howard W. Campbell Jr., an American spy posing as a high-ranking American Nazi whose talent for writing propaganda makes him one of the most powerful fascists of the war, do it soon too! Some criticise Vonnegut’s writing for its Twain-like simplicity, but Vonnegut is a great economiser, and his novels demonstrate a perfect mastery of tone, rhythm and moral rightness, never shying away from the moving humanism that underpins his greatest work. This novella is so freaking wonderful it’s unreal. Read me!

16. M. Ageyev — Novel With Cocaine

This book has the dubious honour of being the 400th book I’ve read over the last two years, the first being John Barth’s appalling Coming Soon!!! (whose three exclamation marks speak of a desperation undignified for such a dignified dignitary). If you think I’m some sort of freak who lives in a tin house with nine cats, you’d be right, only I don’t have cats and I live in a Glasgow flat with ceilings so high all the heat collects ten feet above me. As a consequence I write this enswaddled in fur (from the nine cats I skinned) and a pair of velvet-lined slippers, with a cup o’ warm coffee afore me. Check out MFSO’s review, which includes a chemical formula and more hybridised words than is healthy from a man under thirty, and check out Knig-o-lass’s review which gushes and splutters love for this Russian curio. Me? I found the novel badly structured, slipshod, drearily eloquent like early Nabokov, bereft of character or style, and frankly an overcooked turkey. I do concede that the final chapter, esp. the mother’s suicide, gives a sharp shock, but that’s about all the novel does, gives a series of sharp shocks. Plus, cocaine only features in the last sixty pages, it’s also “novel with dull schoolboy reflections” and “novel with prostitute” for the duration. Read only if you’re desperate to out-weird your bookish friend who’s always sniffing out of print relics from yesteryear.

17. Kurt Vonnegut — Breakfast of Champions

Kurt at his most caustic, rambunctious and playful. When Vonnegut releases Kilgore Trout into the world on his fiftieth birthday and he looses the ghost of his father, this scabrous novel becomes a personal and moving account of a man, his father, and a big old lemon of a world. There’s an early clip of Kurt reading from this on YouTube, where the tale was told in first-person from Dwayne Hoover’s POV (and Kurt was but a phantom), but the third-person narrator opens up the metafictional element that proves integral to the heart of the novel. But listen: this is a furious assault against all that America holds dear, an impish black comedy mixed with his typical whimsy, pitch-perfect satire, and unique Midwestern charm. A film version was attempted in 1999 with that towering comedic presence Bruce Willis to disastrous results, turning real wit into sitcom farce. So for those unsure about this strange little novel, take my word that this ranks among Kurt’s greatest books, along with the nine or so others of equal import: Mother Night, The Sirens of Titan, Jailbird, etc.

18. Douglas Adams — The Salmon of Doubt

A collection of essays, speeches, ramblings unearthed on his hard drive(s), one short story culled from a BBC annual, and the titular unfinished Dirk Gently novel. The essays are breezy and witty, often lacking focus when discussing science and technology, but comprise (realistically) the most readable of his non-fiction output. There are some readers, yours included, who feel Adams spent himself on the Hitchhiker’s books: although the Dirk Gentlys were absurdist romps sutured with awesome logic, they didn’t hang together as novels. The short excerpt from The Salmon of Doubt, however, might prove me wrong: the usual warmth and humour is present, although in nascent form, (the narration even slips from third into first person, a sign of Adams’s dissatisfaction). But all in all, nobody who loves Adams could resist reading this book, despite snoozing through the travel/nature pieces to get to the stuff they want. It’s a pleasing gallimaufry. Savour it, because there is no more.

I Ate a Boulder

2011-12-27T12:00:00.000-08:00

I ate a boulder. Yes, I ate an actual boulder. You’re thinking: how? Did he break the boulder down into little rock chips and eat those one after the other? And in that case, how would he survive the experience long enough to finish eating a whole boulder, which would stick in his throat and choke him to death or at least cause him unendurable stomach agony? To all the questions I respond simply, I ate a boulder. I ate a boulder, because I am an unnamed, unclassified invention in words, and if I want to eat a boulder I will eat a fucking boulder, without your niggling attention to the whys and what-fors. Know what I did next? I ate a cathedral. Then I had Japan, Laos and Paraguay for pudding! How d’you like that, you little monkey, does that meet your approval?

DAN-UCK-UCK-IEL!

2011-12-25T17:00:00.000-08:00

I lost my mother last night. I sat down at the computer to try and capture the moment, use it later in a novel or something. I described her body lying peacefully in the bed, the flowery duvet cover, the table lamp weakly illuming the cupboard (I used that word ‘illuming’—poetic, huh?), but it was lame. She was a dead old woman in a bed. That was the reality. Hardly literary gold, is it? After I buried her, I hit upon a novel idea. I sometimes called bingo at the Seagrove OAP home and this gave me access to the kitchens and staff areas. I would contaminate a few meals with various weed killers then observe the deaths for use in fiction. First to croak was Mrs Thomson who stood up in the canteen and clutched her neck. She wobbled and sputtered and shrieked her son’s name—DAN-UCK-UCK-IEL!—before she crashed into Mrs Bea’s mash potatoes, sending the peas flying in a beautiful arc. Brilliant! Well, so I thought. When I went home to write it all down, the scene was comically grotesque. I wanted a scene that moved the reader to tears, not made them giggle in secret. There was nothing for it—I’d have to smother my son and write down my wife’s reaction. I crept into my son’s bedroom with a pillow then I . . . nah! I didn’t really! Ha! YOUR FACE! And I didn’t really poison the old woman either! HAHA! And my mother’s fighting fit! OH YOU SHOULD HAVE SEEN YOUR FACE! My Lord, what a hoot this fiction lark.

My Year in Rejections

2011-12-23T18:49:00.000-08:00

This year’s no-nos were so dull I almost abandoned the post. But there’s a few of interest in there.

January:

Hi M.J. -
Thanks very much for this, I really liked it - but I don't think it's quite right for us for a couple of reasons. The key one is the dialogue at the end - it's a crucial bit of the story and two distinct voices, which is tough to pull off as a single reader. I also thought the start took a while to get going. The first graph is really intriguing but then there's a bunch of backstory when I kind of wanted you to get into it.
These points are rather specific to our site and my odd personal taste so I really hope you have success place this one elsewhere, and in the meantime if you have anything else you think might be suitable please keep us in mind.
Many thanks,
Mike / 4'33''——

February:

Hello M.J.,

Thank you for your submission to Smash Cake. I apologize for our delay in
response, and appreciate your patience.

Unfortunately, I'm afraid we're going to pass on these pieces.

I hate that, too, because I love your breezy sense of humor. I can tell
you're a kindred spirit. (You're probably a riot at a party, too.)

Thanks for thinking of us, and best of luck in your future pursuits.

~~Tracy Lucas, Editor
Smash Cake Magazine

March:

Dear M.J.:

Apologies for the late response. We loved your story and laughed out loud and
wish we could publish it, but it doesn't quite meet our guidelines. We're
looking for pieces that relate to the setting of a book or an author's hometown.
While we're sure Murmansk must be both of those, you'd need to make the
connection for us within the story and include a couple quotes from that author.

If you can do that, we would be happy to reconsider and/or see something else
you think might work.

All best,
Tina Rubin
Founding Editor

April:

Dear M. J. Nicholls,

Your story, Becoming a Bandit, will be published in the May issue of Frontier
Tales. Thanks for your submission.

Thanks for your support, and keep those stories coming!

Duke Pennell

[Site didn’t seek my permission—the story had been published elsewhere].

May:

Dear Mark Nicholls,
Thank you very much for sending “Fingers in Our Ears” to Boulevard. Although it doesn't fill our editorial needs at the moment, we're glad you thought of us. We receive too many manuscripts to make individual comment possible, but we do wish you luck in placing this with another magazine.
Sincerely,
The Editors

June:

Thank you for your interest in Whitefish Review.
We received over 400 submissions for issue #9 and were able to select work from 37 different artists, photographers and writers.
I'm sorry that we were not able to use your work. Please continue to submit in the future.
I know these rejections are hard – I get many of them!
We will host the unveiling of issue #9 at The Lodge at Whitefish Lake on June 10 beginning at 7 p.m. This year, we will have readings by esteemed authors Doug Peacock, Mary Clearman Blew, and Lois Red Elk, as well work from a young writer selected for this issue, Callie Ann Atkinson.
Good luck with your art. Our next submission period begins August 15.
--Brian
Brian Schott
Editor

July:

Dear MJ,

Can't say I didn't enjoy this display of frustration and misanthropy, but I think it takes a strong constitution to get through it. There's no single place where the Reader can focus his attention (or even his sympathy); the result is a mix of laughing at ()and not knowing whether this is meant to be funny) and of deploring (without for a moment believing this is meant to be tragedy. Maybe you enjoyed writing it more than the reader might enjoy reading it,

Still, I did enjoy it, so you're welcome to send us something else. (NB: Some of this story is deliberately offensive, and we don't do drab sex, or much of the other kind, in TRoL. It's bad enough we all have done it: who wants to read about it?

KB (Editor)

August:

Dear M.J.,

Thank you for sending us your nonfiction piece.

Our editorial board read your work with interest. Unfortunately we did
not feel that it would be the best fit for our journal at this time.
This is not reflective of the quality of your writing; subjective
tastes play an important part in the assessment process.

We're sorry that we won't be able to offer you a spot in this issue,
but hope that you will consider submitting again in future reading
periods.

We appreciate your efforts, and wish you all the best in placing this
piece elsewhere.

Thanks again. Best of luck with this.

Sincerely,
The Editors at Sliver of Stone

September:

Dear M.J. Nicholls,

Apologies for our delay in responding.

Thank you for sending your work to and/or and for allowing our
editors to evaluate it. Unfortunately, we find that it does not fit
our present needs.

Best,
Damian Ward Hey,
Editor-in-Chief
and/or

October:

Thank you for sending us your work. We appreciate the chance to read it. We also sincerely appreciate your interest in The Cupboard. Unfortunately, this piece is not for us. We encourage you to submit again in the future.

Thanks again and best of luck with your work.

Sincerely,

Adam, Dave, and emily

November:

Dear Mark Nicholls,

Thank you for submitting A Florescence of Gerhards to Clockhouse Review for consideration. We appreciate you sending your work to us. At this time, however, we feel it does not fit our needs. We hope you will consider submitting again in the future.

Good luck with your writing.

Kind Regards,

The Editors
Clockhouse Review

December:

Dear Mark Nicholls,

Thank you for sending us "On/Off" and giving us at Catch Up the opportunity to consider your work. We've read your submission and really regret that it doesn't quite sync up with what we were envisioning for our upcoming issue.

We really appreciate your interest in Catch Up, and we apologize if you're receiving this despite having withdrawn your submission.

We hope you'll continue to follow the journal, and we wish you the best of luck.

Thanks again.

Sincerely,
The Editors of Catch Up.

My Year in Books

2011-12-22T12:48:00.000-08:00

This post elects and celebrates the best books of the batch read each month. It’s hard to get a crystal clear picture what was read overall, so let’s get lay down some statistics.

I read fifty-three books by American or Canadian writers (by birth), forty-six by French writers, twenty-four by English writers, sixteen by Scottish writers, nine by Russian writers, eight by Irish writers, five by Croatian writers, four by German writers, three by Czech writers, three by Italian writers, two by Argentine writers, two by Chilean writers, two by Chinese writers, two by Spanish writers, and one by Albanian, Australian, Belgian, Bulgarian, Dutch, Greek, Indian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish and South African writers. Plus an anthology of European fiction with stories from every country in Europe. There were also a dozen or so nonfiction titles whose authors’ identities I didn’t log.

