My Month in Books, Part One (April)

1. George Orwell — Burmese Days

George’s fictionalised account of his time in Burma with our brave old lads in the Indian Imperial Police. Flory is our antihero, desperately striving for decency and brotherhood and love in a moral backwater populated by the drunk whore-mongering Old Guard English and corrupt local blackmailers, rapists and tyrants (rolled into one here as U Po Kyin). Caught in the middle are the unfortunate Burmese and Indians trapped in an easily manipulated honour system, ruled over with contempt by the institutionally racist English masters. An unflinching depiction of yet another bleak chapter in Britain’s history of world-conquering adventures in repression and brutality. Since all the “bad” archetypes are bundled into the book (i.e. the characters whose attitudes George has to blast) the novel’s credibility is occasionally stretched. But there’s no denying these warped human dung beetles existed and befouled the planet with their pestilence for far too long. As Wayne Coyne and his Lips know well, with loving hands, evil will prevail.

2. George Orwell — Coming Up for Air

Released in 1939, Coming Up for Air is perhaps the final kiss-of-death to pre-war life in miserable old England, and the first ready-for-war book to soberly embrace the next six agonising years. The protagonist George is a First World War veteran whose life has settled into the predetermined routine of people of his class and age—a travelling insurance position, a nagging harridan of a missus, and two kids too many. After kvetching about his sorry lot in Part One, he recalls his childhood in Part Two, nostalgic for the privations of his working-class boyhood—somehow they’re better than the privations of his lower-middle-class adulthood—and takes a trip to his youth in the later parts, where everything has slowly modernised and the fishing pond has been tarmacked to make way for an asylum. The novel is written in the first-person, making it hard to discern Orwell’s intentions—is he satirising this look-back bore, or sympathising with the lack of free-will in his life? Probably both. A darkly funny if mainly miserable book about the people who lived lives of quiet despair so we could access Goodreads on our iPhones.

3. Charles Webb — The Graduate

Charles Webb is a possible candidate for the BURIED book club, if this book wasn’t still popular, and it isn’t really—the film and stage show and tea towel and thong range are popular, who reads the book nowadays? The novel is written so sparsely and simply it functions pretty much as a blueprint for Mike Nichols’s script—90% of the action is told in dialogue with occasional flat descriptive passages for the frantic parts. A neurotic boy wonder returns to the suburbs to deliberate on the predetermined future laid out before him, and sets about breaking every taboo imaginable under the sun, but mostly sleeping with an older woman and trying to marry her daughter simply because grown-ups told him not too. As a comedic novel, the dialogue does all the work—Webb’s prose lacks any especial humour—and most of the famous movie lines are here with the added bonus of having Dustin Hoffman’s voice in our heads as we read them. As to Webb’s credentials as a novelist, apart from a Graduate sequel and another book that was turned into a horrible movie (Hope Springs), the rest seems out of print and unloved.

4. Evan S. Connell — Mrs Bridge

A quietly devastating portrayal of a housewife shorn of all personality or free will, raising her typical kids in a typical Midwestern breadbasket under the aegis of her all-powerful husband (who has a sequel in which to express his own typicality). The effect is similar to the poetic melodrama of The Book of Disquiet, but with a more lightly mocking and tender-heartedly sympathetic tone, and less insufferable moaning posing as philosophical profundity. In under 200 canny pages this novel slowly disassembles the American Dream and blasts the capitalist utopia into smithereens with achingly lovely paragraphs of emptiness, loneliness and trivial domestic matters. At times unbearably sad and poignant. As friend Grace Barron ably sums up: “Have you ever felt like those people in the Grimm fairytale—the ones who were all hollowed out in the back?” (p176)

