Known Unknowns

On the Figure of the Aporia

2012-01-17T11:38:00.000+11:00

“Why this language, which does notfortuitously resemble that of negative theology? How to justify the choice of negative form (aporia) to designate aduty that, through the impossible or the impracticable, nonetheless announcesitself in an affirmative fashion? Because one must avoid good conscience at allcosts. Not only good conscience as the grimace of an indulgent vulgarity, butquite simply the assured form of self-consciousness: good conscience assubjective certainty is incompatible with the absolute risk that every promise,every engagement, and every responsible decision—if there are such—must run. Toprotect the decision or the responsibility by knowledge, by some theoreticalassurance, or by the certainty of being right, of being on the side of science,of consciousness or of reason, is to transform this experience into thedeployment of a program, into a technical application of a rule or a norm, orinto the subsumption of a determined ‘case.’”

--JacquesDerrida, Aporias, 19.

Gerald Murnane's New Novel

2012-01-02T12:43:00.001+11:00

So, according to an annual list published by the Fairfax papers here in Australia, Gerald Murnane's new novel, entitled A History of Books, is due out in June of 2011. It's still not listed on his publisher's website, but Murnane did speak about the book in a 2009 interview with the ABC, although his description is typically enigmatic: "I suppose this is getting outside the scope of our interview, but I'm very much aware and very proud of myself for having completed recently a 30,000-word novella called A History of Books. And I couldn't have written that if I hadn't first written Barley Patch because the whole subject of A History of Books is what we're talking about, and if you...well, please God you will eventually read that and you will be given far more on the subject, that this narrator, this self-examining, self-probing narrator, goes deeply into the matter of...and in fact memories from one book invade and mingle with memories from another, so that his mind seems to consist of very little else but this...call it a world, made up of these images that arose. They weren't sometimes even reported or described in the text but they arose while the reading took place."

Best Literature in Translation 2011

2011-12-06T15:23:00.001+11:00

In many ways, I thought this was a slightly odd year for literature in translation; I read an enormous number of books that I really, really liked, but only a few that I felt were truly classic books that I would return to again and again in the future. Moreover, several "big name" foreign authors released books that, in my opinion, were simply not very good (so I will warn you in advance that you won't see Murakami, Peter Nadas, Cesar Aira or Enrique Villa-Matas anywhere on this list). I have also cheated a bit: two books on it were actually published in 2010 and 2009, but I only got around to reading them this year, and another two books are either re-issues or re-translations. As ever, I refuse to rank the books below, because they are all great, and every single one of them is worth reading. Lastly, those of you who read sites like Three Percent, ReadThisNext and Conversational Reading may notice quite a few familiar titles; there's nothing magical or coincidental about this, since those are places I tend to turn for recommendations on books. And if you don't read those sites, you should! Without further ado, here were some of my favourites from the last year...

Jenny Erpenbeck – Visitation
Yes, this came out in 2010, but I only got to it in January of 2011. This phenomenal "novel"--much like Jennifer Egan's vastly overrated A Visit from the Goon Squad--is really a series of interconnected short stories about the history of a single piece of land in Germany during the 20th Century. Despite its seemingly weighty subject matter, its gorgeous prose is consistently inventive, and its rounded psychological portraits will appeal to readers of more "conventional" books as well. With this book, Erpenbeck has already become one of my favourite contemporary European writers. Highly recommended.

Goncalo Tavares – Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique
This novel--to my mind--fits in with a larger return to naturalism that appears to be burgeoning at the moment, but what separates Tavares's work is its dark sense of humour and absurdist tendencies. The protagonist, a power hungry, immoral doctor not-so-subtly named Lenz Buchmann is portrayed in a manner that walks a thin line between melodrama and pastiche--and it works brilliantly. This is a phenomenal and satisfying portrait of a despicable character, and one of the most interesting books I've read in 2011. I can't wait for the publication of Tavares's Joseph Walser's Machine in 2012. Oh, and Tavares's earlier novel Jerusalem is also brilliant, if not quite as successful as this one.

Sergio Chejfec – My Two Worlds
This short little novella--Chejfec's first to be translated into English--simply recounts an author walking through a park, but this simple plot presents the basis for a text of exceptional complexity. Although outwardly resembling Peter Handke's Afternoon of a Writer, My Two Worlds is a complicated work that slyly alludes to a variety of stories by Borges and presents--in fictionalized form--Chejfec's own meditations on the relationship between the world, memory and fiction. This book is a must-read for anyone with even a passing interest in World Literature.

Peter Sloterdijk – Terror from the Air
There are many reasons for disqualifying this book from consideration for this list: 1) it was published in 2009, and 2) it is a work of theory rather than fiction. Sloterdijk, however, is not only one of Europe's most important contemporary philosophers, but also a philosopher with a truly literary style in the tradition of Nietzsche. Terror from the Air argues for a radical new understanding of modernity in relation to three factors: terrorism, product design and increasing awareness of the fact that humans are situated in atmospheric environments. From this simple starting point, he is able to offer a radically new understanding of the 20th Century. Although the massive tome Bubbles, which is part one of his Spheres trilogy, was published this year, Terror from the Air (which is actually the first section of Spheres III: Foam) is the best introduction to this essential thinker.

Magdalena Tulli – In Red
"Whosoever has been everywhere and seen everything should last of all pay a visit to Stitchings." So begins Magdalena Tulli's enchanting novella about the ill-fated Polish town of Stichings. Although Tulli uses a technique that might be described as "magical realism," this brief narrative is full of inventive linguistic and formal surprises and a wickedly bleak sense of humour. This is a beautiful book that is also printed in a characteristically lovely edition by Archipelago Press.

Georges Perec – The Art and Craft of Asking Your Boss for a Raise
This weird little book by Perec--which had previously been considered untranslatable--uses a compositional style that is entirely based on an algorithm given to Perec by a computer scientist, resulting in a form completely unlike that of any other novel you've ever read. By turns hysterically funny, frustrating and inventive, David Bellos's wonderful translation brings this strange-but-essential book to life in English.

Bohumil Hrabal – Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age
Though previously available in English, NYRB Books has re-released this classic of 20th Century Czech Literature, which is easily the funniest piece of prose I read this year next to the ultimate section of Evan Dara's The Easy Chain. This one-sentence novel is the monologue of an old man that is full of one-liners and twisted humour that results from the structural semantic ambiguity created by intentionally misplaced modifiers. If you don't know what that means, read it and see for yourself.

Eduoard Leve – Suicide
Ten days after handing his publisher the manuscript of his final novel, Suicide, Eduoard Leve took his own life. This fact haunts this fictional work about the suicide of a young man, which intentionally both encourages and discourages identification with the real-life figure of Leve. This mesmerising short novel is written in a stark prose that only increases its emotional impact, and, except for a formal shift at the end that doesn't quite work, was one of the most affecting novels I read all year.

Claire Lispector – The Hour of the Star
Although long available in English, New Directions has published a new translation of The Hour of the Star, which further highlights Lispector's deeply idiosyncratic prose. Indeed, The Hour of the Star is such a strange book that I am still not completely sure what to make of it--and I have not been so completely unsettled and intrigued by a prose style since reading Robert Walser's The Robber (which is no small compliment). This is a novel I hope to return to soon, and, given that New Directions is publishing at least four more Lispector novels in new translations next year, it's a given that her work will begin to receive greater recognition.

Honourable Mentions: Patrik Ourednik's The Opportune Moment, 1855, Jean Echenoz's Lightning, Ludvik Vakulic's The Guinea Pigs, Gert Jonke's The Distant Sound, Rene Belletto's Coda, Antonio Lobo Antunes's The Land at the End of the World

The Intentional Fallacy and Edouard Leve's Suicide

2011-11-30T06:41:00.001+11:00

According to the most precious intellectual resource of our time--by which, of course, I mean Wikipedia--the intentional fallacy is a term that "in literary criticism, addresses the assumption that the meaning intended by the author of a literary work is of primary importance. By characterizing this assumption as a 'fallacy', a critic suggests that the author's intention is not important." The principle was a tenet of the academic movement known as the New Criticism--a method of literary criticism that emphasised the literary/rhetorical aspects of a text and argued for textual interpretations based on the internal linguistic evidence within a text, rather than by relying on historical, biographical or theoretical methods of analysis. Later on, the intentional fallacy was the one of the chief pieces of evidence used to convict the New Criticism of ahistoricism (or of prefering synchrony over diachrony, if you prefer the Marxist/Hegelian way of saying the same thing), a charge still levied against the New Critics today.

That being said, the academy's attacks on the New Criticism have largely been a case of protesting too much; the fact is that virtually every high school and undergraduate literature seminar is run along practices and methodologies espoused by the New Criticism--specifically that rational human beings can uncover the "meaning" within a text through close reading. And by extension, the intentional fallacy is a pretty sound general concept: sure, we can probably agree that Melville meant to include a whale in the novel Moby Dick, but would we agree that he intended it to be a fable about the impossibility of humans mastering nature (which is, incidentally, the most boring interpretation of Moby Dick I can think of)? And even if Melville had intended the latter, would it limit other readings of Moby Dick, or make them less "correct"?

The problem of intentionality is further compounded by the fact that writers are notorious liars (how strange for a group of people whose career involves making things up!), and even their own speeches, notes, and diaries, as a result, are often treated more like the statements of an analysand than gospel truth. The fact of the matter is that, once a book has been published, the author can no longer claim authority over its meaning (indeed, book reviews are predicated on this notion).