Of these 227 books (at the time of writing), one hundred and fifty-three were novels or novellas (or closer aligned with the novel than anything else), thirty-eight were nonfiction (essays, biographies, academic), twenty-seven were short story collections, and a feeble five were poems or drama. The numbers don’t scan exactly, but no one but me cares about this stuff, and I’m not so anal as to break it down into sub-categories. Or am I? Other stats: seventeen of these books were illustrated (with pictures, cartoons, unusual page design), and fifty-five were published by Dalkey Archive Press.

So what were this year’s greatest reads? To keep the post from expanding into the unreadable, I’ll try to keep my selections short. These reviews may contain original material. Be careful.

January — Deborah Levy — Billy and Girl

This was the first novel that truly floored me in at the start of 2011. I haven’t been dogearredly marking up the book as perhaps I should since I tend to have one incredible experience then move on, seeking the next like an empty thrillseeker. What I loved, if I recall, was the offbeat narrative voice, its mix of dark childhood themes (parental abandonment and abuse), black humour and unexpected emotional peaks. I haven’t taken to Levy’s work with a passion yet, I should read her earlier novels next year.

February — B.S. Johnson — B.S. Johnson Omnibus

A cheat, since this contains three novels in one. But these novels, among them Albert Angelo and House Mother Normal, contain some of the finest (and only) British metafiction and typographical experiment in print. Albert Angelo is a collage novel masterpiece with the infamous see-through pages: it’s a hilarious, tragic and personal novel. House Mother Normal is a fabulous black comedy that makes devastating use of blank space.

March — Hubert Selby Jr. — Last Exit to Brooklyn

A searing sift through the slurried slums of post-war Brooklyn. The only book that uses shock, violence and vulgarity to depict a world of tragic isolation that truly pierces the heart, gets you so deeply you feel you are THERE, in this boneyard of brittle bones and broken bodies, crying and fighting and fucking and SHOUTING AT YER FREAKIN KIDS TA SHUT THERE TRAPS. Selby’s editor on this book was Gilbert Sorrentino, who helped Selby refine his extraordinarily precise style, his pitch-perfect dialogue, distinctive abuse and misuse of punctuation, his staggering pacing.

April — Daniel Handler — Adverbs

Adverbs has a twisty, clever authorial voice, all-knowing and wise like the best omniscient narrators, which doesn’t really deviate from its essential Handlerness, despite inhabiting the emotional realm of his lovesick hipster personnel. But Handler handles words like a panhandler panhandles handles, or a handler handles hands: deftly, with aplomb. Like Watch Your Mouth, Handler uses recurring images, phrases, motifs, characters, spooling them through his stylish prose with its sardonic Sorrentino metacomment, its wily Nabokovian impatience, its Eggersian whimsy. Each chapter corresponds to one particular adverb, but it’s irrelevant really, as the star here is the style, and the style succeeds strikingly well at depicting the yearnings and maimings of love. And they’re endlessly funny.

May — Paul Morley — Nothing

Paul Morley, Best Rock Writer in UK, explores his own father’s suicide in this exhilarating memoir by taking the reader through his complex relationship to dead bodies (he saw Ian Curtis laid out on a stretcher), his waning relations with his dad, and the mindset that lead Mr Morley to end himself in a car somewhere outside Gloucester. There’s a dedication to B.S. Johnson afterwards, and Morley’s approach to telling the story is as stubbornly non-linear: the first section is about his aborted attempts to write the book (or imaginary versions of the book), there’s a straightforward memoir section about his school life, a series of little vox pops on various themes, and transcribed interviews. His style is maximal, indulgent even, but always warm and witty.

June — Tatyana Tolstaya — The Slynx

This exceptional little pearl should go straight atop your reading list, knocking off that willowy story collection, those fat-arsed historical doorstoppers, and that free verse thing carved into tree bark. Get rid of them all. Put them in a glorious bonfire and read this instead. The granddaughter of Leo T has all the talent of her antecedent, cribbing also the mordant wit of Bulgakov, the lyrical euphony of Nabokov, the despairing glamour of Zamyatin. The Slynx is a first-rate novel on all fronts: original and captivating in its form, succulent and rib-tickling in its prose, dark and prophetic in its subtext, sutured together with sugary feasts of stylistic invention that would make even the illiterate smile. A book about now, about the past, about the future—this book time travels, this book inhabits the fourth dimension. Read it now.

July — Raymond Queneau — Children of Clay

Les Enfants du limon emerged in 1939, the fifth of nine novels in a decade of tireless creative energy for the Parisian polymath. Unlike the other OuLiPo originals, Queneau had a solid body of work behind him before co-inventing potential literature, using the group as a springboard for ideas, to launch him into superstellar orbit. His output of poetry, essays and songs is far greater post-1960, though his corpus of novels act as fine exemplars of the OuLiPo methods—methods that would seep into postmodern literature throughout the sixties and beyond. Our protagonist, M. Chambernac, is working on an encyclopaedia of French “literary lunatics” in the 19thC, and hires trickster Purpulan to do the cataloguing and secretarial work. As he completes his work (of which vast screeds are reproduced here), he finds his own mind teetering off-piste, and discovers the real lunacy may be closer to home.

August — David Foster Wallace — A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again

As much as I revere Wallace’s fiction—his attempt to rescue American culture from the despairing morass of self-aware ironical knowingness—his nonfiction is in another league. The sheer cinematic exuberance, the “floating eye” quality of these pieces is breathtaking and wonderful, bringing the reader as deep into each experience as is textually possible, and as close to Wallace as we can be on the page. In this essay collection, by making the focus tangentially on Wallace himself as filtered through the Illinois State Fair, a revolting cruise ship, or a tortured TV consumer, the work has a deeply personal and directly emotional feel, and although not as ambitious as his attempt to depict the grand throbbing alive-ness of life as in Infinite Jest, the work shines and sings with a more reader-friendly humour, brio and natural warmth, as well as the stylish feats of intelligence and logical probity that is his trademark. An essential text for any serious reader of contemporary essays.

September — Denis Diderot — Jacques the Fatalist

For those exhausted or defeated by Tristram Shandy, here is a precursor to the postmodern novel that packs in more incident, philosophy, bitching and warm humour in its 237 pages than most modern avant-garde writers manage in a whole corpus. Jacques—the titular Fatalist—attempts to recount the tale of his “first loves” while accompanying his Master on a series of oblique misadventures that invariably end up as digressions and more digressions. All postmodern tricks—stories-within-stories, frames-within-frames, direct reader-insulting—are present, and better than in 1971. This is a wild and hilarious romp with a fiercely readable translation from the unfortunately named David Coward, and this edition has an exemplary introduction that neither squeezes all life from the work nor drowns it in academic verbiage. Proof once again the French are the true genitors of all great literature. So it was written up there, on high.

October — Ali Smith — There but for the

I hate to resort to crude Americanisms, but Ali Smith is the motherfucking BOMB. Her latest novel, circa October 2011, shares a structure all but identical to The Accidental—four sections with little one-two-page prefaces—but also shares its masterful grasp over narrative voice, language, style, humour, and subtly heartbreaking strangeness. The novel plays elaborate games with chronology in frequent bracketed sections (the structural design of which eludes me) but There but for the is another lovingly designed work of art, bordering on masterpiece, from my newly crowned Favourite Ever Scottish Writer.

November — Dubravka Ugrešić — Lend Me Your Character

More magical egghead prose from Croatia’s best woman. ‘Steffie Cvek in the Jaws of Life’ is a patchwork novella with various instructions for perforating and crocheting the prose. Where B.S. Johnson might actually knit a novel in a scarf, Mrs. Ugrešić merely presents the idea with her customary sardonic wit. The story collection ‘Life is a Fairy Tale’ involves a woman who finds a penis in her hotdog, a zealous translator of Daniil Kharms failing to reach her publisher, a reworking of Tolstoy’s ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’ involving a cannon on a train, and a man who borrows a writer’s female character to have sex with his male character. Absurd brilliance from this restless firecracker. I chose this merely to give Mrs U. a place—she’s my favourite Croat EVER.

December — Paul Murray — Skippy Dies

This month is technically still happening but at the time of writing (the 17^th), the best book so far is Skippy Dies, a comedy drama set in an Irish boarding school. This novel paints a cynically accurate portrait of teenagehood (at least among rich Catholic kids) as texting thugs driven by spite, sex and sleeping pills. And the adults too are misguided souls, aimlessly searching for an elusive whatever in a disappointing and cold world. But for the duration, Skippy Dies is a manic not-really-coming-of-age-at-all novel written in a range of delicious close third-person narratives, flipping between breathless teenage babble, a convenient scientific genius (helps add cosmic heft), and an adult pedagogue with a wandering penis. The sublime comic energy that infuses this novel guides the reader through its giddying 600+ density, through its crass humour, teenage theatrics, comic caricature, towards the unusual ending where it withers into oblivion like the sequel to Carrie.

The end. Here’s to another two hundred or more in 2012!

My Year in Stories

2011-12-19T11:00:00.000-08:00

It’s been a pleasing year for larding stories into esoteric but beautiful literary magazines. It can feel fruitless being published in these venues since you never know who, if anyone, is reading you. But that’s something even well-known authors and geniuses face, so shut up me. I got stories published. I should be grateful, and I am, even when I’m not.

First stories published this year were How to Wreck a Human at The Literary Burlesque and The Manifesto For Exploding Televisions at Metazen. The former is a homage to Gilbert Sorrentino where I blatantly aped the voice he uses in Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things. Fortunately, the Literary Burlesque closed their website and my story no longer has any online presence, so this rip-off is no longer open to your scorn. Hurrah!

Next was my first ever audio publication Fingers in Our Ears at Liquid Imagination, read by the husky-voiced former movie announcer Robert Eccles. This story, once again, takes up the Sorrentino influence but attempts to use cynicism as a more wrenching emotional spanner.

Becoming a Bandit was published in Feb 2011 in the enormous collection Winter Canons. It’s a coming-of-age tale of bandits-in-training and assorted incompetence in the Wild West. The book itself is accessible to Americans only, since the cost to ship the tome Brit-side is frankly ludicrous. The Easily Persuaded Killer is a crime story of some description, in the satirical mould, as that’s what tends to happen with me. It takes potshots at Ian Rankin Denise Mina types, and it’s in the collection Ransom (scroll down lots).

The strangest story of the year goes to man/woman in a collection of “apocalyptic erotica” called This is the Way the World Ends. The piece is actually a split-page formal experiment which happens to involve one scene of simulated sex between a homosexual man and woman. The story was improperly formatted in the book, which ruined the design somewhat, but Freaky Fountain Press have some quirky books in their staple, so I forgive them. The story itself slightly embarrasses me now, but hey ho hum.

In April, my first creative non-fiction piece Instruction Manual For ‘Burntisland Beach Disaster’ was live at Shaking Like a Mountain. Then in June, The Ante Review published it again with an incorrect title and no response to my emails asking them to fix it. Thanks!

More authorial angst was published in Glint Literary Journal with The Little Book of Nothing where I aped Lucy Ellmann’s style with mixed results. The story features the sexual abuse of trees . . . and dribbling. My favourite publication of the year, Prime Mincer, published my story Downfall of the Dans: A Comic Opera. I used the form of an operatic aria to structure the story, and I seem to still be happy with the results, so all is well.

