My Month in Books, Part Two (Jan)

17. Alexander Theroux — The Lollipop Trollops & Other Poems

My pledge this year is to read more contemporary poetry. I used to review poetry in online workshops, and the nimiety of lowercase e.e. cummings imitations left me exceedingly depressed. I can’t write poems for toffee (and toffee sellers only accept sestinas as payment) but I believe modern poets should acquaint themselves with as many poetic forms as possible, unafraid to box themselves into the metrical requirements of a sonnet or an englyn. When I tried poems I took arbitrary line breaks based on hunches—I needed the constraints of a good form to see me right. But I didn’t have the patience. Anyway, this collection demonstrates an excellent range of rhyming poems (in the 90s!) and free verse dalliances, tackling the trivial, the peevish and the profound. The man’s a damn fine poet. The writer is an essayist and author of Laura Warholic: The Sexual Intellectual.

18. Alasdair Gray — Collected Verse

Alasdair Gray: artist, muralist, doodler, novelist, short story writer, playwright, teacher, historian, translator . . . AND poet? Is there anything this fat asthmatic Glasgow pedestrian can’t do? As a poet he’s no Hugh MacDiarmid but this collection shows he’s no slouch either. The most impressive poems here are his gloomier, earlier poems about voids and loneliness, they ring the truest of all. Some of the later work is eccentric and doesn’t merit rereading . . . ESPECIALLY the Latin translations which are EXTREMELY DULL! My, I’m abusing the caps lock tonight, for sure. For the completists, this volume contains his separate collections Old Negatives and Sixteen Occasional Poems, as well as all the bits and pieces scattered in art galleries and anthologies throughout his life. Two Ravens Press, based on the isle of Uist, have done a stellar job designing this little hardcover edition. On an unrelated note, this Glasgow band Veronica Falls are fucking brilliant. And goodnight.

19. Kurt Vonnegut — Fates Worse Than Death

This is Vonnegut’s last in the trio of “autobiographical collages,” which is a canny way of presenting various nonfiction materials without having to impose a structure on the book. This is the most shambolic of the three—firstly, Fates Worse Than Death is divided into conventional chapters, so the reader has no contents table to peruse the various speeches Kurt reproduces here from recent public speaking events. And the book is mostly reproduced public speeches, most of which are entertaining and erudite in his typical style, but some of which become tiresome. Imagine sitting through several hours of Vonnegut lecturing. That effect is created here. On the positive side, although he repeats facts about his life from previous books ad nauseam (did you know he worked for General Electric? and was at Dresden?), the commentary on his family is illuminating among the shrubbery of opinion. Not to say the revelation he tried to commit suicide in the 1980s, which is barely discussed and leaves me craving more detail. So yes, absolutely for diehards only. Those wishing to dip a toe into his nonfiction try Palm Sunday.

20. Alasdair Gray — Fleck

Performed at the Edinburgh Book Festival in 2011, with Alasdair Gray as Old Nick, poet Aonghas MacNeacail as God, Will Self as John Fleck, and A.L. Kennedy as May. I missed the performance in August because I am stupid. Also onstage were folk like Liz Lochhead, Ian Rankin and Alan Bissett, so I say again: I am stupid. Reading the play on my lonesome was no consolation for this missed opportunity, although I take some pleasure knowing it isn’t very good. A contemporary version of Goethe’s Faust written in comedic verse? Why does that sound like flogging a horse that decomposed years ago? (Two Ravens Press aren’t to blame: this edition is beautifully designed). The world doesn’t need more modern versions of Faust. We could spend an afternoon naming all the films and books and songs about selling one’s soul to the devil. And we’d fall asleep.

21. Kurt Vonnegut — God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian

For an extremely short period of time in the late nineties, Kurt was “Reporter on the Afterlife” for the WNYC radio station in, presumably, NYC—hence the station’s name. (Columbo in the house!) This extremely short book compiles his ninety-second radio spots, where he met such figures as Dr. Mary D. Ainsworth, Adolf Hitler, Sir Isaac Newton and Isaac Asimov. Following Timequake, these little pieces were, more or less, what Kurt did towards the end of his life—little paragraphs of philosophical apothegms, autobiographical reflection, and consistently sharp social comment, all written with a cutting wit and humanist bent. If there were an online repository for Kurt’s taped interviews, speeches, appearances, etc (on his website would help) these sorts of collections wouldn’t need to exist. But I’m glad it does. And, on this fortunate occasion, you can listen to the original broadcasts here.