But Eduoard Leve's novel Suicide presents a serious problem for the notion of the intentional fallacy. In the novel, the narrator recounts a series of interactions with a friend (addressed throughout as "you"), who, as we learn in the opening pages, has committed suicide. Ten days after delivering this manuscript to the publisher, however, Leve took his own life. It is impossible, or so it seems to me, not to read the novel in light of this fact.

The translator's thoughtful essay at the end of the book emphasises that Leve's own suicide and the fictional suicide within the book are different in many ways, but, in point of fact, Suicide is a book that plays with these very concepts of identity. The narrator claims that he was never really close with "you" while "you" were alive, but the level of detail about "your" internal psychological states radically undermines this claim. Like in Bergman's great film, Persona, Leve's characters--the narrator's "I" and his friend's "you"--slowly merge into a singular entity over the course of the novel. Unsurprisingly, this gesture is emphasised by the fact that "you" has a variety of difficulties in accepting his own subjectivity.

On a formal level, Suicide is written in appropriately spare prose, but flows in a stream-of-conscious type of narrative that would appeal to fans of Bernhard (although without Bernhard's trademark irony). My only qualm, ironically, concerns the book's final gesture, which requires a stark formal shift into verse, that doesn't quite work, although it is possible that the verse does not translate into English as well as the prose. All in all, Suicide is a phenomenal little novel well worth a read, and a brilliant introduction to Leve (this is his first novel translated into English). As a result, I am now very much anticipating the publication of his book Autoportrait, due to be published by the always-brilliant Dalkey Archive next year.

Neo-Naturalism and Jean Echenoz's Lightning

2011-11-26T05:04:00.001+11:00

In a review of Tom McCarthy's C from last year, I noted that McCarthy's novel--despite its much-vaunted use of ideas from second-wave cybernetics and Systems Theory--was really an updated version of naturalism that shares more in common with Thomas Hardy than the formal innovations of Modernism. The main innovation in C is that, instead of making its protagonist a Christ-like innocent as in Jude the Obscure, the main character, Serge, is a flat, affectless figure typical of "postmodern" texts. In the year since making this argument, however, I've noted that McCarthy is just one among a larger "movement," including such authors as Michel Houellebecq, Goncarlo Tavares and Jean Echenoz, producing work that could broadly be described as a form of neo-naturalism.

Echenoz's Lightning--like C--focuses on issues surroudning the development of technological modernity as a series of complex networked systems, and its central figure Gregor (a thinly disguised portrait of Nikola Tesla) is a deeply neurotic man who also possesses an exceptional genius for inventing new technologies linked to electricity. Ultimately, though, Lightning is a far more successful book than C for two reasons: 1) its relative brevity means that its strident antihumanism doesn't feel repetitive, and 2) the narration itself has an arch tone that gives the text a much-needed layer of irony.

At the same time, though, the book is not without its flaws. The first 50 pages, in particular, read more like a summary of events than a narrative, and, as such, will seem largely superfluous to anyone who has even a passing familiarity with Tesla's life. Later in the book, however, Echenoz begins to offer a more unique perspective on the events of Tesla's life, and Lightning ultimately develops into a stirring and wonderfully odd little book.

But for all it's merits, my only objection to Lightining is that, for all its ingenuity, it's ultimately the second-best version of Tesla's life presented in recent years, since the best is undoubtedly this:

Drunk History vol. 6 w/ John C. Reilly & Crispin Glover from John C Reilly

Book Review: In Red by Magdalena Tulli

2011-11-18T12:01:00.001+11:00

"In Red, the new novella from Magdalena Tulli, tells the story of the ill-fated town of Stitchings. From the very first sentence, though, Tulli makes it clear that this will not be a story that ends happily: ‘Whoever has been everywhere and seen everything, last of all should pay a visit to Stitchings.’ Tulli is regarded as one of Poland’s most important writers and it is easy to see why: her unusual prose is charged with irony and ambiguity that leads in a variety of unexpected directions, and it is the strength of her unusual narrative voice that ultimately knits together the disparate material in this wonderfully strange book."

On Life Kills and Moron-Proof Books

2011-11-15T13:09:00.001+11:00

Below is a video of my (very brief!) launch speech for Miles Vertigan's excellent debut novel Life Kills. (Synopsis: Unpopular books, a Peter Sloterdijk-inspired reading of the novel, AusLit's love affair with boring realism, moron-proof books).

Tibor Fischer on Parallel Stories

2011-11-14T14:37:00.001+11:00

Over the weekend, Tibor Fischer published what could certainly be called a scathing review of Nadas's Parallel Stories. Although I have major concerns about the review, we are agreed on the unnecessarily repetitive scatology of the book:

"Every time a new male character appears you fear he's going to be wanking or investigating his foreskin in a line or two (and he will be). The only relief from cocks is the occasional intervention of some labia or a clitoris. Doubtless, Nádas has some artful justification for this, but it's like having your face jammed in someone's crotch – it gets exasperating very quickly, and there's still 900 pages to go."

Fischer is right about this, but, at heart, this review is an attack on an intellectualized continental aesthetics and an assertion of pretty typical Anglophone aesthetics--that books should appeal to everyone, serve as an entertainment, and not, God forbid, challenge a reader in any way:

"And the Germans, it seems to me, have encouraged the Teutonic notion that anything entertaining or exciting must be lightweight or pulp. Serious writing has to be … serious, and hard work. If you're not straining, it ain't literature. László Krasznahorkai and Peter Nádas seem to be particular exponents of this attitude."

This is the same sort of "common sense" aesthetics that English reviewers used to assail Coleridge back when he incorporated Kant's philosophy in his literary criticism. It was wrong then, and it's wrong now. I don't recall any reviews of Atonement complaining that McEwan's book wasn't a 900-page experimental novel, but it appears that every experimental novel is expected to justify its existence, as if the mere publication of such a work is an insult to the mythical figure of the "average reader." It's about time that reviewers who should know better stop pretending that wilful philistinism is some kind of enlightened or democratic position. Sadly, in most popular literary criticism, this soft form of anti-intellectualism appears to be the dominant paradigm.

Exclusion Clauses

2011-11-12T09:07:00.001+11:00

Over at Kill Your Darlings, Emily Bitto has an excellent piece on the disappearance of long sentences from contemporary literature, touching on two issues I've written on before: 1) the formal conservatism of contemporary Australian--and, by extension, Anglophone--prose (see here, for example), and 2) the relationship between minimalism as an aesthetic doctrine and creative writing programs (and for my thoughts on CW programs, see here and here).

As someone who has tended towards the long sentence in my own fiction, I agree that there is a bias against the long sentence; I've lost count of how many literary editors I've encountered believe that good editing entails turning every long sentence into a series of shorter ones. I'll also just note two other points that weren't mentioned in the piece, which I think add to Bitto's argument:

1) The long sentence is actually the preferred vessel for English Lit. over its long history. Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century British and U.S. writers consistently use sentences with multiple dependent clauses and the like. In fact, it is the preference for a journalistic, "economical" prose--as promoted by Hemingway, E.B. White, and, later on, William Zinsser (although their ideas can be useful!)--that is actually the exception. The long sentence, historically speaking, has been the rule.

2) Having taught and studied creative writing in the U.S. and Australia, I don't think that minimalism is "officially" promoted as the writing style. Rather, there's a subtle pressure, or a predisposition towards minimalism. Just as most English Literature departments will have a de facto preference for Continental Theory over Analytic Philosophy (a preference I share), few CW programs actually foist minimalism on students as a requirement. Aside from one absolutely horrendous CW instructor, all of my teachers were very supportive of my own work with long sentences.

Book Review: The Opportune Moment, 1855

2011-11-11T10:29:00.001+11:00

I've got a review of Patrick Ourednik's The Opportune Moment, 1855 up over at the website of Readings Books and Music. Here's the opening:

"Czech author Patrick Ourednik’s newly translated novella, The Opportune Moment, 1855, tells the story of a group of expatriate Europeans attempting to start an anarchist commune, called the Fraternitas Free Settlement, in Brazil. But from the very outset, the reader knows that the settlement is doomed; the novel opens with a letter, dated March 1902, written by the leader of this anarchist collective – a man affectionately referred to by his followers as ‘Older Brother’. While the letter is meant to serve as a sort ofapologia pro sua vita, Older Brother’s self-important and grandiloquent expression of his lofty ideals spills over into comic pastiche, and his laments about the failure of the commune emphasise his own unwillingness to take any responsibility for its collapse. While he bemoans various problems with his plan’s execution – particularly his poor choice of volunteers for the first wave of settlers – he refuses to admit any error and stands by his principles." Read the rest here.

Don't Trust the Writer

2011-11-10T04:52:00.001+11:00

Joseph McElroy (author of Night Soul and Other Stories) has written a short piece on why he refuses to answer questions about where he gets his ideas from; it's a wonderful antidote to most writers's thoughts on this topic, and not only does he (correctly, in my opinion) argue that authors don't understand were there work comes from, but also offers a fairly interesting conception of what a good story should do:

"What can happen? my stories ask, as I ask of my life and yours. Not only what did happen, but mainly: What can happen? A story about a boomerang thrower in Paris, or a story about a father and his infant son in his crib in the dark making sounds that the father begins to make sense of during three successive desert nights. What can happen? Sometimes I’ll read just the beginning of a story to an audience and ask where it could go from there. But the writer is mainly invisible, and the story stands on its own between the reader and the writer and would have to be about both if we could only know, but stands on its own and belongs to the reader and in the great differences among the stories in my book Night Soul might even sometimes suggest to you the reader how to read it."