In September I had another short in Metazen, Ffion at the Fjord. I used a ‘reader key’ to give the reader three reading options, short, shorter, shortest. There’s also a little flash piece in the online Edinburgh mag Broken Doll Collective, Ffion at the Funfair. It was a good month for story success, as Frankie & Johnny, the piece I adapted for a class exercise, was printed in Duality 5: Style. The editor misspelled my name, which took the pleasure off somewhat. But I got published so shut up shut up. I’m such an ingrate.

I also love Barge Journal, who published the first in a cycle of pieces using a fragmented narrative approach. The technique involves a series of thematically linked mini-stories, digressions and stylistic quirks to create a “disquisition” of sorts—something that raises a number of interesting ideas and discussion points on an off-kilter topic, a caffeine rush of ideas and anecdotes. The first, A Disquisition on the Importance of Scottish Heather was published there. The second, A Disquisition on the Centrality of Sandwiches in Corporate Britain went up this month at Eyeshot.

So thank you to all these fine venues, a special thank you to my indispensible proofreading bitch Christopher Allen, and a special thank you to me for writing so much pap. My current stack of unpublished material, by the way, totals ten freaking stories, so I have a strenuous year ahead. Good luck me, and good luck to you with your writing endeavours!

My Year in Abandoned Books

2011-12-17T12:03:00.000-08:00

I decided, after sticking to the bitter end with so many putrid novels, to stop this stupid behaviour at once and simply cast aside any book that fails to ignite my loins. These are the books I peevishly quit this year after one hundred, fifty, ten or two pages. My “reviews” are pasted direct from my “seduced and abandoned” Goodreads shelf.

1. Marc Cholodenko — Mordechai Schamz

For some reason I found this book unconscionably boring I had to pull out ten pages in. Books where an eloquent poet based on the author shares his poetic thoughts for 120 sheets leave me ice-cold. This explains the love-hate thing I have with Calvino and why books by poets are usually best left in a small fridge freezer in the Outer Hebrides. There are exceptions, there always are, which makes these grand dismissals impossible to do these days, as some smart-tongued galoop will always sidle up to throw eggs of logic at you. Considering no one on this site will probably ever read this, I’m saved an egging.

2. Herta Müller — Nadirs

I got 30 pages into this and the violins began swelling from the page in mocking staccatos. This is a book of Romanian shorts, all narrated from a child’s perspective (i.e. descriptions of things she sees and nothing else), all about impoverished Romanian villages and backward peasants. Well, it’s an odd idea for a story collection. I could not understand the reason for writing like this, for stripping all the components of a story away, paring it down to descriptions (too advanced for a child) of scenes. Sometimes striking and sometimes macabre, but mostly tedious and miserable. Why, Herta Müller, why?

3. Raymond Queneau — The Skin of Dreams

I went along to the NLS to read this, but had to pack it in when the multi-character screwball antics got too much. I love Queneau but he really wrote one too many of these novels: a little disappointing for such a daring innovator! The same thing again and again! I won’t get around to finishing this unless I go back because the book is going for £100 on Amazon. All my rich uncles passed away in the 1800s, so it doesn’t look like a finisher. I have to admit, though Queneau is brilliant and witty, and well worth reading . . . reading ALL Queneau’s works in English isn’t a good idea. Or maybe I need a little time away to really appreciate them. Unless this title is reprinted, I’ll have eternity away.

4. Jennifer Johnston — This is Not a Novel

This Is Not a Novel is not some David Marksonlike mosaic of quotes, wisdom and fractured narrative, it is the exact polar opposite of such an approach: a directly emotional novel in the first-person intercut with letters and assorted correspondence. Nonlinear approach aside, there could not be two more opposing novels with the same title. Markson’s This is Not a Novel autopsies all fictional tropes and invites the reader to reassemble their components into a strange, original work. In Johnson’s novel her protagonist proclaims: “This is not a novel. I want to make that perfectly clear.” Thus establishing first-person character narration, a voice, a tone, and a style. Ergo: classic novel. I was attracted to this since it shared a title with Markson and expected something a little more original, seeing Review Press are the publishers. Instead, this is a tissue of scenes from a well-to-do Irish family with emphasis on tears, conflict, etc . . . mainstream fodder. Not for me. Lesson learned: be more choosy about reading material. Or go read the David Markson.

5. Claude Simon — The Flanders Road

Bailing out of this one at p82. Oneworld Classics is almost as impressive as Dalkey in bringing esoteric out-of-print novels back into the world. Have a gander at their catalogue if such a thing impresses you. The Flanders Road is an important novel of the nouveau roman movement: Mr. Simon uses an atemporal third-person narrative voice, narrating war horrors in a nightmarish stream-of-thought style, popular among Beckett and late-period modernists. For the contemporary reader, the style is a dated experiment, tiresome to read and more historically curious than narratively explosive. I don’t have the patience to wade through punctuation-free avant-garde monsters these days. I think I’m growing up.

6. Guy Davenport — Eclogues

OK, I didn’t give Guy much of a chance, but I could see where it was going. Endless Greek references, academic indulgence, unbearable polyglot showboating. Bah. Bah. I like random Greek and German phrases and words like boondoggle and whoopdedo as much as the next reader—OK, I don’t—but these difficult stories went over my head, and don’t fall into my corner of the avant-garde, where Sorrentino and Queneau hang out quipping and smoking. I hear his essay collections are the bees knees, so I’ll try those instead.

7. Aurelie Sheehan — Jack Kerouac is Pregnant

Not my teacup. Oblique, down-at-home stories with that tone of assumed melancholy, mystery or profundity, yawningly repetitive for a whole collection. People write like this all over the internet, and McSweeney’s are partly at fault for popularising this stripped-down, bland, reaching-for-the-lyrical style.

8. Gustave Flaubert — Madame Bovary

I have two Czech novels to read ahead of my second book group meeting so I’m throwing in the towel on Bovary. So far, I’ve found at least two people in Glasgow who like to read—the others must be opera lovers—and with some luck I might net a third! Fingers crossed. So: I really can’t decide why Flaubert’s ultra-precious, excessively descriptive style frustrated me in this novel, but had me hooked in A Sentimental Education. I don’t understand. Here’s an attempt: Education has a more epic span and frenetic narrative pace—it weaves an exhilarating tale of illicit love, socio-political upheaval and coming-of-age lunacy into one spiffing tome. MB, despite its satirical underpinnings, falls more into the “costume drama” camp, and progresses at a leisurely, claustrophobic pace: I got 134 pages into the novel and I didn’t feel Bovary had any presence as a character, and Flaubert’s excruciating depiction of bourgeois pleasantries between his various nonentities didn’t help the story spark into life, nor generate interest or compassion. His reliance on omniscient narration over dialogue also presents a problem. So I’m going to watch the BBC adaptation later. Call me lazy, call me crazy, call me Miss Daisy. Onwards!

9. Marie NDiaye — Rosie Carpe

An endearing and breathless style, bringing to mind Boris Vian’s little pearl Heartsnatcher, kept me skating along the thin-ice plot, opaque happenings and wraithlike protagonist for the first two parts. Rosie Carpe is a deliriously enigmatic character, a female receptacle, airily disengaged from her surroundings, who finds herself knocked up by a hotel manager and amateur pornographer, constantly pining for her brother Lazare. NDiaye’s narrator is cheek-to-cheek with her characters, yet she offers erudite assessments of their behaviour (don’t tell the creative writing tutors)—flighty and profound in Rosie’s case, not so strong in Lagrand’s narrative. In fact, this position switch disengaged me completely from the text—our microbiological attachment to Rosie, distant even when close, is taxing enough, so when the position swifts to a lesser character, it’s near impossible to pass through the opaque fog. So I gave up. Sorry Marie. I’ll try harder next time. NDiaye is one of France’s top female black writers: this is her only book in English translation.

10. Jean-Paul Sartre — Nausea

An insufferable philosophical classic, penned in nauseating and styleless first person prose. Roquentin is an arrogant buffoon whose existential woes are trivial, arch and pathetic. No attempt to create a novel has been made, apart from using that most lazy of constructs, the diary, opening the whole work out to a meandering thought-stream of excruciating random dullness. It isn’t accessible to confused students, unless those students happen to be aesthetes on private incomes writing dull historical theses, who like lifeless tracts of flat and horrible prose and can tolerate being bashed over the head with dated postwar ideas. I think that was Sartre’s intention, anyway, I might be wrong. But I get it. Yes. OK. Thanks. Life is horrible, etc, free will is illusory, etc etc. Got it. I read up to p50. That’ll do. The novel was never a useful medium for complex philosophical ideas, except perhaps Camus’s The Stranger, but that was under one hundred pages, and so tolerable. Absolute tish-pock.

11. John Burnside — The Mercy Boys

A poet’s novel about various Dundee alcoholics, malcontents and miserable men leading their miserable lives, written in excessively descriptive, somewhat flat prose. This is what rankles me about the Scottish novel—the sheer unflinching lugubriousness of the enterprise. This is why reading A.L. Kennedy or James Kelman or any other thistled luminary makes me break out in hives. Let’s be honest, Scots writing today sucks balls, except Ali Smith, the high priestess who will pull us from this depressing mire. Alan Bissett? Rodge Glass? Please! Give me a Uruguayan drunk writing isosyllabic iambs in crayon any day. John Burnside’s A Lie About My Father is really neat, howevs.

My Christmas Playlist

2011-12-16T14:28:00.000-08:00

The Fall—Winter (Peel Session)

From the unbeatable Hex Enduction Hour, this song about a mad kid with a rabid dog and a cleaning lady for a mother makes for chilling and inscrutable listening. It also has a bassline so repetitive and drone-like, it sums up The Fall’s entire musical approach.

The Birthday Party—Dead Joe

Imagine skirling down an icy road into oblivion in a burning Mini Metro, and you have this bludgeoning epic. Impossible not to resist that hacking chorus of “oh-oh-oh-ho-ho-ho DEAD JOE!” sung by Nick Cave at the height of his post-punk Old Testament madness.

Galaxie 500—Listen, the Snow is Falling

This band succeeded in making a Yoko One song listenable, turning it into a haunting classic with deliriously wispy vocals from Naomi Yang and a heartstopping build-up into a sublime 90s indie fuzz. From the supremely superior shoegazer classic This is Our Music.

The Lightning Seeds—Sugar Coated Iceberg

I can’t resist the Lightning Seeds: they made my childhood so wonderfully upbeat before the teenage gloom set in. Who can resist this shameless sugar-pop at Christmas, with a cameo appearance from a then-cool PJ & Duncan in the cheeky video?

Mazzy Star—Flowers in December

I am a sucker for soaring violins and gentle female vocals, but who can blame me when the song is this affecting? Winter, after all, is about barren, icy lands, the slow passing of time, about how all things pass and what remains are those fleeting moments of pure happiness. Or presents and turkey.

Lisa Germano—The Darkest Night of All

Germano is a little-known singer-songwriter based in LA whose 90s albums are the best-kept secret of American indie. Her music takes me to dark places with its often unbearable honesty and unflinching songs about social anxiety, alienation, rape and depression. Yields incredible emotional rewards for the listener willing to listen to her incredible music.

The Smiths—Well I Wonder

I always think about the incredible blackness in our world at Christmas—a time when so many are strangers to the happiness we take for granted. As someone familiar with Grade-A loneliness, I strive to appreciate how lucky I am to have two loving families to turn to, though it’s not always easy for me to be so aware. This song is unbearably sad, but immensely powerful too.

Magnetic Fields—Everything is One Big Christmas Tree

On a lighter note, this wonderfully silly “Orc-folk” song with its German refrain always make me titter, and making me titter isn’t always the easier task, as the last song description shows. I love Stephin Merritt’s acerbic lyrics and the masterpiece 69 Love Songs.