5. Alexander Theroux—Laura Warholic or, The Sexual Intellectual

Having read the spellbinding Darconville’s Cat á coups de dictionnaire, I anticipated similar dizzying feats of sesquipedalianism from this outrageously funny follow-up. But unlike the stylishly ad unguem prose in that 1980s masterpiece, Laura Warholic is a frowstier monster: its prose is no less captivating or fine-tuned, but replaces the musicality and sumptuousness with pricklier symphony of aeolistic attacks. “Character is plot,” says Theroux, and the titular anti-heroine dominates this vaudevillian doorstop. Laura is an allagrugous rock groupie in her mid-thirties, her speech and demeanour frozen in a Clueless-era slacker-speak, derided by everyone in the Quink offices—the magazine where our hero Eugene Eyestones works as The Sexual Intellectual—but especially her amurcous ex-husband who intends to sue her for every penny she doesn’t have. Eugene is the only kind-hearted character in the novel (Duxbak excepting): the moral and spiritual nucleus in a world of cartoon malfeasance and anhedonious loathing. His articles for the magazine are adoxographic musings in the Therouvian mould: quote-heavy mini-essays on love, romance, and female behaviour, all drawn from his observations of Laura. Laura is an autoschediastic bandersnatch who lies, betrays, steals and uses men to live a life of idle corruption and chaos, constantly dependent on Eugene’s Jesus-like charity and patience, and as the novel progresses, Eugene is trapped in a battle between his Christian conscience and his need to lance Laura like a boil—an agathokakological conflict that sits at the heart of the novel. Surrounding this relationship are brilliant Dickensian caricatures, rendered with fiendish devilry and typically waspish prose as Theroux preaches his lessons on the decay of American culture. Bursting with wondrous neologisms, relentless trivia and inhuman erudition, this is one of the finest and funniest novels it has been my pleasure to perch on my hydraulic ram and read. For those who dismiss Theroux as a sub-Nabokovian crank, the final chapter has some of the tenderest, more painfully beautiful prose in the Alex oeuvre, as Laura the tortured autothaumaturgist falls into one of the deepest abysses of loneliness ever rendered in prose. One of the most powerful works of fiction composed this century—indispensable, and perfect for the gynotikolobomassophile in your life.

6. David Bellos — Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

David Bellos, famous for translating Life: A User’s Manual and his compendious Georges Perec bio, writes a comprehensive, semi-scholarly and semi-accessible book exploring translation in its multifarious forms. Covering the complexities of literary translation—from verbatim likenesses to humour to style—into wider world areas such as legal and political translation (less captivating material for laymen), Bellos is a witty and super-smart writer who makes a convincing case for the importance of translation and its unsung participants. For those among you (that means Manny) still convinced a literary work loses too much in translation to bother reading—if this marvellous book doesn’t persuade you, nothing will. Last word from David:
 

“A translation can’t be right or wrong in the manner of a school quiz or a bank statement. A translation is more like a portrait in oils. The artist may add a pearl earring, give an extra flush to the cheek or miss out the grey hairs in the sideburns—and still give us a good likeness. It’s hard to say just what it is that allows viewers to agree a portrait captures the important things—the overall shape as that special look in the eye. The mysterious abilities we have for recognizing good matches in the visual sphere lie near to what it takes to judge that a translation is good. But the users of a translation, unlike the friends of the portraitist’s sitter, don’t have full access to the model (they would barely need the translation if they did). That’s probably why translation raises such passionate responses. There’s no choice but to trust the translator. When it comes to speech and writing, people are an untrusting lot.” (p331)

7. Anthony Burgess — Byrne

A. Burgess and me agree that all art should aspire to the condition of music (we paraphraseth Walt Pater), both for the harmony of form and content, and the visceral impact music has on a listener’s nerve-endings, always stronger than responses to books or paintings or YooToob kittehs. More than any other novelist, Ant Burg spent his life inventing musical forms to contain his explosive, spontaneous creativity, whether in the musical play Blooms of Dublin, the orchestral novel Napoleon’s Symphony, or this swansong Byrne, a novel in verse. (He also recorded a musical version of A Clockwork Orange—don’t ask). Most critics and wine-swiggers are unanimous in their opinion that Anto Burge failed to musicalise the novel and create anything particularly innovative in the novel form (in terms of long-term usability), leaving behind a canon of daring experiments (i.e. failures) and almost masterpieces (i.e. not masterpieces). This novel in verse (in Byronian ottava rima stanzas) is full of the bawdiness of Chaucer and Rabelais, and far from revolutionising anything simply shines as another wacky entry in an eccentric and loopy bibliography of one the smartest, comb-fearing bruisers of 20thC lit. And for me, that’s enough.