Struggling through Peter Nadas's Parallel Stories

2011-11-08T14:49:00.003+11:00

Peter Nadas's 1138-page novel Parallel Stores was published by Farrar Straus and Giroux at the end of October, and it's being touted, by its publishers at least, as a Proustian "masterwork" of world literature, much in the way that Roberto Bolano's 2666 (not coincidentally also published by FSG) was back in 2008. The novel took Nadas seventeen years to write, and was another four in translation, so it has been germinating for a long time. The book has also begun to receive some glowing reviews (see here, here and here). Before talking a little more about why I think there's good reason to be skeptical of these claims, I want to note two things: 1) there are some absolutely brilliant moments in the book (the opening forty pages, in particular, are excellent), and 2) I actually have only read about 400 pages of it. I realize that point #2 should disqualify me from making any comment at all, but I think there are very specific local issues with the book, and I haven't yet seen these noted in detail, although Scott Esposito's post at Conversational Reading does deal with many of the other problems (and this post is also meant to serve as an explanation of why I am unlikely to finish the book).

Parallel Stories does many things well: its ability to shift between perspectives and characters, often across decades, in a single sentence is impressive and effective, even if it isn't particularly inventive or new (these kinds of shifts, to my mind, are pretty much the stock gesture of what we conceive of as literary Modernism, as evidenced in Joyce, Faulkner, Proust, Woolf, etc., etc.). Moreover, Nadas does a good job of creating a consistently tense atmosphere, and his psychological evocation of characters, particularly the young Dohring and Gyongyver, are also wonderfully evoked, if also heavily indebted to the Modernist psychological novel [Added later: yes, I just said that an "evocation" is "wonderfully evoked," proving that this editor needs an editor]. But the problems with the book are legion and, to my mind, fairly obvious.

Despite all of the brilliant bits in the book, there's basically just no excuse for passages like this: "To this day, he urinated like a little boy. He did not pull back his wrinkly, unusually long, funnel-shaped and pointy foreskin from his bulb, and when he finished he barely shook his member, letting some of the fluid be smeared on his fingers. He'd dig in with his fingers between his thighs under the testicles, where he always found for himself some worthy odor. Only rarely did he risk invading the cheeks of his buttocks to touch the crimped edge of his contracted anus. Perhaps to rub it just a little bit, to reach into it, as an experiment. But it did happen on occasion. The various odors nicely mingled on his fingers where he preserved them for the rest of the day. He saved them for the night, when he would have unhindered access to his body, though he had to be on his guard in the bluish light of the dormitory, listen for and follow with open eyes every little stirring [...]When he couldn't tuck his weenie between his thighs, or couldn't touch it, not even through his pants, because in the boarding school everybody was watching everybody else all the time, he consoled himself with these odors. And this remained the same later too, with his cock, though its odor had become more penetrating."

One's ability to enjoy Parallel Stories is predicated on whether or not you find this kind of writing revelatory, especially since such passages appear on virtually every other page.

Look, I'm not trying to be a prude here--I like Swift's scatological poems, and Joyce's Ulysses and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, which both have passages that deal with similar, uh, material--but the frequent passages like the above seem indicative of a kind of facile Freudianism (one that's unfair to Freud), which permeates Parallel Stories. One review of the novel, which annoyingly praises Parallel Stories for its "almost Facebook-like approach" also claims that what is remarkable about the book is how it makes "you painfully more aware of your physical body." Although I suspect this was Nadas's intent, I don't think it justifies the ceaseless repetition of passages like the above, and, moreover, the fact is that Nadas's focus on the body, with a few exceptions, is almost always scatological; in this sense, the book actually ignores most of the body in order to focus on a specific set of bodily processes.

I generally like long and "difficult" books, but there's a danger in calling every long and difficult book brilliant simply because of its length and difficulty. Parallel Stories is not a disaster on the level of Harold Brodkey's Runaway Soul, but neither is it a book on par with The Recognitions or 2666. Like many other long books that display brilliance, but aren't complete successes--and I'm thinking of books like William Gass's The Tunnel and Joshua Cohen's Witz, which both veer between the enlightened and the simply tedious--there's no point in attempting to ignore Parallel Stories' significant flaws. And, to me, viewing such work uncritically also gives ammunition to those anti-intellectual readers who believe only pretentious snobs enjoy reading "difficult" books...

Anyway, I am still hoping to finish Parallel Stories, but given my experience thus far, it's probably something I will return to now and then over the course of the next year, rather than feeling compelled to read all of it at once.

Sergio De La Pava's A Naked Singularity Gets Republished!

2011-09-30T11:01:00.001+10:00

I heard some great news today: Sergio De La Pava's brilliant novel A Naked Singularity, which was originally self-published, has apparently been picked up by the University of Chicago Press for re-publication next year. As I've argued in the past, this is a brilliant novel by an incredible novelist, and it is wonderful to see De La Pava starting to get the recognition that he deserves. Read my review of the book here.

New Interview with Sergio De La Pava

2011-09-22T09:27:00.000+10:00

Sergio De La Pava has just given an interview over at the consistently brilliant 21C Magazine, and, for those who are monolingual, it is even in English, this time. In my opinion, De La Pava is one of the most interesting novelists working in English, and the interview/article is a good introduction to his brilliant long novel, A Naked Singularity. Read the interview here.

On Recognition

2011-08-30T14:28:00.000+10:00

“Given that the thymos that has been conditioned bycivilization is the psychological location of what Hegel depicted as a strivingfor recognition, it becomes clear why the lack of recognition byrelevant others excites rage. If one demands recognition from a specificopponent, one stages a moral test. If the other who is addressed rejects thistest, she needs to deal with the rage of the challenger, who feelsdisrespected. Rage occurs first when the recognition from the other is denied(which leads to extroverted rage). However, rage also flourishes if I deny recognition to myself in light of my value ideas (so that Ihave reason to be angry with myself). According to Stoic philosophy, whichsituated the struggle for recognition fully inside the human psyche, the wiseperson is supposed to be satisfied with self-respect, first, because theindividual in no way has control of the judgment of the other and, second,because she who is knowledgeable will strive to keep herself free from allthat does not depend on herself.

Usually the thymotic impulse is connected to the wish to findone's self-worth resonating in the other. This desire couldeasily be an instruction manual for teaching oneself to become unhappy, one with a universal success rate if it were notfor those dispersed cases of successful mutual recognition. Lacan probably saidwhat is necessary concerning the profound idea that there is a groundingmirroring process, even though his models, probably unjustly, situate earlyinfantile conditions at the center of investigation. In reality, life in frontof the mirror is more of a children's disease. But among adults the strivingfor reflection in the recognition of others often means the attempt to takepossession of a will-o'-the-wisp—in philosophical jargon: to instantiate oneselfin what is insubstantial."

--Peter Sloterdijk, Rage and Time

Book Review: The Land at the End of the World

2011-08-05T13:07:00.002+10:00

The Land at the End of the World
By Antonio Lobo Antunnes
W. W. Norton

The Land at the End of the World is a new translation of the second novel by António Lobo Antunes, generally regarded as Portugal’s most important living novelist. Published in his native country as Os Cus de Judas in 1979, this is a key book in Antunes’s oeuvre, for the simple reason that it describes his own autobiographical experience as a medic during Portugal’s war with Angola in the early 1970s; the evocations of the unimaginable brutality that Antunes witnessed in that conflict help explain the notorious pessimism and darkness of his later works, such as Acts of the Damned (1985). Read More over at Readings' Website...

Sergio De La Pava Interview

2011-07-21T12:35:00.004+10:00

I missed this a few weeks ago, but Sergio De La Pava has given his first-ever interview--which is great news, except for the fact that the article's in Spanish. That being said, even those with limited Spanish (like me) should be able to muddle through--or you can always just use Google's translate function, which will give you 90% of the sense (though not the tone). My favourite bit: when De La Pava (whose novels are self-published) is asked about the publishing industry, he replies by saying (roughly): "I don't understand--are you telling me that there are companies who will pay writers to publish their books? (ha ha)."

(N.B. I found out about this through the excellent blog, Conversational Reading, which, really, is a site worth visiting on a daily basis...)

Lost: The Lost Scrapbook

2011-07-07T00:51:00.001+10:00

Lost Classics: The Recognitions

2011-05-31T09:19:00.001+10:00

The Recognitions

By William Gaddis

I’ll note this from the outset: not only is William Gaddis’s The Recognitions (1955) my favourite novel of all time, but also it is, in my opinion, the best U.S. novel written after 1950. Although the works of Gaddis, who died in 1998, have belatedly started to get some of the, uh, recognition they deserve, his books are still too infrequently read by the larger public. And to be fair, there are some legitimate reasons for this: The Recognitions is 956-pages long. Much of the writing in it is what would be considered difficult (inspiring Jonathan Franzen’s essay ‘Mr. Difficult’ about Gaddis), and it’s the kind of book wherein the punch-lines to jokes are quite literally withheld for hundreds of pages. It is also perhaps the funniest, most inventive and most beautiful book I have ever read.

The novel does, however, have a plot; The Recognitions is the story of an extremely talented young artist, Wyatt Gwyon, who, after receiving a terrible review of his first painting exhibition (for the reason that he refused to pay the critic to write a good review), becomes a professional art forger, counterfeiting the works of the old Flemish masters for a shadowy international ring of criminal art dealers. While the book includes an enormous and encyclopaedic set of references to other topics, including the history of Christianity and pagan religions, alchemy, the Faust myth, and huge array of other characters and subplots, it is first and foremost a satire of the Greenwich Village art world in the 40s and 50s. The book contains long party scenes full of young ‘hip’ artists who are basically unbearable people, and its riotous skewering of bourgeois bohemians is, if anything, more relevant today than it ever has been.