Kristin Hersh—Winter

Kristin Hersh is my favourite female musician—or heck, my favourite musician, period. This song from Learn to Sing Like a Star is a dramatic sweep of cello grandeur and a divine chorus of healing proportions. And the bells add equal brilliance to the package. This live version isn’t great, so find the studio cut if possible.

Xiu Xiu—Chocolate Makes You Happy

This is more a song about bulimia and self-loathing than a celebration of Cadbury’s finest products, but what could be more Christmassy than stuffing your face with fowl to forget how much you hate yourself and how horrible your stepbrother is every time he “satirises” Mohammed?

My New Card Range (1-4)

2011-12-06T16:54:00.000-08:00

Boo Hoo

2011-12-02T08:54:00.001-08:00

I’m not having a good time. Usually I’m stoic in the face of adversity (at least in these posts), but lately I’ve been biting pillows and munching carpets (I know these are lesbian slang phrases but I don’t care—and so what if I’m a lesbian? that’s my business, right?) The source of my complaint is fiscal, i.e. needing to get a job to survive.

It’s hard for me to write about this, since I tend to supersize the trivial. For everyone else, getting work is a normal occurrence, a necessity. For me, it’s the biggest hardest deal in the universe since I want to write, not work, so I am naturally resistant against all forms of employment. I have had gigs in the past, so I know I can bash through and ride the waves, but it’s beastly. OK, so that’s the main source of my unhappiness. I won’t dwell on it. It doesn’t make for good blog meat: spoiled writer whinges about having to work for a living. But I had to dump it here, since it’s the thing most heavy on my mind.

I’ve always viewed working to stay liquid as separate from all writing endeavours, but lately the two have been sleeping together. After a difficult night renouncing all my writing as useless, I spent the next day looking for work online, and fired out applications. A few minutes later, I was hammering out words like a lesbian possessed: I started up a new ‘support blog’ (now deleted—too time-consuming), then started two new stories. It calmed me immensely and helped remind me writing is what I will always return to, regardless of my failure to rustle up a novel, an agent, whatever.

So yes, very heartwarming. Is your heart warmed? I could massage it for you. So the point is—and you really need the sick bag for this one—regardless how anxious I get looking for work or attempting to slip into society, I know the blank page will always await me when I get home from hosing down pigs or licking clean Catholics. I know that’s more heartwarming than you’re used to at this blog, but permit me this rare moment of human weakness. I’ll return to the book-bragging and aimless rants about nothing later.

Good luck, me.

My Month in Novels (Nov)

2011-11-30T15:39:00.001-08:00

1. Alasdair Gray — Working Legs

I read this in the bath. Right there. I am all soaped up and pleasant smelling. It’s a play Gray wrote for a little disabled theatre group: nothing special, really. Broad satire and old-school melodrama set in a 1960s Scotland, not the 1990s it was written in (and perhaps meant to depict). It depressed me a little as a starving writer, as I know the sting of receiving and losing government benefits, and right now with our double-dip recession and Tory leaders, the UK is going all Thatcher again. So this was not a cheerful read. I might cry. Pass me the Kleenex. Gray’s artwork is always pleasant, alas. And there was a happy ending. Almost.

2. Harry Mathews — 20 Lines a Day

It’s late and I need a little time to let Mathews’s charming and meaningful vignettes seep into the right side of brain—as in correct, not the opposite of left—before I pass comment (or into sleep). Over the years 1983-4, pivotal in Mathews’s life, and in literary history, the American Oulipian wrote twenty lines per day, based on an old Stendhal quote. During this time seminal OuLiPo members Georges Perec and François LeLionnais passed away, and these short entries touch upon the sadness in his life and the horror of trying to write through it all. It’s the highbrow equivalent of Blogger, more or less. Some entries are ponderous, some funny, some random, some moving. Towards the end he overeggs the second person, but who’s complaining? This brisk book is expressive and charming.

3. Alf MacLochlainn — Out of Focus

One of the earliest Dalkies. The novel’s blurb (see novel’s blurb) takes a stab at summing this up, and almost succeeds. The closest I can get is to say it’s like a cross between Inish and the Research Bureau columns in The Best of Myles, but not as good and twice as weird. The illustrations are hilarious and some lines are so absurd I chuckled, despite my utter bemusement. I read this while distracted to the point of . . . distraction. So add an extra star if you must to excuse my anxious state, and congratulate me on my graduation, which was today.

4. Dubravka Ugrešić — Lend Me Your Character

5. Jonathan Coe — Like a Fiery Elephant

As writers, we are overly conscious of our foibles and traits: where we see ourselves on the great graph of dysfunction. On the page, I have walked the perilous road of selfconscious indulgence, of postmodern pretention. I have written dozens of stories, and two novels, that collapse into self-referential revelation: pure spits of Johnson’s own plea: FUCK ALL THIS LYING! I have stepped onto the stage like a shy schoolboy and told my embarrassed audience: “I have nothing to say except how much I hate myself.”

This shambles ended for me when my first novel, A Postmodern Belch—a shameless vehicle for dated metafictional tricks, a Mulligan Stew without the theory—caused its small LA publishing house to collapse through bilious dissent. For who, in good conscience, could publish two hundred pages of a writer treading water, showing off his verbal artillery, but so scared to write a well-rounded character or fast-paced plot, he would never make these poor fresh-faced saps a single cent? (I am convinced to this day the editor faked her sister’s car accident to shut down the press and hide from me).

So I came, a year after my first serious novel was torpedoed, to B.S. Johnson. Seeking amusement. Lightness. Inspiration. I found in Christie Malry a quaint dark comedy, a book unreplicable in its technique, which I wanted to write so bad, my valves chafed. Then on to Albert Angelo: a full-bodied experimental workout with curious perforations. Less envy, more curious squints. Then the humorless snooze of Trawl: an unrelenting Beckett homage, seasickness in hardback. And last, House Mother Normal. A startling work of poisonous comedy, confirming to me the warped magnificence of this sad man.

I forgot The Unfortunates—to me, his least successful novel, despite its standing as an objet d’art among the vain literati. What I learned from Johnson, among other innovators, was how to make a form or structure integral to the emotional core of a work. There’s no point writing an 1000-page epic in misspelled Norwegian iambics if this form isn’t crucial to the meaning. The rampant postmodern dickery that mars my juvenilia (which, although dated, is at least charged with a Pythonesque mischief—see this example) was crucial in my ongoing quest for identity as a writer, as an unsalaried drudge on this woeful sphere. It’s not a vast education, perhaps, but I’m a slow learner.

My fascination with Johnson seems typical: I too was raised in a working-class household, absconded to university, and now swing awkwardly in a bourgeois hammock. Although class is less divisive in the UK as in the 1950s, I can empathise with Johnson’s attempt to prove himself as an artist in a world of Oxbridge leg-ups and Cambridge cronyism. I often indulge in logic-free rants against a literary system that refuses to subsidise ambitious creatives living in penniless decadence. I have an arrogant streak. (But unlike him, I am svelte, raffish).

So his persona, his techniques, his suicide, his charming turn on the ITV special Fat Man on a Beach (prime-time avant-garde films!), all drew me to him naturally. My interest, while mostly distanced, has stretched to reading some of his out of print works at the NLS archives—more from a stubborn obscurantism of preoccupation that makes me such a hit with the ladies than genuine obsession. (I also like to snowboard on the novels of David Markson).

So at last, I came to Coe’s magnificent bio. And what a triumph. Entirely readable, compulsive, obsessive, fascinating—all these words and more. Coe, himself a mainstream and tame novelist, makes his own literary approach clear from the off: Johnson, far from being a literary mentor or inspirer, is more a strange avuncular figure in his life, like my distant relatives in Invergordon. Who I am told have money, but I never see a cent.

This fat volume, with its criminal small print (not helpful for us lame-sighted) is as comprehensive a book one could expect on Johnson, and the speculation about his own relation to the occult, and myths, plus his rumoured homosexuality, all add intrigue to this complex portrait of a mad, feverish and unbalanced creative firecracker. A terrific book, and apologies for the preamble, but this review is really about me, isn’t it?

6. Alasdair Gray, Agnes Owens, James Kelman — Lean Tales

Not much cop, governor. I don’t have time for Kelman’s raw punctuationless obscurity—to me, it’s not an effective representation of his characters, nor his Glasgow. Like Gray’s Lanark, it places him outside his homeland, but in a bad way, since Lanark is freaking awesome. Agnes Owens I always have time for, and her stories here are largely impressive, barring a few fabulist flops. And Gray, oh dear Mr. Gray, once again proves his incompetence at the story form. One gets the impression he writes whatever he pleases, stands back and allows people to congratulate him on his originality of form. These pieces are dry, autobiographical bores, told in Gray’s arch schoolmaster style, and his two portraits belong in newspapers, not a storybook, being articles, not stories. After Lanark, Gray was enshrined in the pantheon of Scottish greats. He got away with murder from then on: Unlikely Stories, A History Maker and Old Men in Love being three examples. I think our love affair has reached cessation.

7. Nicholson Baker — The Fermata

The Fermata doesn’t simply posit the question what would you do if you could stop time? It assumes, quite rightly, that everyone would undress and violate their fellow citizens within about four seconds, so asks instead how would you use this erotic licence to engineer love in the moving world?

Such is the problem of our hapless obsessive narrator who, like the hero in The Mezzanine, observes a pathological attention-to-detail to the minutiae of his warped inventions. Since constructing his time-stopping device through a series of implausible homemade contraptions, he has practiced a strict moral code: no stealing and no sexual deviation observable to his victims in the moving world. A laudable practice that he doesn’t always observe, especially with those he has reciprocal sex with.

Sadly, I came to identify with the narrator at points—not in his planting-porno-on-the-beach or his whipping-himself-into masturbatory-frenzies side—but in his attempts to manipulate fate while remaining invisible to the victims of his infatuation.

In my case, I became infatuated with a woman in a blue-button hat who caught the 8am train into Edinburgh. After some harmless staring I detected her reading Treasure Island and tried dropping feeble hints that I too was reader, and that although we only shared a train trip and interest in books, we one day might unite in supernovas of love and set the universe on fire. Or, failing that, do it quick and nasty in the driver’s cabin. My technique was to carry a book underarm at all times, as though the book might magnetise her toward me. Feeble.

This novel is awesome. Exemplary verbal gymnastics, hilarious neologisms (or neolojisms) and crazy Flann O’Brien-style humour. And lashes of gratuitous pornographic content. Perfect.

8. Stendhal — The Red and The Black

I promised myself I wouldn’t spend too long clacking out a review of this one: usually, after a frenzied Sunday of reading I like to mellow out for the last few hours, and not dissertate (apparently that’s a word!) on a lofty French classic. Plus there are a few tip-top reviews already, like this one and this one and this one, so who cares what the anaemic Scot has to say? Really? In short: loved the epigrams, didn’t mind the frequent blurring of narrator with interior narration and dialogue, and thought Julian a loveable little bastard. Sure, the persistent tuggings between affection, class, love, ambition, and so on, became unbearable, and Julian shooting his true love because she threatened his insincere love didn’t quite scan on the plot level, but who cares with prose this schizomanic? Love Stendhal.

9. Claudia Rankine — Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric

Perhaps a little dated, but if a poet can’t wax about the world now, or then, or now as it was then, what world are we living in? We’re not living in the world now, thassfursure, we’re living in the world then. When topical poems were out. (When this then is, I am uncertain. But let it be said poems about eating cheese in 1907 are hardly taught on campuses—or is it campi?) Anywho. This brisk series of prose-poems or prose lyrics ruminates coolly on contemporary America: scraping away at the darker layers of our lives, tipping often into polemic. (I think it’s campuses. But I like campi. Why can’t our plurals be more Latinate nowadays? What’s with these purple-headed octopi ruling the language? Or is it octopuses? They ought to be ashamed. I liked this book).