22. Kurt Vonnegut — A Man Without a Country

Something of a misnomer, this title: “A Memoir of Life in George W. Bush’s America.” Hmm. No. In fact, Kurt’s final book is another collage of pieces taken from public speeches, and various articles commissioned for the publication In These Times. Michael Silverblatt described this book as a “response to a plea”—that plea coming from the editors of Seven Stories Press, who tickled Vonnegut into writing little chunks again. Any fresh writing from an eighty-three-year-old man is hard to come by, and Kurt recycles passages from previous books, most notably Dr. Kevorkian. But who cares? This collection is deftly edited to give Kurt’s words real power through brevity, and a cadence is established throughout, building to a moving climax. Not bad for a man without a country. The excrement has truly hit the air conditioner. (P.S. Portions of this appear in this excellent speech).

23. Geoffrey Hill — Mercian Hymns

These poems put me in mind of PJ Harvey’s latest, Let England Shake. All soil and toil, fantastic gloom. I nabbed this collection from my girlfriend who knows how to read poems. Ask her, she’s nicer than me, and a talented playwright. Or perhaps you can form your own opinion? Here’s stanza III, part XXII to consider: “Then, in the earthly shelter, warmed by a blue-glassed storm-lantern, I huddled with stories of dragon-tailed airships and warriors who took wing immortal as phantoms.” That sort of thing. Very English!

24. Jacques Roubaud — The Form of a City Changes Faster, Alas, Than the Human Heart

Jacques Roubaud’s most recent collection of poetry explores the streets of Paris, the idle hours spent ambling around this distinctive city, with an emphasis on place names over scenery. Roubaud responds to work from Queneau (the first cycle is a take on his collection Les pauvres gens), Verlaine, Rimbaud and esoteric historical figures. From meditations on death to playful Oulipo antics, wilful obscurity and silly throwaways, this is about as deliciously uplifting a collection as a poor deprived Scot could expect to read. I have a sore throat and stuffed nose right now (a detail you all needed to know), so this is the perfect medicine (that and Glycerine). Read Roubaud, read Roubaud!

25. Émile Zola — The Masterpiece

You have this friend, a writer. He’s written this terrible bildungsroman about his tedious student exploits, I Want Vagina. You tell him tactfully that a 900-page, unspellchecked homage to sexual frustration doesn’t fly in the marketplace. Your friend scurries off and signs up for a Creative Writing MA at Dorset Polytechnic, taught by Vernon D. Burns. He returns, a few months later, with a new 900-page spellchecked homage to sexual frustration, I Want to Squeeze Bosoms. You arrange for him to lose his virginity so his art might progress by dialling a friendly helpline for that purpose (Callgirlz2nite). He returns a year later with a new epic, I Love Sleeping With Whores. His prose abounds in loving descriptions of thighs and calves and thighs, but lacks a greater purpose. A novel needs something more than loving exudations of prozzies to be successful (a few classics notwithstanding). Your friend trundles off. He rents a box room and starts his masterpiece, A Novel With Substance, Truth & Power. You tell him to rethink the title, but he tells you to shut up, he knows what he’s doing. So: skip twelve years, past the four breakdowns, nine marriages, one suicide attempt, to the final draft of his masterpiece. You sit down to read this dense marsh of unreadable prose, despairing at each spontaneous MUMMY that looms from the text (often LOVE ME MUMMY), and watch a sitcom instead. The message? All artists are fucked up. Some are—as they say in the US army—fucked up beyond all recognition.

Uplifting passage, spoken by the character based on Zola:

“From the moment I start a new novel, life’s just one endless torture. The first few chapters may go fairly well and I may feel there’s still a chance to prove my worth, but that feeling soon disappears and every day I feel less and less satisfied. I begin to say the book’s no good, far inferior to my earlier ones, until I’ve wrung torture out of every page, every sentence, every word, and the very commas begin to look excruciatingly ugly. Then, when it’s finished, what a relief! Not the blissful delight of the gentleman who goes into ecstasies over his own production, but the resentful relief of a porter dropping a burden that’s nearly broken his back . . . Then it starts all over again, and it’ll go on starting all over again till it grinds the life out of me, and I shall end my days furious with myself for lacking talent, for not leaving behind a more finished work, a bigger pile of books, and lie on my death-bed filled with awful doubts about the task I’ve done, wondering whether it was as it ought to have been, whether I ought not to have done this or that, expressing my last dying breath the wish that I might do it all over again!” (p259-60)