At the same time, it is also full of beautiful passages of moving writing, such as this short line about a young married couple venturing off on a cruise-ship for the first time: ‘Nevertheless, they boarded the Purdue Victory and sailed out of Boston harbor, provided against all the inclemencies but these they were leaving behind, and those disasters of such scope and fortuitous originality which Christian courts of law and insurance companies, humbly arguing ad hominem, define as acts of God.’

When Gaddis published the book in 1955 at the age of 33, he had high hopes that it would establish his reputation as a writer, and, as he later stated: ‘I almost think that if I'd gotten the Nobel Prize when The Recognitions was published I wouldn't have been terribly surprised.’ But the tepid response meant that Gaddis returned to work in advertising and corporate speechwriting, and his book dwelled in obscurity for more than twenty years. In the interim, his reputation was buoyed by a book entitled, Fire the Bastards! by Jack Green, which sought to demonstrate that almost all of the 55 contemporary reviews of The Recognitions demonstrated obvious errors (and that most reviewers hadn’t even finished reading the book!). Gaddis later won the National Book Award in 1976 for his second novel, JR, and enjoyed some small fame and recognition.

But in many ways, this history is fitting for a book that is very much about artists who don’t get recognised and the final lines of the novel, which describe the fate of the work of a composer who dies in the collapse of a building, are often taken as fitting description of Gaddis’s own reception: ‘most of his work was recovered too, and it is still spoken of, when it is noted, with high regard, though seldom played.’

To put it simply, if you haven’t read The Recognitions, then you’re simply missing the best that 20th Century literature has to offer.

Book Review: Personae

2011-05-24T09:58:00.000+10:00

Personae

By Sergio De La Pava

Last year I reviewed Sergio De La Pava’s brilliant, 689-page, self-published novel A Naked Singularity, a wonderful book that blends the crime thriller with the ‘postmodern’ literary novel (eg. Pynchon, Wallace). This month, however, De La Pava has released his second book, Personae, which is much slimmer at around two hundred pages, and is also a genre-jumping work that proves A Naked Singularity was no fluke.

Personae begins in the mode of a crime novel. We are told that the book comprises the police report of one Helen Tame, who we quickly learn is no ordinary detective. As a former world-class concert pianist, who has a nigh-supernatural ability to turn virtually invisible (a feat she accomplishes due to a mastery of arcane physical properties of light and acoustics), Tame only works unusual cases that have not been solved through normal means.

In this instance, Tame is called to a crime scene involving the suspicious death of a very old man, and she comes into possession of a series of unusual manuscripts that appear to have been authored by the deceased. But while this set-up is wonderful and Tame is a fabulous character who could easily occupy a novel of many hundred pages, Personae unexpectedly swerves in another direction. We leave Tame’s narrative, and are suddenly given the contents of the manuscripts, which wander across various forms and genres, including a series of notes and errata (including an extended critique of the English-translation of Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude) a modernist-style short story (‘The Ocean’) whose attention to detail is reminiscent of Virginia Woolf, an absurdist two-act play (‘Personae’) that recalls Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, and a novella (‘Energeias’) that alternates between two different storylines, as well as a variety of pieces of newspaper articles, essays and the like.

If this sounds a bit unusual, it is. But Personae’s charm lies precisely in this unceasing variation, which is very much intentional. The book makes continual references to Bach’s Goldberg Variations, which clearly provides the form for the relentless innovation of this novel, which also contains a recurring leitmotif: Personae is very much an elegiac novel, which focuses on the notions of grief and death (which, in retrospect, is no surprise for those who have read De La Pava’s brilliant essay, ‘A Day’s Sail’, on Virginia Woolf, boxing and death over at Triple Canopy).

The variations are all entertaining, although they might throw some readers who were expecting Personae to repeat the pulse-raising narrative of A Naked Singularity. In particular, I suspect that two sections of the book (the two-act play and a later moment that recounts what appears to be a conversation between a man and the devil) will frustrate readers who are allergic to characters discussing lofty philosophical issues (although De La Pava specifically ironises such a reaction at one point in the text). But, to be honest, that’s their loss: the pleasure of Personae lies precisely in the joy of tracking both the similarities and the disjunctures between each iteration of the novel (and it also demonstrates the virtuosity of De La Pava’s writing), and while it’s inevitable that some sections may work better than others, at its best Personae is as good as any contemporary writing coming out of the U.S.

Moreover, the book slowly reveals itself to have a deep, emotional centre which also touches on the issue of what it means to behave ethically in the world. The way in which De La Pava handles this slow transformation is absolutely masterful, as we being to realise that the book we are reading is actually very different from the book we thought we were reading (and I can’t say any more for fear of ruining the surprises), and it ends with a moment of beauty that recalls the final aria of Bach’s composition.

Personae is another excellent book by De La Pava that demonstrates once again that he is one of the most dynamic and important younger novelists coming out of the U.S. But while Personae reveals this talent, it is also essential to note that, in many ways, it is an (intentionally) difficult book, and perhaps even more challenging than A Naked Singularity (despite being less than a third of its length). Indeed, I wish that more novelists had even half of the ambition and talent that De La Pava does.

For readers interested in an unusual and unforgettable experience, Personae presents a rewarding challenge and is already one of the most intriguing and brilliant novels I’ve read all year. This is a beautifully written work that I’ll keep thinking about for some time to come, and as soon as I finished the book, I immediately wanted to read it again—and I can’t think of any higher praise than that.

Read an excerpt from the book and buy Personae here.

This review initially aired on Triple R’s Breakfasters.

Book Review: The Easy Chain

2011-05-11T08:56:00.000+10:00

The Easy Chain

By Evan Dara

Aurora Publishing, 2008

With recent publication of David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel The Pale King, there’s been a lot written about Wallace’s legacy, and he’s usually portrayed as both a literary genius and a ‘strikingly original’ voice (to use the language of book review-ese). While I’d agree that Wallace was a phenomenal writer, I’m less convinced of his uniqueness, given the presence of many living U.S. authors who have written similarly experimental novels of exceptional merit that have remained lesser known for the simple reason that their work often just hasn’t gotten the same kind of press. Chief among this group of excellent but underrated U.S. writers is Evan Dara, whose first novel, The Lost Scrapbook, was published in 1996, the same year as Infinite Jest.

To be fair there are legitimate reasons why Dara hasn’t become a household name. Number one on this list would be Dara’s own strictly enforced anonymity: Evan Dara is, in fact, a pseudonym, and no-one knows any biographical details about the writer behind Dara’s books, except for the fact that he lived in Paris at some point. Moreover, after the release of The Lost Scrapbook, nothing more was heard from Dara for twelve years, until his second book, The Easy Chain, appeared in 2008. Further adding to the enigma of Dara is the fact that his book was published by Aurora Publishers, a company that Dara appears to have set up himself, and which only publishes his books (So far anyway. Since 2009, the Aurora website has claimed it will publish translations of two Italian novels, but they have not appeared, and I can find no information about either the authors or their translators anywhere on the internet—although to be fair, there is still information that exceeds Google’s grasp).

The plot of The Easy Chain is (relatively) easy to describe: Lincoln Selwyn, a young Englishman who’s been raised in Belgium, arrives in Chicago and quickly climbs the social ladder to become one of the most influential people in the city, but he just as suddenly disappears, leaving no trace of his whereabouts. If that synopsis sounds straightforward, the book is anything but. Its first 200 pages detail the rise of Selwyn, but this is all related through the gossip of those who knew him and rendered in unattributed dialogue; the speakers all note Lincoln’s incredible charisma, describing him as ‘superluminous in a way. He takes you in at a shake, and at the first trespassing of fingertips you’re instantaneous old friends’. At page 207, this stream of discourse suddenly stops and is followed by 42 nearly blank pages of text (I suspect it’s this gesture that would’ve sent most publishers running for the hills).

The gap in the text replicates Lincoln’s disappearance; since he has gone the gossip about him also ceases, but it also reflects a larger formal strategy in the book. The Easy Chain makes several references to the notion of ‘negative space’—a concept from visual art that refers to the space around and between the subject of a drawing or painting. The novel reflects this technique—giving us not the ‘story’ of Lincoln but a series of details around it from which the narrative itself can be inferred. Indeed, we as readers never really get to know Lincoln, who, despite being the protagonist of the book, has all of the substance of a rumour even after 500 pages. That Dara is able to achieve this effect and still make the book compelling is a testament to his incredible skill.

The rest of the book offers a set of intriguing and unexpected detours, from a seemingly factual essay on the corporate control of public water in Chicago to what appears to be the undertaking of a terrorist attack on a significant local landmark, as well as 60-odd pages of repetitive text that’s formatted like lines of poetry. But these twists and turns all pale in comparison to the final part of the book, which offers the monologue of a man being interrogated under (apparently) violent circumstances: this section is a mind-bending display of sheer linguistic virtuousity and also comprises some of the funniest writing I have ever read (if in a dark and twisted way). While this is a book whose narrative is intentionally never resolved (much like Infinite Jest), the last section does introduce a character—the daughter of the interrogated man—who suffers from autism and whose disconnection from the world serves as a foil to Lincoln’s uncanny ability to form an instantaneous emotional connection with every single person he meets.