10. Jacques Roubaud — Some Thing Black

This ten-part poetry cycle was written by Oulipo legend Mr. Roubaud in memory of his young wife Alix Cléo, a Canadian photographer who died of an embolism aged 31. Her own book Alix’s Journal, also available from Dalkey, is a collection of moody B&W photos and compliments this volume, creating a chilling portrait of death and its permanent imprints. The poems here use various complex constraints and stark free verse to express the impact of loss, nagging absence, and the begrudging afterness. Several photographs from the Journal round off the volume, creating what is perhaps the most moving Oulipo production in English, and a beautiful memorial to an unrealised talent.

11. Marie Redonnet — Hôtel Splendid

Redonnet has a disquieting stylish simplicity: she writes each sentence on thin ice—cool and exacting—threatening the next moment to crash into freezing inscrutable waters. This tale, narrated by the third in a trio of sisters running a derelict swamp-side hotel, bares a striking similarity to the Bouvier sisters. That is, Jackie Onassis’s eccentric kin who holed themselves up in their Grey Gardens mansion in self-imposed exile, until Mrs. O paid an overdue visit and rescued them from pneumonia. (See the good film). Here, Rimbaud’s Hôtel Splendid is inverted: rats, damp, insect swarms, clogged toilets and tropical fevers complete the visitors’ stay in the house of horrors. The narrator takes it all in her stride, chillingly detached until the whole operation crumbles around her—nary a tear, but many a drop of sweat—spent. Ecstatically unique. See also Sorrentino’s take on Rimbaud, Splendide-Hôtel.

12. Marie Redonnet — Forever Valley

From derelict hotels to derelict churches, the second book in Redonnet’s triptych involves another nameless narrator’s frolics in squalor. This one takes place in a beyondbackwater, where the clueless sixteen-year-old narrator is talked into a life of profitless prostitution with sinister customs officers. Presiding over a dying priest and his crumbling parish, she goes in search of “the dead” by digging four holes in the garden where some previous town has, suggestibly, been buried. Meanwhile her ersatz mother Massi plots to save the “valley below” from its bad milk crisis by seducing the town back into some semblance of its former self. As in Hôtel Splendid, the style is an aching melancholic treat, where vapours of pleasure rise from the existential mire into pure prosaic bliss.

13. Marie Redonnet — Rose Mellie Rose

The final little slip in Redonnet’s triptych doesn’t have the same lyrical melancholy as its predecessors (perhaps, in part to the series being written in little over six months), but retains the fabulist magic and surreal antics that made the other two so charming and unique. The improvisation is more apparent in this one, and doesn’t suggest as much structural wizardry behind the pages. This edition has an illuminating (and somewhat arrogant) essay by the author explaining her intention to fight her way free of poetic/authorial influence. I heartily recommend Redonnet to readers of the French novel post-Grillet and post-Oulipo.

14. Milan Kundera — The Unbearable Lightness of Being

A good Europop lit-fic offering—a bit outmoded now, like Snap! or 2Unlimited. But still compelling fodder for philosophising undergrads with higher aspirations than erotic encounters with their right hands. The narrator is droll, sardonic, wise, and almost unbearably smug. In fact, I thought about using the line The Unbearable Smugness of Being but I decided not to because . . . drat! Also: I have vivid memories of the film version, where Juliette Binoche’s underpants ride up her crack in a most pleasing manner for the teenage male viewer. I’m sure when Kundera wrote this novel he wanted his expansive intellectual vision reduced to reminiscences of cinematic titillation. I’m sure he’d appreciate this review’s emphasis on tawdriness over complex discourse on Czech politics. I’m sure. So: this hasn’t become a favourite. It was solid intelligent lit-fic: repetitious in places, ambitious in structure, scattershot in plot. I tripped up over the amount of quotable lines and overlooked the endless use of the catchphrase Es muss sein! I didn’t say anything when the Tomas plot turned into Confessions of a Window Cleaner. I even cut Tereza some slack for being a self-loathing dormouse, and the other characters adulterous imbeciles who intellectualise their childish behaviour and hopscotch across Europe at the first sign of trouble. I think art and adultery make for entertaining bedfellows. If someone fellates you at the opera, is that somehow less damaging than getting fellated in a motel? Kundera doesn’t address this question exactly, but it would make for a good final book. He’s 82 now. Somehow, that makes this review seem even more disrespectful. I’ll pull the plug.

15. Voltaire — Candide, or Optimism

A re-read from undergraduate days. I wasn’t quite as amused the second time around: the shambolic charm seems to have worn off and I found the freewheeling structural chaos more vexing. I’m a spoiled bourgeois used to precision engineering in my novels. Having said that, Candide is more about the quotable lines and shining philosophical maxims littered among the dismembered torsos. But: the text requires a boatload of explanatory notes, which engulf the chapters themselves, lending a glaze of dullness to the reading experience. So, what to do? Voltaire is such a fascinating figure, plump with wisdom, I would pick out a biography and lick up the pages instead. Give me a minute and I’ll find one. OK, how about this one: The Age of Voltaire?

16. Jáchym Topol — City Sister Silver

An enormous hypocaust of a novel. A sprawling epic both exhilarating and insufferable. Split into three sections (see title), this Egon Hostovský Prize-winner uses a freeform poetic style—fractured dreamlike clauses caught in large cumulonimbus paragraphs—blending narration with dialogue, breaking down all linear time and plot into a continuous “pressent” narrative. We weave in and out of scenes with no distinction between reality, fantasy or dreams, scarcely aware of what is “happening” but oddly mesmerised by the violent, postapocalyptic imagery and stark street dialect. The easiest comparison point is A Clockwork Orange, which the novel references and plunders, especially in the early scenes of gang violence and oblique, frightening nihilism. On a language level, Topol is a poet, so it’s all about the ripples of language as they move through large paragraphs flooded with ellipses and phonetic dialect (rendered here in American gangspeak), with occasional respite in zippier dialogue exchanges. The most notable ‘plot point’ is the narrator Potok’s apparent love for his sister Černá (not his literal sister, though that’s also unclear), which dominates the latter half of Sister and beyond.

The most notable scene occurs when Potok and his cronies find themselves in Auschwitz sifting through the bones of the murdered. The dialogue that ensues with a talking skeleton is one of the most macabre, blackly comic scenes to be found in any novel since Ralph Cusack’s Cadenza, and as such pushes Topol into his own league of mad inscrutable weirdness. It would seem City Sister Silver—written during the Velvet Revolution, when Stalinism became Capitalism—aims for a panoramic sweep of postwar East European history, using fantastical and improvisatory techniques to capture the mood of a generation. Whether this succeeds, who can say? The last two hundred pages are an exercise in endurance and patience, the style having exhausted itself and peaked in earlier chapters. And translation-wise, the American gangspeak often clunks beside the Czech names and references. Hats off, however, to Alex Zucker for translating the untranslatable. For the reader I recommend dipping in and out, taking scenes and chapters in any order, manipulating the novel’s form for a more satisfying reading experience.

17. Ishmael Reed — Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down

A Wild West satire predating Blazing Saddles—almost as funny, twice as anarchic. Written in a series of stand-alone paragraph fragments, Reed sends up the genre’s clichés, taking a broader pop at American politics and race relations circa 1968. The proceedings are surreal and outré: from scandalous subversions of Western myths and characters to sudden appearances of presidents and popes. (And questionable sexual politics). I’m sure I missed most of the novel’s references and subtleties, but I had a rootin’ tootin’ darn good two hours all the same. Along similar lines, Gilbert Sorrentino’s Gold Fools.

18. Ali Smith — The Whole Story & Other Stories

It’s official. I am not as smitten with Ali Smith the story writer as I am with Ali Smith the novelist. Isn’t that usually the case? It’s either one or the other with writers. Could Barthelme write a decent novel to save himself? Nah. (Don’t link me to The King. Puh-leaze). Could Barth write a short story to save either himself or Mrs Barth? Nah. What about Martin Amis’s short pieces? Oh please! So it goes. There are stories in here I adored, most notably ‘The Universal Story’ which toggles narrative positions like a prized platespinner, and ‘Erosive’ which confronts the notion of structure: can a story ever, truly, finally, really, properly end? The central beef I have with her stories is their oblique, wraithlike narrators, their recourse to the second person, their uncertain “poeticising” of the quotidian. But Ali is the best novelist writing in Scotland today, so don’t take my criticism with anything less than a keg of salt.

19. Geoff Dyer — Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D.H. Lawrence

This entertaining look at authorial and general angst—fast becoming a sleeper hit on Goodreads—almost meets the hype, minus the actual parts about D.H. Lawrence, who is as pleasant to read as F.R. Leavis’s Guide to Dysentery. The narrator, unnamed, but accepted as Dyer himself, stumbles through his charmed life fretting about the best European paradise in which to write his sober academic study, the hilarity escalating as his Lawrencian angst takes over. Dyer’s apparent wealth sets up him up as a figure of fun until the more probing parts about his past take over, when he assumes an air of Roquentin. Clearly, however, Dyer isn’t a writer paralysed by inaction (see his books page), but for the duration, I was fooled. The US edition changes the subtitle to Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence—to make it seem less like a sober academic study?

20. The Review of Contemporary Fiction: Summer 2011: Gilbert Sorrentino and Mulligan Stew

I have hit the Sorrentino MOTHERLODE with my first RCF subscription. First last season’s Failure Issue, featuring selected bitchery from the Dalkey correspondence archives, now this complete issue devoted to Gilbert and his comic masterwork Mulligan Stew. Sadly, I slurped it up like a coke-addled groupie, and now the Sorrentino comedown must begin. The issue features a range of scholarly essays on MS—perspectives on the aesthetics of failure and its hidden politics, along with a look at the text’s use of boredom and satire in the masque play Flawless Play Restored. Peter Blegvad has contributed a series of glorious illustrations to compliment the pieces, and has added his own art poem “The Sweet of Love” to the issue. Jonathan Lethem pops up with a short article on Sorrentino’s indispensable avant-garde bible, Something Said. Notable also are the pieces by Ammiel Alcalay and Gerald Howard’s tour of his Brooklyn neighbourhood. If you haven’t read Mulligan Stew yet, and you’re nearing death, please do so instantly. FABULOUS issue.

Denise Mina, Fragmented Narratives & Packaged Sandwiches

2011-11-28T15:32:00.000-08:00

Denise Mina

I saw Denise Mina lecturing in the Anatomy Theatre on Glasgow campus last Thursday. OK, not lecturing. Talking. I saw Denise talking in the Anatomy Theatre. It’s a marvellous shrine to the body, with dismembered limbs lit up like art exhibits, femurs in formaldehyde, the whole caboodle. Denise was talking about her crime fiction and how the best material is found in the newspapers, gossip and buying coppers a dram or two.

I couldn’t quite link her writing process to my own . . . she writes tightly plotted genre novels, I go in for more inscrutable narrative stuntpilotry that never takes off into the stratosphere. It was interesting to hear how much she improvises to give the prose a freshness and inner tension, to generate the unexpected twists that keep her novels entertaining. Apart from that, mostly gas about her TV adaptation and strong female characters.