8. Andrew O’Hagan — The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and Her Friend Marilyn Monroe

To be filed alongside the brightest and funniest animal-narrated fiction (not a competitive field—ha, see the pun?), O’Hagan’s novel is a debonair shaggy dog story (homage to Tristram Shandy evident in the title) that concerns the exploits of a Highland pup, passed into the hands of Vita Sackville-West, Natalie Wood’s princess mother, and finally (via Frank Sinatra) Marilyn Monroe. Maf was raised a socialist in the Scottish Highlands, and is extremely au fait with European, American and Russian literature, as well as philosophy and human psychology. As he accompanies Marilyn in her final year of life, he bumps into Brooklyn rats and soup-flies with attitude problems, all the while observing Marilyn’s airy complexity and her run-ins with Sinatra, her psycho psychologist, Carson McCullers, and JFK. Told in a light but consistently amusing way with insights on Kafka, Proust and Woolf you wouldn’t expect from an Aviemore maltese, O’Hagan’s short novel is a charming and finely written comedy. Note: Monroe obsessives need not apply—this isn’t a barrel-scraping “fresh perspective.”
 

PS: Tara in her review has complained that this narrator is insufficiently doglike. Apparently she prefers her talking dogs to “sniff their butts” and “chase after [sic] dropped potatoe [sic] chips.” She is also upset because this talking dog used “words that I don’t know” when as we all know, most talking dog narrators should limit their vocabulary to doglike words such as “woorf” and “owf,” both one syllable, so more realistic for a talking dog. You’ve been warned!  

Swallowing the Dictionary

Why has the English-language novel ended up in the hands of ventripotent thumb-twiddlers and feckless gaberlunzies? Remember when Charles Dickens wrote those compendious novels rich in voluminous word-spinnery (The Circumlocution Office in Little Dorritt, or the legal satire in Bleak House?) Remember when James Joyce blasted the ultracrepidarians with his beautiful masterwork Ulysses, and dis- and re-assembled the language for the craic in Finnegans Wake? As the novel continues to exhaust and normalise taboos, one taboo forever shunned is the unmarketable and temerarious practice of engaging with the dictionary. Why do all these spoffokins with their stercoricolous “lit-fic” offerings refuse to colour their prose with geflugelte Worte? Their ramfeezled dribblings hardly deserve a second glance beside thegalumptious masterworks by writers like Alex Theroux and co. That’s all.

The House of Trouts

Kilgore Trout’s latest book, World’s Funniest Thermonuclear Accidents, was forthcoming from Michael O’Mara. He shared a bathroom with Kilgore Trout, whose latest book, Complications in the Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulum, had forthcome from Yale Press. The two Trouts co-rented a kitchen with Kilgore Trout, whose book I Was a Teenage Obergruppenführer, had not found a publisher. All three Trouts did not read each other’s books and did not discuss literary matters at all. When one Trout saw another, he said: “Nice day, Mr. Trout.” If one Trout was working on his book and the other Trout spotted this, he said: “Hard at work, Mr. Trout?” One time, Kilgore Trout broke Kilgore Trout’s prize antique cup, handed down nine generations of the Trout family. Kilgore Trout looked at his shattered heritage and said: “Accidents happen, Mr. Trout.”

My Month in Books, March (Part Two)

13. J.M.G. Le Clézio — Terra Amata

Terra Amata is either a visionary masterpiece or cheap apocalyptic schlock—either way, the end product is a strange and wonderful mixture of Michael Bay and French existentialism. Chancelade is a perpetual boy traversing the stunningly evocative language of this novel. His surroundings shapeshift from sentence to sentence, allowing him occasional moments of beachside lucidity or ludic Oulipian antics, but mostly, he’s like a cyberpunk Scheherazade, caught in immense thickets of doom-laden prose, thundering out the page like a pulpit preacher seconds before a meteor impacts the earth like in the Permian period, drenching the world in one billion trillion tonnes of seething hot lava for over 80,000 years. A novel that runs entirely on opaque imagery and surreal lyricism isn’t an easy sell, but Le Clézio succeeds by speedballing his prose with urgency, lunacy, and a black we’re-all-going-to-die humour, otherwise known as “gallows.” I can’t think of a finer novel to get hanged from.