While The Easy Chain is not an easy book by any stretch of the imagination, it’s also a book whose strange detours are not arbitrary, but rather part and parcel of a carefully planned and executed formal principle. This is also true of Dara’s first novel, The Lost Scrapbook, which spends hundreds of pages seemingly meandering between unrelated narratives (with transitions that confusingly occur mid-sentence), before the reader realises that all of these stories are linked by one traumatic event that connects an entire community. And, moreover, for all of their formal innovation, Dara’s novels are both exceptionally funny and surprisingly warm and human; one never gets the sense that his experimentation is simply an exercise in technique for technique’s sake.

Simply put, Evan Dara’s The Easy Chain is without a doubt, my favourite book that I’ve read in 2011, and in my (not very) humble opinion, Dara is the best-kept secret in all of contemporary American literature today. His highly conceptual but beautifully written novels compare favourably to the best work of William Gaddis (who also gets a passing mention in The Pale King), and I’d argue that readers who enjoys Wallace’s work would be doing themselves a disservice not to read Dara’s work. The only caution regarding The Easy Chain I might add is this: those who haven’t read Dara before might find that it’s best to start off by reading the slightly more accessible The Lost Scrapbook first to become accustomed to his style, but anyone who reads either book will discover perhaps the most interesting author writing in English today.

You can purchase The Easy Chain from the website of Aurora Publishers: www.aurora148.com.

This review initially aired on Triple R’s Breakfasters.

Thomas Pynchon's Fingers

2011-05-07T10:43:00.000+10:00

So, here's Thomas Pynchon's fingers forming (appropriately) a V in the back of this photo, which comes from an interesting story about him in the LA Times.

The Inhuman

2011-05-04T16:08:00.000+10:00

'The emancipation of the subject in art is the emancipation of art's own autonomy; if art is freed from consideration of its recipient, its sensual facade becomes increasingly a matter of indifference. The facade is transformed into a function of the content, which derives its force from what is not socially approved and prearranged. Art is spiritualized not by the ideas it affirms but through the elemental--the intentionless--that is able to receive the spirit in itself; the dialectic of the elemental and spirit is the truth content. Aesthetic spirituality has always been more compatible with the fauve, the savage, than with what has already been appropriated by culture. Spiritualized, the artwork becomes in itself what was previously attributed to it as its cathartic effect on another spirit: the sublimation of nature. The sublime, which Kant reserved exclusively for nature, later became the historical constituent of art itself. The sublime draws the demarcation line between art and what was later called arts and crafts . Kant covertly considered art to be a servant. Art becomes human in the instant in which it terminates this service. Its humanity is incompatible with any ideology of service to humankind. It is loyal to humanity only through inhumanity toward it.'
--Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, pp. 196-7.

Literary Links: A Brief History of the Future

2011-04-29T11:46:00.002+10:00

• Here’s an awesome video of what people in 1994 thought the future of tablet computing would like (via dvice). Surprisingly, it looks like . . . a tablet:

• Sergio De La Pava's second novel, Personae, is out now! It appears to be another (very, very literary) take on the crime novel, with the book comprising an extremely unusual police report. Read a sample and then buy the book!
• Over at one of my favourite literary blogs, Conversational Reading, Scott Esposito takes apart a (very) bad review of Wallace’s The Pale King, but also offers a great incidental discussion of the too-limited way in which reviewers discuss a book’s ‘emotional content’: ‘Why impoverish the idea of emotionality in literature by pigeonholing it into something like “a round character whose pain you can identify with”? To take just one example, I find Sebald to be an amazingly emotional read for the fact that he so expertly evokes the sensation of nostalgia (among others), despite having nothing resembling conventional “emotionality” in any of his books. Even if you were to admit that Wallace was cerebral to the point of ignoring character–and anyone who has read him at all knows that’s not the case–there are other ways his books could have been emotional.’

• Overland on why we should read more literature in translation. Here’s one reason: it tends to be way better than the stuff that passes for literature in the Anglophone world. Oh, and you might learn something about other cultures, too.

• Penguin has introduced a new crowd-sourcing service (which is masquerading as a social-networking site). What is crowd-sourcing, you ask? Well, read Jenny Lee’s great (and appropriately critical) article on the subject.

• Who knew Samuel Beckett was a PR machine?

• Lastly, we’re starting to get some interesting data on price and sales of ebooks on the Kindle. Quick quiz: which band had the highest growth since December? Answer: books under $2.99. Ah, yes, glad to see that the agency model is ‘working’ (if by ‘working’ you mean sacrificing market share to new players in the market). I’ve just written an article on this subject that should be out later this year, so I don’t want to say too much, but we’re going to start hearing a lot more about this soon, and it’s not going to be pretty . . .

I'd Rather Be Clogging

2011-04-28T14:46:00.000+10:00

Literature Is Not a Genre: On the Miles Franklin and Literary Merit

2011-04-22T11:35:00.006+10:00

Most Australian bookshops have a ‘literature’ section, which has always struck me as a bit odd (most bookstores in the U.S. put all of their general trade fiction together, but have separate sections for ‘genre’ writing like SF and Crime etc.) since, while it seems to reflect the traditional high culture vs. low culture divide, all it really does is effectively ghetto-ise those works marketed as ‘literature’. Not only do I suspect this practice is bad for sales of ‘literary’ works, but also I strongly object to the notion that literature is a genre.

On a practical level, publishers do think of a literature as a genre—specifically as a genre that sells poorly—and I suspect that it is for this reason that so much trade ‘literary’ fiction is so very boring: it has been edited (and often written) in order to be accessible to the market (or, more specifically, to what publishers think the market wants—which ignores the fact that publishers are notoriously incorrect about what the market wants, given the standard claim that 80% of all titles will lose money or break even, while the remaining 20% of titles will generate all of the profit). I suspect, to appropriate—and possibly misuse—a suggestion Mark Davis makes in Gangland, that many publishers also presume the public is dumber than it really is (which is to say that certain pernicious forms of cultural elitism can result as much from cynicism as anything else), and one of the great successes of ‘genre’ writing over the last several decades has been the ability to write into a genre precisely by subverting the rules of that genre in productive ways (see, for example Rjurik Davidson’s great article on science fiction from Overland).

But the truth of the matter is that literature as literature bears no relation to the form of the ‘literary novel’ that seems to circulate in Australia (usually a realist novel that more or less feels like a formal implementation of E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel). Indeed, work in any genre can be literature, including essays (Montaigne and Joan Didion), philosophy (e.g. Soren Kierkegaard and Simone Weil), speculative fiction (Neil Stephenson and Ursula K. Le Guin), crime (a genre that many trace back to Edgar Allan Poe!), or any other type of text that includes letters and words.

I’m not making this point to the argue that the novel is ‘dead’ (it’s not dead, but it is a form that is no longer predominant in our culture, which is, as far as I can see, something that will not change anytime soon), but rather to point out the problem with prizes like the Miles Franklin (which is currently being accused of sexism after its second all-male shortlist in three years. This angle to the story has already been aptly covered by Jo Case, Alison Croggon and many others) is that they tend to presume a unitary definition of literature that is based on little more than a set of particular cultural practices. Ultimately, these kinds of awards don’t tell us anything about literature as a space of potential, and everything about how our culture (or at least our cultural gatekeepers) values literature.

I’m not interested in criticizing either the Miles Franklin judges or nominees (in fact, I know one of the nominees and would be very pleased to see him win the award on a personal level), but, and this needs to be clear, literary awards bear no relationship whatsoever to that thing called ‘literary merit’. The dream of ‘merit’ is always a right-wing dream, since ‘merit’ is presupposed regardless of the real-world inequalities that, as any sociologist can tell you, shape our world; the future education-level and wealth of children is still most likely to equal that of their parents. Merit, if it exists, is to be found in the next world (if it exists), not in this one.

Books are commodities, pure and simple. Ninety-nine percent of all publishers publish books because they think those books will sell, not because of their ‘literary merit’. The notion of literary merit is a marketing strategy. This doesn’t mean that books can’t mean things to people, too (I think Marx would see this as the difference between exchange value and use value), but to think that books are not part of the world and subject to the same kinds of inequalities as the rest of the world is at best naïve and at worst pernicious. It is no longer enough for institutions like the Miles Franklin—or any other institution—to offer apologetics for exclusionary practices through recourse to simple claims of literary merit (and, to be clear, I’m not claiming that all books are equal; indeed, if all books are equal, then I would have to argue that some books are more equal than others). Disputes such as the current one over the Miles Franklin’s all-male shortlist, rather, should be viewed as opportunities to re-interrogate the way these elite, cultural institutions value literature, and, more specifically, what kinds of literature it is that they value.

Early in 2010, Jacinda Woodhead wrote an essay about the need to incorporate other kinds of voices into literary culture, which also argues that the formal qualities of such diverse writing might need to be different. I think she points to an essential intolerance of formal differences in Australian literary writing. In Kalinda Ashton’s long and interesting interview about political fiction last year, she noted that, while she had never been censored or edited due to political content, per se, writers are ‘much more likely to hear qualms about experimental forms’. My argument is that this suspicion of new or different forms in Australian literature is, in fact, a means of maintaining the status quo and keeping other kinds of difference (whether based on economic status, gender, culture, ethnicity, etc.) out of Australian literature.

It’s interesting to note in this context that Modernism (which is often portrayed as exclusively white, bourgeois and male) was a formally experimental shift in literature that also included a very large number of first-rate female authors, such as Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, Hilda Doolittle, Mina Loy, Katherine Mansfield, Rebecca West and Djuna Barnes. I’d suggest that part of this is attributable to the fact that, in its formal invention, Modernism (to a small degree) opened a window for other forms of expression to enter into the notion of the literary, which resulted in a greater (though still insufficient) diversity of writers. Unlike for the Modernists, however, the current problem isn’t one of staid Victorian aesthetics, but rather of a market tyranny that convinces cultural gatekeepers that a work can be literary only if it is truly boring (i.e. follows established formulas).