Fragmented Narratives

It’s official. I love fragmentation. I love narratives cobbled together from little flash paragraphs, weaving three or four stories together to create a striking overall product. Like David Markson. It’s this approach I’m taking for the second half of my novel. And, coincidentally, it’s this approach I’ve taken for my latest published story, A Disquisition on the Centrality of Sandwiches in Corporate Britain, up now at Eyeshot. Er . . . goodnight!

A Capital Offence

2011-11-24T16:15:00.001-08:00

Are you like me in that when you’re NOT writing you’re anxious about READING and when you’re NOT reading you’re anxious about WRITING? Or when you’re neither reading NOR writing you’re anxious about either reading or writing or SUBMITTING to magazines or NETWORKING or looking for OPPORTUNITIES? Or when you’re writing you’re so DESPERATE to stop and do anything else, you’re anxious about not paying SURGICAL MICRO-ATTENTION to the text? Or when you’re writing you’re anxious about the NO POUNDS in your bank account and want to get a PROPER JOB that pays ACTUAL MONEY? Or when you’re looking for a job, you’d rather SCRATCH YOUR OWN EYES OUT than work when writing is all you want to do, despite the fact writing is a HORRIBLE THING and pays no money and no one reads anything you write, even when it’s published, and it’s much easier to UNBLOCK LAVVIES than be the new Joyce? Or do you not have these concerns? I want to be you.

Also. Are you like me in that EVERYTHING YOU WRITE is never as good as what came before, and what is written today is STEAMING SHITE compared to yesterday’s shite which today looks like GOLDEN DODO PELLETS? Do you stare at your words hoping they might magic themselves into GOREGOUS IMAGERY, beautiful prose, dazzling language, all that SHIT IN BOOK REVIEWS? Do you want to KILL ALL THOSE FANNIES who write one book with an orchard on the cover and get gigs in MA PROGRAMS, forcing their students to read BOLIVIAN POETRY until their brains burst open? Would you rather stick an axe in your head than write another story NO ONE READS? Do you worry endlessly about how your style is EVOLVING and how you are evolving even though you have no idea what this actually MEANS since no one reads your work, or the people who do read it have no time to ANALYSE THE MINUTIAE of your work to map out an EVOLUTIONARY PATTERN? Do you? Then you might be me. Or prone to exaggeration.

My Funeral

2011-11-17T10:01:00.001-08:00

If I were to drop dead tomorrow, or anytime in the next five years, here’s my funeral plan:

A deadpan German gentleman steps up to the pulpit. He reads selected excerpts from Voltaire, Camus, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky for twenty minutes in English in his deep basso voice. The audience applaud.

A PowerPoint presentation, announced by the comedian Simon Evans, compiling the various misadventures of my life in a series of slides: photos, animations, drawings. Beginning with my persistent bawling as a baby, through my days as a blonde preschooler, to my athletic early childhood, my days as a teenage depressive and onto university and my final role as a cashless artist. Includes scathing remarks about my character with special attention to my inability to adapt to change or assimilate into new groups.

Some music as my coffin is carried down the aisle. Something classical to preserve my dignity, perhaps a light acoustic instrumental.

The priest, played by Alan Arkin, delivers a heartfelt tribute to my qualities as a wit, writer and raconteur. He then quips that he mixed up eulogies and says I was nowhere near as good as the other geezer! The audience laughs heartily: they have to agree, really.

A four-hour bellydancing extravaganza!

My coffin is then carried, by one small boy, to the graveyard. The German gentleman reads selected passages from Beckett, with emphasis on Malone Dies, in the gravest tones. No one is allowed to leave or sit during the readings. My grave is then filled in with sweeties.

Light refreshments from a nearby lemonade stand. Lemonades cost £2 each—all money goes to the vendor for his hard work. As people leave the church, the sound of me bawling as a baby is played over enormous speakers, serving as a fitting epitaph for my entire life.

Leninists

2011-11-13T17:04:00.000-08:00

Rickshaw brothers swoop
from tree to tree
in pursuit of an answer.

Humble loveless urchins
cowered in paddock
weeping into their borscht.

No hope in Cossack wife
she drowned the burden
when the moon surrendered.

Sorrowful shot man
minced sons for the
dignity of discipline.

Nonanononowrinomo

2011-11-09T08:45:00.001-08:00

See, if everyone in the world tries their hand at writing novels, this unbalances the competition levels. What if these people unearth some raw writing talent and score bestsellers with the minimum of effort, while life-long grafters sweat out their twelfth debut, beating off the taxman with a shorn-down pencil? It isn’t likely, granted. What’s more likely is they’ll write a sprawling unfocused mess, one tenth of which is reasonably written. Still. Do we want to encourage untapped talent when there’s already too much to go around?

No other professions have nanomos. What about learning how to use ASCII programming to decode old computer files? Nanoasciipomo? Or how to fix a broken carburettor on the 1950s Buick 6? Nanobufixmo? Why do people think all novel-writing requires is being present at the computer enough to clack out 50000 words? (Which isn’t a novel, anyway, that’s technically a novella. 75000 plus is a novel).

See, the problem with speed-writing for me is the misleading excitement. It feels good to get all those words out, to loose those ideas on the page and get caught up in the fun of writing off the cuff. But at some point, the writing slips into stylistic repetition, flailing form, shambolic structural disaster. All the worst parts of one’s writing tend to pronounce themselves again and again. And since there’s no time to sit and consider solving these problems, the only option is to soldier on making the same mistakes for a whole MS.

Then again, this isn’t universal. Some might plan their work to the letter and use the month to knock out a formidable first draft, using the community as a support bolster. But it pains me to think of all those useless manuscripts festering in drawers condemned to a life of Stendhalian half-finishedness, when with a little more nurturing they could sing like canaries.

My Graduation, or The Missing Cufflinks Débâcle

2011-11-04T09:20:00.000-07:00

05:55 Wake up. Or, more accurately, emerge from a day-long anxiety trance and stumble into a shirt and tie.

06:15 Notice my shirt is missing one crucial element: buttons or cufflinks. With no time to find said items, I sellotape my shirt cuffs together with Rymans’ finest 99p tape. Leave tape behind.

06:27 Head to the subway, dragging my girlfriend Laura with my right arm while she attempts to decrease my walking speed from panicky haste to standard urban saunter.

06:35 Arrive on subway platform to find a fault on the outer circle line before the first train engine has even been turned on. Clench my toes, grit my teeth, and hurl obscenities at invisible engineers.

06:50 Get on train. Look at watch nine hundred times.

07:05 Drag Laura towards bus station. Note the disproportion in our leg sizes and get blasted for being too tall. Have a brief argumental blow-up on Buchanan Street before resuming our walk.

07:14 Buy a Mars bar.

07:20 Get on the bus to Edinburgh. Mellow down and resume the anxiety trance. Read an obscure absurdist text that doesn’t help unknot the tension ropes. Eat half the Mars bar.

09:00 Meet my sister Kathleen at Usher Hall. Discuss safety when crossing the road in pairs: if nothing is coming along the small road you intend to cross, but the neighbouring road looks busy, is it all right to cross at red? If others are crossing is this not a sign of safety? Lose argument.

09:03 Go into the wrong door.

09:10 Leave my companions and get robed up.

09:13 Ask my companions to return when I realise the sellotape has not held my cufflinks together. My sister is forced to gobble down her bacon roll while I stand outside like a lemon holding my coat.

09:25 Send my companions off to buy a roll of sellotape.

09:35 Companions return with tape and Laura bites off several strands to keep the shirt sleeves together. I keep the tape in my trouser pocket in case the strands don’t hold for the duration.

10:00 Head inside to graduate with my dangerously talented writing cohorts.

11:43 Graduate. (See picture). Hold cuffs up to prevent the tape snapping off while shaking the chancellor’s hand. (See picture).

12:30 Dick around in the corridors getting squashed and jostled and shunted. Make a choice and ditch the robes. Meet someone who has graduated with a degree in television. We voice our disgust at not receiving a red cylinder with our degree certificates before departing forever.

12: 45 Get out of there. Get on a bus to Craighouse campus.

13:05 Ditch the shirt and tie on the top deck for a fetching black T-shirt ensemble.

13:15 Arrive at the ceremony. Drink two glasses of orange, nudge through the sea of parents and unknowns, endure boredom. Eat a few salmon and prawn canapés and one that looks like a squid eye.

13:45 Fail to spot most of my co-students, then ditch the scene. Discover a squished Mars bar in my coat pocket lining.

14:00 Sit on a bench. Walk around the campus one last time. Close the book with tearful farewells.

Ten Reasons We Ignore Long Blog Posts

2011-11-03T09:29:00.000-07:00

If we met you in a bar, we’d do everything possible to wriggle off your tongue.
Marmite.
We only comment so others comment on our blogs.
Marmite.
Our attention span on the net is so short.
We need bullet points.
And.
Shortness.
So we can get to the end sooner.
That’s why people like flash fiction.
Even though.
Flash fiction is bullshit.
Hemingway?
Don’t quote baby shoes at me, baby.
What if they were simply a pair of unused baby shoes?
I don’t want to believe.
They had a miscarriage.
Or the baby died postpartum.
No.
It was leftover stock.
So shut it, Hemingway.
I hate flash fiction.
Unless it’s good.
Or written by my friends.
Then I love flash fiction.
Where was I?
Long posts.
No one likes.
To.
Read.
Long.
Posts.
But.
This.
Choppy.
Bullet.
Approach.
Is.
Equally.
Annoying.
Marmite.

To Forfar on a Silver Salver

2011-10-31T14:51:00.000-07:00

My boyfriend bought me a new pen. I wrote him the following sentences on a sheet of A4:

David, I love you. I love you, and I love your pen. I love the ink that flows from this pen. I love the ink that flows from you. Darling . . . you are delicious.
I wish we could go far far away, to Forfar. If Forfar is far enough for you, we should go far far to Forfar.
Sometimes I want to cut up my heart and serve you slices on a silver salver. You could eat slivers from the salver, slivers from the silver salver, slivers of my beating heart, beating inside you.

We went to see Robbie Williams that night. Then we went to see Gary Barlow. Then we saw Adele, Rihanna, Kelis, Pink and James Blunt in a rolling revue show. I kissed David so hard I fell down his throat and made a nest in his stomach. Inside, I ate some leftover chicken madras and peas from last night’s dinner. I love David!

Some say love is a difficult word to say. I say it to David four times a second. I creep up behind him, leap onto his shoulders and shout: “I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, darling David!” Relationships fail because not enough people buy their lovers pens and scream in their faces how much love is bursting inside their love-stuffed hearts.

David, David, David, David—love is all we need! Let me write another sentence for you, in loving italics:

When I was a little boy, I was afraid of the boogie man. I later learned the boogie man was only my uncle, and all he wanted was my ass for the night. As I obliged Uncle Boogie, I thought about this little kid I knew, only two years old. His father beat him every night and sent him down the pit nine hours a day, shovelling coal in the scorching heat. I looked deep into that boy’s eyes, and all I saw was fear and misery. When the boy turned four, he stabbed his father in the face and took over the house. I thought: what a positive message! What if we all went around stabbing evil people in the face?! Wouldn’t that make the world such a happier, lovelier place? I thought of your mother, David, the old witch blocking our love, and I stabbed her, David, I stabbed her in the neck, because she put up a fight and I couldn’t get her in the face. But happiness is ours, David! At last we can live in our house of endless love (if your dad helps bury the body).

My Month in Novels (Oct)

2011-10-30T12:31:00.001-07:00

1. Ali Smith — There but for the

The title refers to the first word in a significant phrase deployed in each section of the novel. For example, in the first part ‘There I was’ is used when the character Anna is speaking to someone about journalism (which can be summed up in six words: I was there, there I was), and later ‘The fact is’ is used by precocious child Brooke for her little book of facts. These words and their significance within the narrative allude to the book’s questions of representation and presentation, both in a literary sense, and in broader notions of reality.