14. Hubert Selby Jr. — Waiting Period

Cubby’s swansong is a blackly comedic novel about a suicidal nerd who decides to off the bureaucrat that wronged him instead of taking his own life. By manipulating a strain of E-coli bacteria and furtively inserting it into his victim’s coke, he succeeds in his plan to dispense with the faceless desk vulture, and decides to increase his repertoire of sly E-coli murders like a nerdier Charles Bronson until the novel ends on a morally ambiguous note. Not unlike B.S. Johnson’s Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, this last work from Selby fizzles with dark comic energy and his (now tired) stylistic run-ons and stream-con. As a bitter bow-out from the world of letters, and the world, Waiting Period triumphs, leaving pellets of pain in all unsuspecting do-goody readers.

15. James Wood — How Fiction Works

A verymost entertaining and informative book about books and how writers make them from words placed in different orders. Split into handy chapters but written as one lengthy essay with numerical subheadings, Wood teaches us things from Flaubert, James, Joyce, Foster Wallace and other masters and mistresses about how to identify bad writing from good, and how free indirect style is a thing of beauty when done right. Only trouble is his persistent disagreement with a William Gass quote that he milks for the whole book while soldering his argument into the pages. Never disagree with The Gass. Hauntings and such to be feared. I have nothing else to add. Regard the four stars and begone.

16. Sam Savage — The Cry of the Sloth

A quite outrageously dreadful literary satire, so cringe-inducingly lame one wonders whether the noble Coffee House Press has any credentials at all, outside publishing the mighty Sorrentino. Sam Savage has read and met Sorrentino, which makes this novel doubly painful since what transpires is a sanitised, whimsified Mulligan Stew, centred around small lit-mag publisher Andrew Whittaker whose failing mag Soap, along with other sub-comedic sitcommy disasters, precipitates a book-long nervous breakdown. The failure is tone. And approach. Written in a tiresome epistolary format (didn’t Sorrentino kill that off in MS?), the lightly comedic antics fail since the reader isn’t sure whether to pity or laugh at or root for Whittaker, and the bad writing samples suggest merely a laziness (hence the sloth title) but no delusional imagined talent like Antony Lamont, and frankly the humour in these samples (and the book) is so slight it effectively isn’t there at all. Abandoned on p213 with violent disappointment. More people have (and will) read this than Sorrentino’s masterpiece. Sad truth.

17. Steve Hely— How I Became a Famous Novelist

An uproarious assault on the sorts of manipulative middlebrow fictions that sit, with smug pastel or pastoral covers, on every highstreet booksellers’ bestsellers shelves and shift enough units to keep real writers impoverished for nine lifetimes. Next time you encounter someone talking up The Kite Runner or The Poisonwood Bible, slap them across the head with copies of Hely’s witty novel until the message is received that laziness in book choice kills. Bestsellers should come with warnings on their covers: IF YOU BUY THIS, SEVEN BETTER NOVELS WILL REMAIN UNPUBLISHED. In Hely’s comedy, satirical in a sitcommy way, a smart hack masters the lingo of the earnest southern novelist who toploads his books with clichés and lyrical descriptions until through a careful process of cronyist shimmying, he ends up making a moderate puddle of funds before he is cast adrift into the vast ocean of readerly contempt. Top-flight satire, if a little off-base and kooky sometimes, but bang on-message.

18. George Orwell — A Clergyman’s Daughter

Orwell sharpens his satiric knives in this early novel about Dorothy and her life of perpetual misery living in a backward petit bourgeois town. Capturing the pure hell of ill-bred country folk and hateful religious fustians, Orwell creates a sense of smothering hopelessness as his heroine finds herself among homeless hop-pickers, sweating for twelve hours in fields and sleeping in haylofts, and later working for starvation wages under a tyrannical crone who epitomises the penny-pinching meanness of a private school system whose only purpose is to keep kids stupefied and the parents paying the fees. Little about life in 1930s England is portrayed with nothing short of sputtering near-hectoring contempt as Dorothy elects to remains a perpetual virgin in her bleak, pointless existence of rubbing down eczema-addled old ladies and raising funds for an ever-collapsing church, trapped until death in a lonely, friendless, and godless universe of crushing isolation, disappointment, poverty, and fear. The past was a horrible place. Orwell hurts.