I do believe in the power of literature, but this is because of the open space that literature provides: the potential of language, through highly charged rhetoric, to bring newness into the world. The limitless, inexhaustible possibilities of language enacted in literature remain, quite simply, one of the greatest collective achievements of humanity (but not because it reveals ‘universal, human truths’ and, in fact, quite the opposite: literature, by being language, has the possibility to exceed the limits of the human, a possibility that we experience every time we read a book from the distant past—which is to say, when we speak with the dead). But this possibility rests on the requirement that the notion of literature should not be reified, restricted and limited according to the dictates of an elite institution, a national culture or—worst of all—market mechanisms. The exclusion of new forms of literature is everyone's loss.

Book Review: The Pale King

2011-04-19T08:49:00.000+10:00

The Pale King

By David Foster Wallace

Today on Triple R's Breakfasters I reviewed David Foster Wallace's The Pale King. You can read the opening below, but you'll need to click on the link at the end to read the rest over at the Readings website:

In 2008, David Foster Wallace committed suicide, leaving behind a partially completed novel that has now been published under the title The Pale King. Michael Pietsch, who edited The Pale King, discusses the process of compiling the book in a detailed introduction and establishes from the outset that this is an incomplete work; indeed, the tag-line ‘an unfinished novel’ is given a prominent position on the title page. And the book itself makes good on that promise: the text of The Pale King doesn’t end so much as it simply ceases, followed by a series of Wallace’s notes and errata that suggest how the rest of the book might have turned out . . . (Click here to read the whole review).

Book Review: I Hate Martin Amis et al.

2011-04-12T09:41:00.001+10:00

I Hate Martin Amis Et Al.

By Peter Barry

Transit Lounge

Peter Barry’s I Hate Martin Amis et al., is an unusual debut novel that combines irreverent humour with brutal depictions of war and musings on literary history. The protagonist of the novel, Milan Zorec, is an Englishman born to Serbian parents. Although Zorec had trained to become a teacher, he has spent most of his life working as a school janitor and writing four novels in his spare time—all of which have been rejected by every publisher and literary agent he’s sent them to. Zorec’s life falls apart in England when his girlfriend leaves him and, after a brief stint in prison, he decides to head to Bosnia and join Serbian forces as a sniper (at the height of the Bosnian conflict in 1998)—but Zorec’s enlistment is instigated less by nationalist pride or filial piety than by the thought that his wartime experiences will provide the unique experiences needed to enable him to write a successful novel.

Much of the novel derives its interest from this disjuncture: while Zorec encounters untold horrors in Bosnia, he always considers these events with the detachment of someone who sees them as the raw materials for his future novel. And as the plot unfurls it becomes clear that Zorec—despite being in many regards a pathetic figure—is a deeply unlikeable figure who in most regards is completely responsible for his own fate. This fact becomes even clearer as Zorec slowly discovers that he’s actually a more than competent soldier who experiences little difficulty killing unarmed civilians in the service of a cause that he doesn’t even believe in.

Despite its dark subject matter, however, I Hate Martin Amis et al. is also a comic novel, and Barry shows a particular facility for absurd similes, such as when he writes, ‘The moon was looming over the horizon, huge, like one of those cheap paper lams with which students like to furnish their digs,’ or ‘Like a leaf in autumn, like a sunbaker on the beach, like a Rottweiler, like a worm, she turned.’ And Barry also successfully handles the transition of Zorec from a mildly unlikable schlub into a remorseless killer.

But I Hate Martin Amis et al. is also about the frustrations of a rejected author and finds considerable humour at the expense of publishers and literary agents. It also reflects on literary history, and contains many references to Martin Amis’s novel, The Information, which is a book about a literary feud (and a book that is also highly in the debt of another, much better book—Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire); by and large these references to Amis work well (although I must note in passing that The Information is, without a doubt, the worst book by an author—Amis—who consistently writes terrible books (presumably in the spare time he finds in between making comments that many have deemed racist)). All in all, I Hate Martin Amis et al. is an enjoyable, unusual and generally successful first novel.

Book Review: The Art and Craft of Approaching Your Head of Department to Submit a Request for a Raise

2011-04-05T13:39:00.000+10:00

The Art and Craft of Approaching Your Head of Department to Submit a Request for a Raise

By Georges Perec

Vintage

Georges Perec’s 112-page novella, The Art and Craft of Approaching Your Head of Department to Submit a Request for a Raise, was originally published in an academic journal in France in 1969, but has just been released in English translation for the first time. It’s a wonderfully strange little book, and one that can’t be understood properly without a little bit of information on its provenance; as translator David Bellos explains in his introduction, a French computer company was searching for artists and writers interested in using computers to advance their artistic practice, and a then largely unknown writer named Georges Perec answered the call.

Perec worked with a computer scientist named Jacques Perriuad, who had developed a flowchart (see image above) on how to ask your boss for a raise that mimicked the algorithmic functions of a computer program; Perec’s novella, then, is a fictional account of the flowchart, in which the protagonist of the book—addressed as ‘you’—is presented with a series of choices about how to approach your boss to ask for a raise. The result is this unusual prose experiment.

Those familiar with Perec’s work, however, won’t be surprised by its formal inventiveness. Perec was a member of the French group, Oulipo (short for Ouvroir de literature potentielle), an acronym that might be best translated into English as the ‘Workshop for Potential Literature’. Oulipo was famous for its use of formal conceits—the best know of which is the so-called ‘lipogram’, in which an author writes with the constraint of not using one letter of the alphabet. Perec, in fact, wrote what is almost certainly the most famous lipogram, called A Void, which is a book that does not contain the letter E.

The Art and Craft of Approaching Your Head of Department to Submit a Request for a Raise is another such experiment, which was written as one continuous block of prose with no punctuation and no capital letters, and rigorously follows all of the steps one would have to go through to get a raise—which is sort of like the effect of writing a choose-your-own-adventure novel in which every possible outcome is simultaneously explored. Perec of course, raises this quest to the level of complete absurdity, as various events get in the way, such as your boss being unavailable as a result of having eaten rotten eggs, having swallowed a fishbone or having come down with a wildly infectious case of the measles that requires medical quarantine. The use of humour in the book stops the novella from simply becoming an exercise in pure formalism; the strange structure produces an unusual and striking new form of literature.

Those with even a slight interest in experimental, mind-expanding literature will find much to love in The Art and Craft of Approaching Your Head of Department to Submit a Request for a Raise, which is a book that operates on principles wildly different from almost any other written work of literature (excepting perhaps Jorge Luis Borges’s famous, ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’—a story about a book that very much resembles this novella), and is indubitably a minor classic written by one of the most important French authors of the last fifty years.

Book Review: Blue Skies

2011-03-29T09:38:00.003+11:00

Blue Skies

By Helen Hodgman

Text Publishing

The narrator of Helen Hodgman’s Blue Skies is a young, suburban housewife in Tasmania suffering from unbearable boredom, or as she terms it the ‘numberless days when the clock always said three in the afternoon, no matter what you did to it’. Little relief is provided by her husband, James, one of whose chief attributes, according to the narrator, is that he ‘had been the first man to explain the American electoral system clearly to me’. The only release from this tedium comes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when she is able to ditch her infant daughter, Angelica, at her mother-in-law’s house and meet up with one of her two ‘friends’, Jonathan and Ben, with whom she is having an affair.

But if all of this sounds a little bit melodramatic, the fact of the matter is that Blue Skies is very much a dark and twisted comedy; sure, the book does contain murder, suicide, a variety of sexual acts (mostly adulterous), and much more, but these are always delivered through the narrator's dry, affectless tone, which leaves it up to the reader to find the humour. But at the heart of these jokes is very much a pointed satire aimed at a variety of social and political issues.

Indeed, this book was originally published in 1976, but has just been reprinted this year by Text Publishing under the idea that Hodgman’s novel is something of a lost classic (which it, indeed, legitimately is). But what’s most impressive about Blue Skies is just how contemporary it feels, since its satirical critiques are aimed at environmental issues, the social inequality of women and the unjust treatment of Australia’s indigenous peoples. But Hodgman’s treatment of these issues never resorts to simple sloganeering; the narrator’s neighbour attempts to plant English grass in her backyard, for example, but this simple decision gets redescribed in terms that elevate the action to a kind of colonialism: ‘The native grasses rustled and swayed at the edge of this pampered patch. Occasionally it would stake its aboriginal claim to the usurped homeland by launching a seed to fetilise and reclaim a centimetre.’

And for all of the brutish acts committed by men (or the more subtle action of other women, such as the narrator’s mother-in-law, who seek to maintain patriarchal practices), the narrator isn’t represented as an angel either (to put it mildly). And while the novel could easily be read through the lens of feminism or postcolonial theory, the humour and absurdity of the novel means that it never feels like an ideological exercise; Blue Skies is satire, but not satire that can be reduced to a simple, straightforward message. Later this year, Text will republish Hodgman’s second novel, Jack and Jill, but it’s already clear in Blue Skies that Hodgman is an important, Australian author who deserves to be rediscovered by a new generation of readers and writers.

R.I.Y.L. Donald Barthelme's Snow White, Kathy Acker (in her more restrained moments), Feminist Literature with a Wicked Sense of Humour

This review initially aired on Triple R's Breakfasters.