The novel’s four strands revolve around an opaque stranger named Miles who attends a dinner party and locks himself inside his host’s spare room, thenceforth refusing to budge. The reasons behind Miles’s motivation are never made clear, and the event is merely a pull for the four protagonists, each rendered in a breathtaking close third-person style that demonstrates the truly balletic skill Smith has with language. At the heart of this book—and it seems a lot of her work—is a fascination with storytelling itself and how language distorts and enriches our understanding of life in equal measures, and how baffling and wonderful words can be, whether their meanings are monstrous or delightful.

The novel plays elaborate games with chronology in frequent bracketed sections (the structural design of which eludes me) but There but for the is another lovingly designed work of art, bordering on masterpiece, from my newly crowned Favourite Ever Scottish Writer.

2. Ali Smith — Hotel World

Another astonishing piece of work from Ms. Smith. Is there anything this writer can’t do? I have domestic duties and a rumbling stomach at present, so this review might be brief, and gushing. But here goes.

I love Ali Smith. I love Ali Smith because she moves me, and being a man, I’m not supposed to be moved by books. I’m supposed to be stirred by the raging masculinity of men in battle: the sound of gunfire in the crisp Vienna air as heads rain down upon the blood-soaked streets. But no. This pink-covered novel moved me to bits, and I am proud of the fact.

Split into six sections marked by a separate tense, Hotel World uses a corporate hotel and the accidental death of Sara Wilby as a pull for its five characters, establishing a style and structure used in her later novels The Accidental and There but for the. Each section varies in rhythm, style and narrative position, opening with Sara’s ghost conversing with her corpse to get the scoop on her death. Crouching in a dumbwaiter (a lift shaft for tea trolleys), Sara plummeted to a horrible death aged twenty.

Entangled in this tale is the predicament of homeless woman Else who plots to steal money from Sara’s sister Clare, crouched outside the hotel in a state of incoherent grief. She is invited in by Lisa (third character who later is stricken with a debilitating disease) and then hounded by the unpleasant Penny (fourth character: a journo seeking a scoop in Else). Each section immerses the reader deeply in these characters’ worlds, each drawn to this grim hotel with their own motives, problems, tenuous links to life.

Most staggering of all, however, is the internal monologue from Clare, a stream-of-consciousness outpouring and the most bone-shudderingly effective representation of grief I have read. The moment the mist clears and we realise Clare is throwing objects down the hotel’s dumbwaiter to determine the duration of her sister’s fall, our hearts break like Sara’s brittle bones.

Outrageously good. Books are rarely as skilful nowadays. Smith is a singular talent.

3. Ali Smith — Girl Meets Boy

Another day, another terrific novel from Ali Smith. I have resolved to gobble up her canon in the most heroic time possible, like an overweight man backing a lorryload of curries and waffles into his ecstatic gob. In Glasgow we have a meal called the Everything & More, which is enough food for an entire Ethiopian village in a bucket. Battered.

This delightful story frames the myth of Iphis (woman disguises her daughter as a man, daughter turns into a man later on) within a tale of sexual identity and social injustice in contemporary Inverness. Flicking between sisters Imogen and Anthea, Imogen is a young go-getting business type working for Pure Water while Anthea is her younger sister who falls in love with the mannish girl Robin.

In no time at all, Anthea is spray-painting Inverness with radical slogans and Imogen is learning about the darker side of global commerce (as if there’s a light side). Imogen’s sections use internal monologue and more parentheses than is healthy in one novel, while Anthea’s sections are in more straightforward first-person. This is certainly a lighter work from Smith, despite the polemic at the heart of the text, but it’s still better than you, me, them and us.

4. Ali Smith — Like

Like is the blossoming talent of Ali Smith splurged into one long rambling debut novel. This is a novel from a writer who doesn’t hold out much hope of writing a second. Over three decades’ worth of glorious descriptions and metaphors and ornate language festoon this funsize monster, nothing like her subsequent novels in the slightest.

Split into two parts, the first concerns Amy, a former scholastic prodigy who, despite being a lesbian, has a child, and despite being a scholar, has forgotten how to read. The second concerns Aisling (Ash) who lives in Inverness and spends all her energy pursuing the student Amy, whose hauteur and priggishness she finds irresistible.

The language is the most compelling facet of the story, as these aren’t characters we are set up to “like”—in fact, they are selfish and often unbearable people—but Smith is a hypnotic and tireless writer, and pulls the reader into her strange, semi-autobiographical tale like a pro. Certainly not one for those new to Smith, but putty for the fan.

5. Ali Smith — The First Person & Other Stories

A ragbag of tales here, ranging from the directly emotional (‘True Short Story’ and the title piece), to the intellectually playful (‘Fidelio and Bess’ and ‘Astute Fiery Luxurious’) to the downright hilarious and strange (‘The Child’ and ‘No Exit’). When I first read Ali Smith I was unimpressed (hence my two-rating of Other Stories) and narked at her constant inclusion of the reader as a character—most of the first-person stories replace a character name with ‘you,’ which I found a contrived ploy at times, then quite repetitive. This technique is still present here, but its purpose is a little clearer, more intimate. Plus I have built up a resistance to it, having read the previous collection.

Smith’s shorts are the opposite of her novels: stripped-down language, conversational, loose syntax, a lazy feel. Clearly these are mere deceptions, for deeper down her work subverts old story forms and has a more postmodern aesthetic, and moments of warmth and radiance rise from the page regardless of how many cockamamie dialogues we’re being drawn into. Still: I can’t help the feeling I won’t fully embrace her shorts as I did her novels. Here’s hoping.

6. Ali Smith — Free Love & Other Stories

OK, the Ali Smith marathon is over. Please mop up your drool, pull up your pants, and sod off home. It's been real. This book is her first story collection, a little more straightforwardly literary than her other works. Most of the stories here are excellent, others found me yawning and itchy. But I have been reading A LOT. And most of that has been Ali Smith. My bum (and head) hurts.

7. André Gide — The Immoralist

My foray into Frenchies continues with this peculiar, off-the-scale subtle novel about forbidden pleasures. The pleasures in question are young lads and loosing one’s morals. Michel starts out as a bedridden lump, unsure about his wife but sure about young Tunisian visitors. As his health improves, he tends to his vast acreage of land and resumes his academic work, growing fonder of his doormat missus, as well as power and cheating farmers. As we slump towards the final third, his wife becomes the bedridden lump and he sneaks out for illicit pleasures as she degenerates. Sometimes he feels guilty, but mostly he’s haughty and prone to exclamatory remarks. Odd. Queer. I liked it.

8. François Mauriac — The Knot of Vipers

An embittered old turd writes a mad, furious letter to his wife, whom he hates with a vengeance, which becomes a lengthier journal to his family, whom he hates with an even bigger vengeance. Because he hates them so darned much, he spends his every waking hour planning to diddle them out their inheritance, while they fret about how much their Grandpa hates them and is planning to diddle them out their inheritance. At certain rare moments, the Grandpa takes a break from his hatred and tries out affection and tenderness, but then goes back to pure spitefulness until the last twenty pages, when he almost repents before dropping dead at his desk. Well . . . at least the title is an absolute blinder.

My edition had handwritten notes inside, where the user underlined words he or she didn’t know. For extra likes, who can tell me the meaning of (no cheating): jejune, daguerreotype, heliotrope, evanescent, bier, filial

9. Madame de LaFayette — The Princesse de Clèves

A little too far back into French literary history for me. This is one of the earliest French “novels,” inasmuch as it tells historical events with inaccuracies. These inaccuracies form the “fiction” part of what is ostensibly an historical account of events at court over a century earlier. Madame de LaFayette might not even be the author/chronicler of this tale! What intrigue! What potential for interpretation! The prose is what one might call “prehensile” and the story what one might call “shit.” Kidding. I hate pouring scorn over influential works. This is best left to students of French literature and other trainspotters. Bonus features include The Comtesse de Tende, The Princesse de Montpensier, and outtakes from M. de Nemours’s zany final speech.

10. Jacques Jouet — Mountain R

Oulipo with teeth. Part of Jouet’s la République roman series—a series unavailable in English, though two other Jouet books are out from Dalkey—this is an inventive satire of a corrupt Republican who elects to erect a public mountain for his own delusional purposes. Recent parallels in UK politics include Boris Johnson’s proposed “Tower of Boris” for the 2012 Olympics, and Edinburgh council spending £8m on a tram system.

Insert your country’s insane fund-spunking here. The novel is told from three POVs in a ‘before-during-after’ structure, and the cosy satire gives way into something more sinister, inverting our opinion of these funny, strange characters. Clever, Swiftian and swift.

11. Émile Zola — The Drinking Den

Whenever I think I had a rough upbringing I read a book like this and realise I am a fluffed little pillow of good fortune. I was raised in a council tenement in a backwater semi-village in Central Scotland amid a backdrop of Protestant activism and spinster gossiping. But compared to Zola’s Paris in L’Assommoir, I was mollycoddled in a warm nook of familial love and warmth.

So: Gervaise is hardworking laundress whose life is blown to smithereens by rotten good-for-nothing beer-sodden bastard men. Men are responsible for taking her life and flushing it down the sad Parisian cludgie, along with a family of unfeeling guttersnipe witches who make you want to pound their faces in with soldering irons. Oh, poor Gervaise!

Zola’s style pioneers the close third-person, later taken to blistering heights of anal acuity in Joyce’s ‘The Dead.’ The translator Robin Buss strikes a good balance between modern slang while retaining a sense of the original French dialect and mode of speech. To translate a book that uses archaic working-class slang and keep it both authentic and readable is no mean feat. So forgive little slips like ‘getting laid’ that creep in there.

I haven’t been as stupefied by a work of hysterical genius since the hectoring morality of Tolstoy’s Resurrection or the brutal sadism of Hubert Selby’s ‘Tralala.’ Think twice about that extra beer before bed.

12. Honoré de Balzac — Eugénie Grandet

A heartclenching pain-turner of a classic, a perfect manifesto for choosing love over money. The French do desolation and hopelessness so well! Must be the heat. In certain respects, Eugénie gets off lightly. She steals a kiss with her cousin before her bastard father packs him off to the Indies to get rich off slave plantations, and stays a virgin her whole life for that one moment of stolen love. Nowadays, anyone marrying their cousin would be hounded out the hamlet, Daily Mails flung at their backs, ruined forever in their hometowns. The relationship would buckle under the weight of this shame, and the couple would fall apart, doomed to shoot smack in tower blocks to numb the pain. Having said that, I have been sleeping with my sister on and off since I was thirteen, and no one’s ever ostracised me. Huh! Strange world! The novel is excellent, though takes thirty-odd pages to properly kick into gear.

13. Théophile Gautier — Mademoiselle de Maupin

More people should know about this pioneering feminist lovestruck poetical drivelling masterpiece. Your plot antics are bare: a poet looking for his perfect Venus encounters hurdles in his search, finding no luck in the pink-cheeked Rosette whom he diddles for five months out of kindness. When he claps eyes on the girlish man Theodore (who happens to be a woman, but ssshhh) he finds his Venus par excellence and goes stark raving mad like all melodramatic romantic poets who want to mainline beauty into their veins. Theodore is a woman kicking against the limitations of her gender, outclassing all the men with her horsing and fencing prowess, beating off Rosette who also topples arse-over-head-over-elbows in love with her. But this novel is not about the banalities of upper-class debauchery, it’s about the excess. The irresistible ravings of this eloquent romantic, his glorious tracts on beauty, love and the sensual world. This novel is like caressing the buttocks of a Greek odalisque while having wine skooshed into one’s parched throat. It is a sublime, delicious concoction and so pulsatingly erotic, the pages throb in one’s palms like the quivering want of a girded loin before the fast release of orgasm. Find it.