19. Kurt Vonnegut — Slaughterhouse-Five

Re-reading Kurt’s famous one for a third (or fourth?) time perhaps wasn’t the wisest move. Upon the third read, Billy Pilgrim’s antics have less of the time-hopping quirkiness and seem more cartoony, while Kurt’s prose comes across as simplistic to the point of patronising. From time to (un)time, his Dresden ramblings have the same sting as on the first read and his humanist humour, and his resigned peacenik stance still seems the best response to war horrors. His time on Tralfamadore also contains bubbles of loveliness and near-profundity, but often the prose (in regard to women) smells dated. As does the humour. Some books are best left buried in the past.

20. George Orwell — Nineteen Eighty-Four

So much to be ANGRY about! If you ever conquer your nagging self-hatred, there is a whole world of untamed FURY waiting to be discovered. People—rich ones, conceited ones, selfish ones, hateful ones, abusive ones, thick ones—everyone is a potential GEYSER of rage!

Fortunately, your self-hatred is strong for now, otherwise you would have to confront the wankers in suits who snubbed the homeless outside the bank, leaving downtrodden debtors to fit the bill; or the woman who strutted with self-regarding arrogance along the pavement; or the smirking busker who strummed crap indie covers outside the library who was probably a middle-class cock named Tim up from his country estate to slum it in a well-appointed Blackford flat while at uni before taking a managerial role in his father’s corporation; or the single mother whose only purpose in life was to push her spawn around by saying their names over and over in a shrill English accent until they erupted in bus-consuming screams; or the old men who stumbled out pubs and staggered to the betting shop, forever trapped in cycles of mindless gambling and alcohol consumption as though art, music, books didn’t exist and the world was one bronchitic catarrhy wheeze-cough; or the billboards for unfunny comedies with wax-faced gurning hasbeen multi-zillionaires; or the people who walked through life blissfully unaware of the contempt and indifference with which they were treated by the corporations that took their money to butcher penguins and pauperise small businesses and abuse starving children in third-world sweatshops so everything looked nice in the display window; or the perpetually corrupt chav-baiting governments that took backhanders from devil-fucking corporations that ruled the world by exploiting and bending the law to make their wallets fatter, dishing out lies whenever convenient to flatter the stakeholders’ greed; or the impudent people from all walks of life so bound up in their own petty needs and wants they would never think to lift a finger to help anyone, or who begrudged giving the tiniest morsel to charity because the self-pleasure impulse was so strong it inconvenienced them to have to dig into their pockets; or the people who filled themselves up with soulless entertainment like commercial pop music and defended their right to pollute the world with their tastes at the expense of suppressing all art with proper value with the capacity to move people in deep heart-shattering ways through hard-wrought artistry, not cheap sentiment; or an interminably dreary future of call centre dystopias where everyone is programmed to deliver peerless customer service and hawk tat for bonuses; or a world akin to ancient Egypt where the cat is venerated over all humans and more deserving of our attention than genocide, famine, war, drought, ecological disasters, and so on; or a world where INDIFFERENCE and GREED were so rampant there wasn’t even a good reason to drag one’s weary carcass out of bed in the morning to face it all again.

So many things to get ANGRY about! How do you even begin to cope with all that?!

21. Raymond Federman—Return to Manure

Almost all Federman is out of print or import-price in my country, except this novel(?) about his imaginative and real-life return to the French farm he worked on as a slave during WWII under the tyrannical hand of Lauzy. Over 190 pages, Federman (as narrator) details life shovelling manure and taking frequent beatings from his perverted boss, and rare moments of respite from the buxom farmer’s daughter (who may be an invention—like anything else in this novel[?]), while travelling with his partner Erica back to the farm to see what emotions it stirs up for use in his book. The ‘surfiction’ deployed in this novel is basically a subset of metafiction—Federman includes interruptions from the “reader” in rectangular boxes, and dialogues with his partner over the accuracy of his narration. The self-consciousness in here is deployed in a tender, bitter and hilarious prose style, with the line between memory and fiction wondrously blurred—clearly the book could be written in no other way for Federman. An excellent introduction to an author I will probably never read again unless those prices come down.