Literary Links: In Which Everything Is Awesome Or Not Awesome

2011-03-24T10:37:00.003+11:00

• The other week, I was complaining about the (in my opinion) absurdity of the arguments advanced by the likes of Nicholas Carr in his book The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember. I had been considering writing a more studied response to this, but – good news! – I don’t have to because the London Review of Books has done it for me. (N.B. I still think the argument that the internet may inhibit creativity, which is advanced at the end of this review, is, in a somewhat complicated way, total crap.)

• As I noted the other week, Sergio De La Pava will soon release his second novel, Personae (which I’m hoping will have awesome references to Ezra Pound and Ingmar Bergman). In the meantime, though, why not read his awesome essay in the also awesome journal, Triple Canopy.

• Sorry, Google, computer says no.

• Here’s a handy scorecard to use when reading any and all articles about the ‘future of publishing’.

• I want these books in Australia. Now. Seriously, dudes. Oh, and here's a slightly creepy dutch video of these books in action. Also, promotional material is here.

• More stuff written by that Roberto Bolano guy.

• Here’s a profile of the publisher at one of my favourite presses in the whole, wide world, The Dalkey Archive. If you aren’t buying their books, then you aren’t reading good books.

• Emerging authors, take heart in your bad reviews!

• Self-publishing on the Kindle is awesome! Self-publishing on the Kindle is not awesome! Self-publishing on the Kindle may or may not be awesome!

2011-03-22T09:14:00.000+11:00

Three Paths to the Lake

By Ingeborg Bachmann

Holmes & Meier

Three Paths to the Lakes was the second and final collection of short stories written by the Austrian author Ingeborg Bachmann and it contains five, loosely connected stories about women in the 1960s. Although Bachmann is still largely unknown amongst Anglophone readers, she remains an important figure in Austrian literature of the 20th Century, not only in terms of her writing, but also as a cultural figure: Bachmann rose to prominence as a poet very quickly (before, in fact, she’d even had a full book of poems published), and became perhaps better known in Austria as a prominent bohemian than a writer. Bachmann also garnered some unwanted publicity due to having several affairs with high-profile authors, including Paul Celan and Max Frisch. And Bachmann’s romantic image was further enhanced by her own unfortunate death from accidental self-immolation resulting from an unextinguished cigarette that set her room on fire while she was sleeping.

But despite the emphasis often placed on her eventful life, Bachmann’s own fame rightfully stems from the simple fact that she was a phenomenal prose stylist, who has had a profound influence on several generations of Austrian writers (indeed, one of the most prestigious prizes for German-language literature is named after her), and Three Paths to the Lake demonstrates her mature style. All of the stories discuss women who feel isolated from the world around them in different ways. The first story, ‘Word for Word’, tells the story of a young interpreter who is engaging in an affair but remains incapable of opening herself to emotional intimacy (a fact underscored by her inability to sleep while in the same bed as her beloved); here, Bachmann uses the notion of interpreting between languages as an extended metaphor for the couple’s inability to communicate. In ‘Problems, Problems’, a young woman named Beatrix, who is just able to live on a small amount of money provided by her family, has difficulty envisioning any kind of future direction for her life. In ‘Eyes to Wonder’, Miranda, who suffers from extreme myopia but is too vain to wear the glasses she needs, becomes so concerned that her boyfriend will leave here that she actively works to drive him into the arms of another woman.

But lest readers presume that Bachmann’s stories only discuss the lives of the mildly neurotic middle class, the fourth story, ‘The Barking’—which is the standout of the collection—details the life of an old woman who lives in near-destitution despite the fact her son is a prominent and successful psychiatrist; this beautiful story unfolds as the woman slowly develops a relationship with her son’s new wife, Franziska; the story takes several turns, however, as Franziska begins to realise that her mother-in-law is suffering from severe delusions, and a variety of other tumultuous events occur (and although they are suggested indirectly in the text, they are never fully explicated).

The final story, ‘Three Paths to the Lake’, is about a successful journalist in her fifties who travels home for a brief vacation; despite the seeming simplicity of its premise, however, the story is also very much about World War II and Germany’s subsequent division into two separate states, and we also learn more about the subsequent (and often unhappy) fates of many characters from the previous stories. Bachmann’s Three Paths to the Lake is rightly considered one of the most important works of 20th-Century Austrian literature (no mean feat, given that the country also produced Kafka, Musil, Rilke, Stefan Zweig, Hermann Broch, Thomas Bernhard and Celan among many others, resulting in what is arguably the most interesting literary tradition of any European country in that period), and will, without a doubt, please any reader interested in European literature from the last century.

R.I.Y.L. Austrian Literature, Jenny Erpenbeck's Visitation, the final section of Roberto Bolano's 2666.

This review initially aired on Triple R's Breakfasters.

Book Review: Coda

2011-03-15T09:28:00.000+11:00

Coda

By René Belletto

University of Nebraska Press

Coda is the newest novella (or at least the newest that’s been translated into English) from acclaimed, French author René Belletto, who has written around twenty books, including novels, poetry and criticism, as well as a few screenplays. From the opening pages, we know that Coda is going to be an unusual book, since it’s epigraph, which reads, ‘From her lovely delicate hands/I take the book and I look’, is actually attributed to the very book we are reading. A reader unsettled by this unusual paratext will perhaps be even more alarmed by the exceptional declaration that opens the novel: ‘It is to me that we owe our immortality, and this is the story that proves it beyond all doubt.’

But at the heart of this 88-page novella is a crime thriller—albeit a strange one—that includes suspicious deaths, kidnapping, femme fatales, nefarious cults and psychotic killers. Setting off this most unusual chain of events, however, is a surprisingly banal circumstance: the protagonist returns home to find his daughter missing and a package of clams in his freezer that he does not remember purchasing. This packet of clams turns out to be his first clue in unravelling a great mystery, and more surprises and twists occur in this novella than would normally happen in a book five times its size.

But this, of course, is the point. Despite its flirtations with the mode of the thriller, Coda is ultimately an avant-garde work that betrays an inheritance to the nouveau roman, a post-World War II movement in France that often combined experimental techniques with the detective novel. Coda, then, is laced with intentional absurdity and surreal moments that are reminiscent of the work of Cesar Aira (although it must be said that Coda is not nearly as strong as Aira’s best work). The protagonist is independently wealthy, for example, for the reason that his father invented a ‘perpetual motion machine’; these machines, however, aren’t truly capable of perpetual motion, although their unusual mechanisms are visually intriguing, leading people to purchase them for decorative purposes.

The mystery at the heart of Coda is ultimately ‘solved’, but Belletto leaves other big metaphysical questions intentionally open (I mean this in the most literal possible way, but can’t explain it better without ruining the book), and the final gesture of Coda, befitting its title, is one that returns us to the beginning, making the book a sort of fictional ouroboros. Here, Belletto’s plays with the notion of perpetual motion introduced earlier and raises significant questions about the narratives we tend to construct around our lives.

But for all of its experimentation and madcap absurdity, Coda is, by and large, simply an entertaining book to read (provided, of course, that you aren’t the sort of reader who is put off by experimental, French fiction). For all of its engagement with philosophical concepts (the end of the novel, in particular, seems to recall Blanchot’s writing on death), this is surprisingly light and easy to read novel, which revels in its own pulp-y gestures and strange twists and turns.

Recommended If You Like (R.I.Y.L.): Cesar Aira, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, books by authors associated with the nouveau roman.

This review initially aired on Triple R's Breakfasters program.

Shellac - Dog and Pony Show

2011-03-09T18:37:00.000+11:00

Lost Classics: Stoner

2011-03-08T09:17:00.001+11:00

Stoner

By John Williams

NYRB Classics

This 1965 novel by John Williams (not to be confused with Steven Spielberg’s favourite hack composer)—although never a great commercial success in its own right—has been called a ‘perfect novel’ by The New York Times Book Review, and I couldn’t agree more. Stoner is, without any doubt, one of the best novels I’ve read in the last year, and may well become one of my favourite books, but part of what makes this Williams’s achievement so impressive is that he builds such an exceptional novel out of such unassuming material.

Stoner (no relation whatsoever to the more contemporary use of the term) is about the life of William Stoner, born to poor uneducated farmers in rural Missouri, and Williams even opens the novel by giving us a thumbnail sketch of his life story: ‘William Stoner entered the University of Missouri as a freshman in the year 1910, at the age of nineteen. Eight years later, during the height of World War I, he received his Doctor of Philosophy degree and accepted an instructorship at the same University, where he taught until his death in 1956. He did not rise above the rank of assistant professor, and few students remembered him with any sharpness after they had taken his courses.’

At this opening suggests, Stoner is not a particularly cheery novel, and its melancholy tone and choice of both an unassuming main character and setting may not seem immediately appealing. But Stoner works because of Williams’ precise and often scathing ability to map the emotion of his characters, whose very beings are often laid bare in a single sentence. One woman, for example, is described by noting that ‘Her voice was thin and high, and it held a note of hopelessness that gave a special value to every word she said.’ About another character, Williams writes that ‘Like many men who consider their success incomplete, he was extraordinarily vain and consumed with a sense of his own importance.’