26. Michel Houellebecq — Whatever

You have this friend who works in IT. He is rendered sick at the torturous formality and bureaucratic inevitability of existence, and slaps you on the face twice before bursting into tears. You phone his friend Tisserand who is unbearably ugly and hits on you twice, for help. You say: “You are so hideous, no woman would go anywhere near you, you disgusting pustule of a man.” Tisserand breaks down in tears but comes back with a brutal salvo: “You women are callous stiff planks who’re only out for yourselves!” Or words to that effect. But your friend who works in IT is looking extremely peaky. He, naturally, has no problem getting laid (despite his own physical shortcomings, i.e. he looks like Michel Houellebecq) but he does seem to be coming down with a bad case of lifesickness. Clearly, traveling around France training people in IT packages is no sound basis for a life. So your friend writes strange animal stories then checks himself into a psych ward. You don’t hear from him for a while, for he is a gone man. A long gone man. (P.S. Worst cover and mistranslated title ever. Original: Extension du domaine de la lutte).

Favourite passage:

“Writing brings scant relief. It retraces, it delimits. It lends a touch of coherence, the idea of a kind of realism. One stumbles around in a cruel fog, but there is the odd pointer. Chaos is no more than a few feet away. A meagre victory, in truth. What a contrast with the absolute, miraculous power of reading! An entire life spent reading would have fulfilled my every desire; I already knew that at the age of seven. The texture of the world is painful, inadequate; unalterable, or so it seems to me. Really, I believe that an entire life spent reading would have suited me best. Such a life has not been granted me.” (p12)

27. Marie Darrieussecq — Pig Tales

You have this friend, she’s been out of work for months. Then she gets this gig at a perfume counter, which also involves being a prostitute. She is routinely abused by her “clients” who use her for increasingly perverse sexual practices. She is also, at that time, transforming into a sow. You keep calling to meet for a coffee, but all you get is the answer machine, oinking and grunting her absence. You hear she’s taken up with a politician who sweeps her into the dark sexual underbelly of Paris’s powerful elite, where her fluctuating pigginess proves popular with the higher-ups she lets abuse her rectally. You can forget trying to reach her now. She’s leading a new life with her six teats and wolf boyfriend, she has no time for YOU. It’s frustrating when friends fall away. (This is a delightfully surreal tale with no paragraph breaks).

28. Denis Diderot — Rameau’s Nephew and First Satire

Some editions lump this with D’Alembert’s Dream, others with “other works”—helpful!—but this Oxford Classics edition includes First Satire (some eleven pages). As the one-star rating makes plain, me no likey. Rameau’s Nephew is a rambling conversation between ‘ME’ and ‘HIM’ that feels like an indulgence, written very much for Diderot’s cultural circle, and a very dry run for Jacques the Fatalist. The bantering leans towards the philosophical, and far from being a philistine, I don’t read philosophical tracts because I hate them. The First Satire is equally irrelevant to today’s reader, punctuated with obscure references to figures of the time, copious explanatory notes and flat humour. More to the point, there’s no Diderot magic here, not in the slightest.

29. Jeanne Hyvard — Mother Death

A raging feminist splurge. 110 pages of staccato attack weapons. Sentences like nunchucks in the knackers. A Lucy Ellmann heroine letting rip after her third divorce and fourth Martini. A full-scale warhead launched against the prevailing male discourse. A repetitive, plotless, placeless, timeless anti-novel. A French theory piece in league with Deleuze or Derrida (men men men). Passages like this: “What do they say? What do they want? For us to have orgasms like them? What do they want? For us to be satisfied with being able to say: she belongs to me? They want our desire to come to an end so they can be more secure in knowing no one else will come along after them. So they make things up. They speak in our place. They teach us the discourses we recite to please them. They think they’re able to converse with us. They talk to their shadows. Because the sea’s voracious mouth is never satisfied. The more they make love to us. The more they fill us. The more they empty us. The more they make love to us. The more desire we have. The more we become the world. The freer we are.” No longer in print. Phew.