22. Alexander Theroux — Three Wogs

Alex’s first published thing (we’re on first-name terms now) is almost as bizarre as this review. Three Wogs is a politically incorrect triptych-novel set in late 1960s, with each protagonist representing a particular type of disagreeable racist, and Alex’s task is to flay their backward attitudes alive with his divinely satirical prose. In the first story ‘Mrs Proby Gets Hers,’ Alex lampoons stuck-up petit bourgeois spinsters to hilarious effect, capturing the absurd language of needless precision and trivial preciousness. Her encounter with a local Chinese tradesman ends badly during a Fu Manchu movie in a piece of odd mirroring. ‘Childe Roland’ is the longest and least successful of the three, covering the adventures of young thug and bus-cleaner Roland as he chats up local tarts and engages in a potentially violent dialogue with an Indian chap on a bus. The parody of soapbox bigotry is the funniest thing here, reminiscent of the pulpit hissings of President Greatracks in Darconville’s Cat. The last story ‘The Wife of God’ is the wittiest, reminiscent of Ronald Firbank and other pomposity-skewering wits. Taking on the arch sexual cowardice of the church, Alex’s prose reaches its most dazzling peak as the sexless vicar tries convincing his African choirmaster not to marry by threatening him with impossible karmasutric sexual feats. As first books go, Three Wogs is the weirdest I have read in yonks. Since Alex squeezes humour from cultural stereotypes and accents, the book will offend many. But clearly the focus of this book is to ridicule the attitudes of the period (Alex wrote the book during his stay in London) and at this task, he succeeds magniloquently. If Nabokov had written Up the Junction, this might’ve been the result.

23. Paul Fournel — Little Girls Breathe the Same Air as We Do

A dusty Oulipo book from the late seventies, extremely traditional in approach but often funny and moving. A collection of vignettes about various French schoolgirls and the tender coming-of-age moments that makes life so whimsical and cute, if you happen to be bourgeois. This author’s other English book Need For the Bike is an 2000+ page lipogram written in Latin about a lost lemon squeezer, featuring deleted Sappho fragments and a previously unwritten Harper Lee sequel, To Flog a Dead Mockingbird. In the year 2014, Paul will release a 9,000 volume series of books about how Mark Danielewski picks the fluff from his navel. Exciting things doth grow in the avant garden.

24. Terry Eagleton — Literary Theory: An Introduction 

From Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory for Toddlers: An Introduction. Phenomenology: Tigger tells Pooh that he must distinguish between the phenomena and noumena of a pot of honey. That his intentionality towards the honey is narrowing his awareness of his surroundings, pushing him into a false structure of consciousness where the honey is both a perpetual fantasy and an instrument of real-life fixation. He tells Pooh he must separate his intentionalities to avoid becoming corrupted and driven by his desire for honey. Hermeneutics: Tigger tells Winnie that he must forget about honey and concentrate on the Heideggerian being-with of bear relatedness. He must suppress the empirical evidence around the existence and necessity of honey as a thing-in-itself and take an antipositivist approach to his own need for honey in a godless and indifferent universe. Reception Theory: Tigger tells Winnie that the only reason he is so popular as a character is that readers can “relate” to his being orange and craving frequent honey. Their life experiences have shown them that things with orange bears and honey are an essential part of the human condition, and require enshrinement in the literary pantheon for almost entirely no other reason. Structuralism: Tigger tells Pooh that his preoccupation with honey is part of larger woodland structure dating back to the stone age, and that “honey” has always been a signifier triggering hunger and savagery in the heart of orange bears, long before Milne gave them the consciousness to understand the signified of “honey” as a delicious bee-made product popularly served in pots. Semiotics: Tigger tells Pooh that honey is merely a symbol for part of a larger racial and class struggle among woodland beings. Across the woodland culture, the word “honey” can symbolise the tyrannous oppression of the orange bears over beavers or squirrels, or the totalitarian confiscation of honey among the lower orders. To bees, “honey” is understood as a priceless trading commodity frequently being plundered by cuddly pirates, whose struggle remains unacknowledged among the wider woodland populace. Post-structuralism: Tigger tells Pooh that honey that the destabilised meaning of his quest is more significant for the reader, whose quest for honey will loom even larger once Pooh’s quest is complete. But more importantly, “honey” is a binary opposition which also means “Jacuzzi,” so Pooh’s system of language is under severe scrutiny. Psychoanalysis: Tigger tells Pooh that his craving for honey is merely a way of screwing his mother and killing his father and venerating his very curly and unseen penis. (From p12, p54, p87, p99, p123, and p149)