14. Jacques Roubaud — The Princess Hoppy or The Tale of the Labrador

For such a gifted mathematician, linguist, historian and poet, Jacques Roubaud is a cute wee daftie. This novel delights in wordplay, maths problems, storytelling tropes, subverting the reader-writer relationship with callisthenic nonsense prose whose games and riddles are either deeply imbedded, or one great confidence trick. Mr Roubaud is an accomplished prose-poet and Oulipo legend whose Hortense novels might pigeonhole him as a postmodern prankster. But his genius runs deeper. See, for instance, his latest book, Mathématique.

15. Gustave Flaubert — A Sentimental Education

An exhausting thrill-ride through the zany world of womanising socialite Frédéric, or—for the first 300 pages, at least—wannabe womanising socialite Frédéric. Because Frédéric can’t make it happen with his mate Arnoux’s missus, nor his mate Arnoux’s mistress, and this frustration is the bane of his existence as he falls in and out of money, society and love. Against the backdrop of the 1848 Paris uprising this novel heaves with ornate descriptive grandeur, political commentary and violence, a frenetic comic energy, and more love triangles than the HMS Hefner in Bermuda. A classic that delights, frustrates, amuses and teases in equal measure—what more could you ask for? Sex? Well, there’s no sex. You have sex on the brain, you do. Take a cold shower.

16. Warren F. Motte — Fables of the Novel: French Fiction Since 1990

Ten academic essays on contemporary French fiction, grouped together through their formal hijinks and language games, and how each text constitutes a “fable” of the novel form. Among the books in English translation are Onitsha by J.M.G. Clézio, The Crab Nebula by Eric Chevillard, Slander by Linda Lê, Mountain R by Jacques Jouet, Television by Jean-Phillipe Toussaint, and The Lecture by Lydie Salvayre. Other books from the four remaining writers are available too, those writers being Eric Laurrent, Marie NDiaye, Jean Echenoz and Christian Osler. The essays are lively and light on academic verbiage, but the book feels less like a unified manifesto, more a series of separate papers from journals tied together with this “fable” connection, which didn’t convince me!

17. Jacques Roubaud — Hortense in Exile

More cartwheeling absurdism from Oulipo’s lesser-known genius. Hortense is back and so are her breasts, buttocks, and her watchful cat Alexandre Vladimirovitch. In the previous novel she married Prince Gormanskoï or some other irrelevant plot detail, and here she finds herself caught up in a production of Hatmel as her honour is threatened by the clone Whortense. As ever, wordplay, digression, authorial intrusion, lunatic antics of a nonsense nature and high-wire Oulipo games are all served on a platter of complete mayhem. At times the technique does feel like breaking out the postmodern bag o’ tricks—there’s nothing here we couldn’t find in Queneau, Share, O’Brien or Sorrentino—and novel-long absurdism only stretches so far. Still: Jacques has some more “serious” books in English translation, among them the exquisite poem-photo montage Some Thing Black, and these novels are a testament to the comic spirit of the French avant-garde. Delightful.

18. Geoff Dyer — Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It

Geoff takes various shirts, various drugs, and various girls, to various locations around the world, intellectualising as he goes, sometimes having impish larks along the way, sometimes having nervous breakdowns, sometimes having sex with black women. At first, I was amused at this bourgeois intellect mincing around like a Club 18-30 member, then I found his antics a little drab, indulgent and flâneurish. At first his laid-back prose reads like a treat, but lapses at midpoint into a meandering and pedestrian snooze. I think the essays could use more thematic focus, and less obsessive personal detail, quite a whack of which paints Geoff as a tosspot. But all in all . . . a nice airport read.

19. Émile Zola — Germinal

This novel is about as grim and horrendous as literature gets. Instead of ranting about the history of human suffering at various pitches of bowel-plopping rage, let me take a more facetious route. Let me instead discuss various mining experiences lived out on the Sega Mega Drive. Remember Mega Bomberman? Those who do will remember the mine level.

This level was pivotal in the game, since here a remote-controlled power-up was available which was crucial for facing down the final boss, whose beardy metamorphoses proved impossible without both a back-up life and a self-detonator. The problem was using the detonator hastily, as an ill-timed whack of the C button would invariably blow up the hero, who had a hard enough time dodging bombs. The mining level itself involved negotiating the terrain on a little blue cart and threats from crazed red baddies, stumbling around the scorching hellhole with startled eyes, running into bombs like kamikaze hearts.

Then there was Lava Reef Zone, on Sonic & Knuckles. The presence of fire and darkness usually indicated the impending doom of Robotnik and his enormous egg-shaped earth-conquering moustachiopod. Since the introduction of fire-proof TVs, leaping onto scorching lava wasn’t a great concern for Sonic. This level involved spinning down into an underground mine, where giant crushers and ledges threatened his pretty blue head.

And there was Scrap Brain Zone. A factory filled with trap-flaps, flame pipes and crushers, its backdrop a bleak brown silhouette of chimneys and skyscrapers. The foes being caterpillars who died by careful bops to the head and little bomb-men in metal helmets who blew up when you ran past. The challenges were all mechanical—spinning ledges, squishing ledges, vanishing ledges. A holy wine cup with black grapes shooting electricity from both sides, razors looming over sluggish conveyor belts. Some of the most terrifying moments of my childhood happened on this level. Fact.

But about Germinal? Imagine the amount of times Sonic gets crushed by gamers the world over, then transfer that to human lives, and you have the sorry state of 1800s French mining. For more info read my forthcoming book Zola the Hedgehog: When Rocks Fall on Top of People.

20. Marguerite Duras — Moderato Cantabile

A slim, seductive novel, sort of a nouveau roman version of Brief Encounter. Anne Desbaresdes meets Chauvin after a shooting heard at her son’s piano lesson, where she sits in with the haughty Mademoiselle Giraud, urging her stubborn son to play a Diabelli sontana moderato cantabile (moderately and singingly). We later learn Anne is a drunk and is desperately in love with Chauvin, but nothing is ever said—only the poetic, slippery prose helps make the subtext clear, and the ending quietly heartbreaking. The wiki page on this book is oddly detailed.

21. Propser Mérimée — A Slight Misunderstanding

At first, swept up in the author’s charming and sardonic style, this seemed a promising short in the Gautierian mould, before lapsing into melodrama and a typically hysterical ending. The author is best known for the short story Carmen, based on the highly successful opera and TV series starring Julie Delpy as a mushroom.

Book of the Month: Ali Smith — There but for the

A Series of Unfocused Paragraphs on the Problem of Bastard Readers

2011-10-27T04:37:00.000-07:00

Let’s forgive our readers. Forgive them deeply, in the most pious Christian sense of the word. They put up with so much venal wicked bastardy from us these days. Frankly, they’re saints. But beware, because they’re also watching us closely, meat cleavers in hand.

Because we’re desperate. We’re desperate to push the boundaries, take it to the edge, get way out there, touch with our ice-cold fingers the tips of the ORIGINAL. So we write and write, read and read, sucking up as much “daring new” fiction as possible before we retire at our blank screens, hitting whatever keys our fingers land on. We call this “writing.”

And we’re struggling. Writers still cling to their grand old notions: Franzenean epics placing the reader right at the moral heart of our nation, wrestling with our collective struggle as people. Nonsense. In a world that caters to the individual—we who are the most unique cogs in this collective of individuals—does a book have the right to represent a people? Because now, we’re so choosy, we simply will not tolerate a book that does not speak to us, directly, us, INSERT NAME HERE. We are not a people anymore, we are a person. We are me, me, and not forgetting me! We pick up our books, open them and hear: “Hello, Tim! How are you? You’ll love this for the first forty pages, then find the middle part a little meh, then leave it on your desk for two months.”

So let’s cut to the chase. What do you WANT? Reader? Come on! What? You don’t know? You have too much choice, you’re scared? You want someone to choose for you? You want believable characters, gripping plots, happy endings? When asked, most readers who aren’t writers, i.e. the people who don’t read us, crave these things like food.

This positions us, writers on the margins, in the shadowy wilderness of journals and websites (however formidable and intelligent), in an awkward place. See, we’re never sure who we’re writing for. When we discover a new form (let’s say, for argument’s sake, a new form exists) and we craft a story that embeds its meaning in its design—structure, style, shifts narrative position—where is that elusive reader, that deep close reader we have wet dreams about, who comes to unravel our story for us? Sure, we might pretend we’re writing for the disillusioned, the lonely, the hopeless, but do our audiences even exist?

I have come to accept, whenever I conduct an experiment with form, I am writing solely for the pleasure of discovery, for my own gratification and amusement, then after this, writers. Sure, I might sneak in a non-writer from time to time, but writers are my core audience. And since so many readers now read Catcher in the Rye, start a blog and write at varying levels of automatic competence, the world is splitting down two lines: those who read and write, and those who don’t.

So because our audience are writers, this puts avant-garde fiction in pole position. Our readers are one step ahead. They’ve read the writing blogs. They know about split infinitives and framing devices. While we’ve been sitting in our dens, dreaming up intricate labyrinths of complexity, they’ve been reading Stephen King’s On Writing. There’s no room for slackness, because if we drop our game, the reader will rise up and hack us to pieces.

This is a call for experimentation through fear. Smash up the tedious orthodoxies of literary acceptability, because someone is right behind you, waiting to smash up your tedious orthodoxies. There has never been a crazier, scarier time to go absolutely crazy on paper, to do ANYTHING. Take your imagination to the wildest stops imaginable. But please, be clever about it. This brave new world accepts no imitations.

This post originally appeared on this blog, but three days later it was a guest blog at Barge Press, i.e. here.

Reason V. Reader

2011-10-23T11:52:00.001-07:00

Reason: You can’t read that book in one afternoon, there’s like 300 pages with endnotes.

Reader: No, honestly, it’ll only take a few hours.

Reason: See, that didn’t take a few hours.

Reader: It’s only three o’clock in the morning. What’s next?

Reason: Bed.

Reader: What about that new Jacques Roubaud?

Reason: You do realise a book addiction can only lead to ruin? It’s the most time-consuming antisocial addiction imaginable. It’s worse than heroin since you can’t share a book like you can a needle.

Reader: What do you mean "you" can't? And two people can’t delight in the same book?

Reason: No. People read what they like, they don’t like you foisting your reads on them.

Reader: That might be true, but if there aren’t any speedy readers in the world, how do all the books get read?

Reason: You need to prioritise which books to read and which to not. Read.

Reader: But if I don’t read Madame Bovary based on the fact millions of people, for the last century-and-a-half, have read it, I’m missing out on some mighty fine literature, no?

Reason: Yes.

Reader: And I frequently read unknown books to make look smarter and more educateded.

Reason: On your own again.

Reader: Yep. Me and me, we make a good team.

Reason: Uh-huh.

Reader: Look, the alternative is wasting my time watching some dribble on the ewetoobs, or clicking like a madman on the interwebs, or writing a story that goes nowhere. Reading focusizes me.

Reason: How about friends?

Reader: I’m working on that. I’ve moved to Glasgow, I need time. And no, I haven’t joined book groups or anything.

Reason: Too busy reading?

Reader: I hate you.

Reason: And I you.

Reader: Get out.

Reason: . . .

Reader: Good. Now where’s that Jacques Roubaud?