30. Brian McCabe — Selected Stories

This gentleman was the first writer I met and, since I am gifted at first impressions, I slid two 30-page manuscripts into his office folder before I even spoke to him. The first was an excerpt from a 900-page paean to sexual frustration, parodied earlier as I Want Vaginas. The second was a novel about ending up like your father. Despite their incredible ugliness, he kindly encouraged me to keep writing with no weariness or beeriness in his voice. Later, I took part in his lovely evening workshops where I had the great good fortune to meet my current partner of some five years, and to make people chortle at some sub-Flann O’Brien whimsy I had farted onto my sister’s old PC the night before. All in all, I can safely say Brian McCabe is a top bloke and a brilliant teacher.

And what a writer! Why did I wait five years to read his work? His stories are playful, hilarious, darkly realistic and endlessly ponderable. The story ‘Interference’ about a child who invents a Martian language to deal with his mother’s suicide attempt took my breath away. Written in a perfect early adolescent tone, with an Ali Smith-like flair for language and wit, the story’s devastating core creeps up on the reader like a really good rapist. ‘Anima’ and ‘Say Something’ are equal favourites: the latter a drunken rant from an academic’s wife, with her uninterrupted monologue speaking for the silent man. Other tales deal with life in bleak Scottish towns, among the best ‘The Hunter of Dryburn’ and ‘Strange Passenger,’ the longest piece here, and a great exploration of kids who leave their parents’ social class. Read this man. He’s bloody nice.

31. Georges Bataille — Story of the Eye

The last orgy I attended was in Dundee. I turned up two minutes late, improperly dressed (my gimp mask hadn’t been drycleaned in time), and offended the host by complimenting him on his lovely breasts, and even more cracking vagina. I was told to gently lube the testicles of a history teacher for the first romp—clearly the host was furious with me, as the history teacher was my own father—then invited over for a little frottage against the pelvis of a divorced Cher impersonator. She sang ‘Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves’ to the slow rocking of her climax. What an embarrassing night!

This novella is nothing like that embarrassing night, except the sex is almost as degenerate. No physical descriptions of the sexers are included in the text, so the reader is free to imagine two nubile French handsomes instead of acne-ridden shut-ins (a whole new level of perverse) doing their evil deeds. The writer’s postscript explains the use of eggs and eyes in erotic situations, as some psychoneurotic method of dealing with seeing his blind father struggling to wet himself as a child. If I saw that in my youth, no doubt this is exactly the book I would write. This edition contains an extremely boring essay by Susan Sontag (as long as the novella itself) and a typically inscrutable one from Roland Barthes. Skip those and make up your own theories of perversity (with a partner!)

32. Nicholson Baker — A Box of Matches

If you turned up at your agent’s office, caught his attention long enough to pitch a new novel idea, and told him the novel would be structured around a box of matches, with each match unleashing a series of domestic anecdotes told by a very boring and precise man, your agent might throw a plant at your head. Nicholson’s agent, however, simply said: “Sounds great, can you have it by February?” Oh, agents. Oh, Nicholson. Oh, mass of unpublished unloved unwanted writers. Oh dear. Anyway, this is another short unoffensive interesting book from Nicholson. But you have to ask yourself, with books like Checkpoint and Vox and so on, where lieth the substance with Baker? These are great books but Baker prances about the place like a colossus of literature, and I think, why why why? He does have the greatest beard in literary history. Counts for a lot.

My Month in Books, Part One (Jan)

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.

16. Raymond Queneau — We Always Treat Women Too Well

This novel parodies cheap noir novels being sold by the shovel in the 1940s. Holed up in a Dublin post office, a group of Irish rebels hold hostage the canny temptress Gertie Girdle, and one by one, as the English crush their insurgency, fall sway to her peculiar charms. Dismissed as a crude failure upon publication, Queneau’s pseudonymous novel certainly lards more sex and swearing into the action than in his screwball comedies, but the parody is clearly delineated from the ludicrous dialogue and the nods to Joyce. Despite the filth this is unmistakably a Queneau novel—zippy chapters, perfect comedic descriptions, broader backdrops of cantankerous protest against trends. A hoot, a veritable hoot! (Though several theses could be written on its sexual politics—don’t probe too deeply). See also Boris Vian’s I Spit on Your Graves.

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

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]

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]

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.