This kind of approach to his characters recalls the wonderfully ambiguity of a book like Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and, like that novel, Stoner is able to enliven the quotidian until it is charged through with significance. Stoner’s often difficult relationships with his wife, his daughter and other members of his department all turn in unexpected ways that make them compelling. And as a character, Stoner, too, remains incredibly interesting despite his often bureaucratic occupation (indeed, I never would’ve thought that departmental meetings could be rendered as such tense and interesting moments in a novel—and I work as an academic!). While at points, his own inability to see the world around him can be maddening, his own bravery and determination at other points are impressive; Williams, himself, explains the paradox of Stoner: ‘He had, in odd ways, given [passion] to every moment of his life, and perhaps it was given most fully when he was unaware of his giving. It was a passion neither of the mind nor of the flesh; rather it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but a matter of love, its specific substance. To a woman or to a poem, it said simply: Look! I am alive.’

In a way, I’ve cheated a bit in this review; I haven’t said much about the plot, and I’ve quoted a good deal of Williams own writing, but that’s the case for two reasons: 1) I really, really, really don’t want to give away any details about this wonderful book and 2) Williams’s writing is the main attraction here. But to sum up, Stoner is a book about a man whose life is simultaneously both destroyed and enlivened by books—a point that the final moment of the novel underlines in what may be the book’s best passage. As it stands, Stoner is a monument to what the traditional, realist novel can still achieve; on the strength of this book, alone, Williams deserves to be known as one of the most interesting writers of the second half of the 20^th Century. This is a book that would very much appeal to fans of Richard Yates (Stoner is similar in style and tone to Yates’s work), and it is an absolutely, indescribably phenomenal book; buy it now, read it and then read it again.

On a final note, it seems likely that John Williams is due for a bit of a revival; another one of his novels—a western entitled Butcher’s Crossing—will be adapted (by Joe Penhall, adapter of The Road) into a movie slated for release in 2013. Sam Mendes—who fittingly directed the film version of Yates’s Revolutionary Road—is apparently attached as the director. Regardless of the quality of the final movie, one can only hope that it will introduce more readers to this woefully overlooked author.

Recommended If You Like (R.I.Y.L.): Flaubert, Richard Yates and Beautifully Written, Depressing, Realist Novels

This review initially aired on Triple R Radio's Breakfaster's program.

LIterary Links: Big News from Dead Authors

2011-03-03T08:08:00.002+11:00

Once again, I'm late with Bolano news. Apparently, Bolano's novel, The Third Reich, will be serialised over four issues of the Paris Review. So, the good news is that there's a new Bolano novel, but the bad news is that you'll have to buy the Paris Review to read it.
Oh yeah, that Patrick White guy also has a new novel coming out. Wow, this has been a prolific few weeks for dead authors.
Harper Collins has written an open letter to librarians about their proposed 26-week licenses for ebooks. First of all, I think it's nice that Harper has decided to write a letter to librarians, because I think librarians would like letters (they seem like the type). Second, if you have no idea what any of this means, you can read this article that explains the background.
OK, so few things annoy me more than the current trend to use neuroscience as the alleged basis to make wild and wholly unsubstantiated claims about anything and everything. Exhibit A is Nicholas Carr's essay 'Is Google Making Us Stupid' (turned into the book The Shallows), which, when interpolated in the larger media, largely seems to offer baby boomers the opportunity not only to argue that younger people are distracted, stupid and lazy, but also that their distractedness, stupidity and laziness can now be scientifically proven. Wonderful. This article--while not attacking this particular form of madness--at least points out how illegitimate many extrapolations from neuroscience are. Which, of course, isn't even to note the possible epistemological limits that may necessarily accompany any scientific study of subjective states of consciousness.
Possible epistemological limits that may necessarily accompany any scientific study of subjective states of consciousness? Say what? Have a read of Thomas Nagel's classic essay 'What Is It Like to Be a Bat?' Be aware that there are like 30 million responses and counter-responses to this (as is the wont of analytic philosophers).
Last week, Kill Your Darlings posted an article on how authors can use the internet to promote themselves successfully. I'll quickly note that I have a real problem with the way these arguments play out; it's not that they're wrong, exactly, but that they tend to be overly enthusiastic and cite the exceptional cases without paying attention to the very details that generally enabled authors to be successful through self-promotion or self-publishing in the first place (kind of like how the whole 'Myspace made Lily Allen famous' meme from many years ago ignored the fact that she has famous parents and thus access to contacts in the industry, which, you know, kinda helps.). Hopefully, I'll have time to write something about this soon.
Jeff Bursey, author of Verbatim (which I'll be reviewing in a few weeks) reviews Thomas Bernhard's My Prizes.

Book Review: This Too Shall Pass

2011-03-02T11:17:00.001+11:00

This Too Shall Pass

By S.J. Finn

Sleepers Publishing

S. J. Finn’s debut novel, This Too Shall Pass, opens with a series of events that appear to let the reader know what kind of novel this will be: the narrator and protagonist, Jen, changes her name to Monty and falls in love with a woman named Renny; this, of course, results in her decision to leave her husband, Dave, who is placed in charge of looking after their six-year-old son, Marcus. Most readers might imagine the novelistic trajectory such an opening suggests—specifically, a narrative about escape from conventional, bourgeois expectations of motherhood and sexuality and the difficulties accompanying any decision to live a life outside of these 'norms'. But while these issues appear in the novel at appropriate points, This Too Shall Pass is something far more unusual and complex than most readers might expect, which, in and of itself, is a testament to Finn’s considerable skill as a writer.

This Too Shall Pass succeeds on the strength of its authorial voice. The entire novel is related by Monty, who has a wry wit and combines high-cultural allusion to Borges, T.S. Eliot and Sylvia Plath with daggy references to lyrics from songs by Ben Lee and Silverchair. Monty also displays a tendency toward lengthy and abstract self-reflection—which makes sense given her profession as a social worker offering therapy and counselling to children at a mental health centre called Marlowe Downs.

More than anything, This Too Shall Pass is a novel about work—which critically examines the difficulties Monty faces as she tries to balance appeasing the complex bureaucracy around her while finding the best outcomes for her patients—and even more specifically about the toll that her commitment to work exacts on those closest to her. Monty’s dedication to Marlowe Downs not only creates significant problems in her new relationship with Renny, but also leaves Monty feeling distant from her son, Marcus. The novel represents this shift on a formal level, as both Renny and Marcus become increasingly peripheral characters in the narrative.

Moreover, for all of Monty’s charm and self-reflection, it’s also clear that she’s often blind to the effect that she has on others’ lives. As frustrating as she finds her ex-husband, Dave, she gives little thought to how her departure has touched him, and often seems to feel as if she is a passenger in her own life, even though many of the troubles she encounters are directly the result of her own decisions. S.J. Finn sets all of this up cleverly in creating an unreliable narrator who is as beguiling as Monty—and it’s to Finn’s credit that she leaves it up to the reader to assess the validity of Monty’s statements. But given Monty’s often-thankless work and the fact that she does care about those in her life, she never becomes unlikeable, but only flawed in an eminently human and understandable way.

This Too Shall Pass is a wonderful curveball of a novel that tackles big issues in an oblique way and also has the courage to wrestle with a particularly important issue that is too often left out of contemporary Australian literature: the workplace. Despite the fact that most of us spend forty hours or more working each week, too often our novelists omits these issues, focusing instead on personal relationships and matters of the heart. I suspect that some reviewers may be confused by the degree to which the domestic themes of the novel’s early pages are pushed to the side, but these omissions are, in fact, both intentional and incredibly effective, and again display Finn’s considerable talent; at virtually every point she seems in complete control of both the narrative and her narrator’s voice.

My only slight qualm comes in the very final moment of the novel, in which Monty offers a retrospective summation that feels a little too neat—but, ultimately, this is the only possibility; Monty’s tendency toward abstract self-analysis and work-driven desire for therapeutic resolution are so strong that she can’t help but attempt to sum-up what she’s learned. In this sense, her final comments display both her growth and the limits of her own self-knowledge.

This Too Shall Pass is a clever and deceptively complicated debut novel. As a novelist, Finn shows incredible control over her authorial voice, an excellent willingness to take risks and a restraint in refusing to spell things out too explicitly for the reader—in this book, what’s been left out becomes every bit as important as what’s been put in. Buy it here.

[CORRECTION: Blarg and double-blarg, after calling this book S.J. Finn's debut, it has come to my attention that she has, in fact, published a previous novel called Fine Salt in 2002. This, kiddies, is why you do your research. Sorry!]

Sergio De La Pava's New Novel

2011-02-25T15:28:00.001+11:00

I've just been informed by De La Pava's publisher that his second novel, currently entitled Personae, will be published "soon", and very likely this Spring (that's the Northern Hemisphere Spring). As anyone who's read his first novel, A Naked Singularity, knows, this is incredibly exciting news--and, in what's already shaping up to be a very strong year for literature, this is easily my most-anticipated book of 2011.

New Bolano Novel Published in Spanish...

2011-02-25T15:20:00.002+11:00

I missed this (apparently it came out earlier this month), but Anagrama has published yet another "novel" found amongst Bolano's papers after his death. Entitled Los Sinsabores del Verdadero Policia (which, in my feeble Spanish, I'd render as something like The Sorrows of Honest Policemen) it's a 300-page book, that, according to what I can understand of the article I read about it (which you can read here, but it's in Spanish), includes such characters from 2666 as Amalfitano and Archimboldi. Apparently the book is part of the material Bolano was writing for 2666, but sits alongside the narrative rather than being part of it (much in the way that Amulet is part of the same story as The Savage Detectives, but still its own novel). Apparently it's very much a novel full of "echoes and self-plagiarism" from Bolano's earlier work, including moments that reference The Savage Detectives, Llamadas Telefonicas (Telephone Calls) and Distant Star. Anyway, I probably won't get to it in Spanish (I had to give up on El Tercer Reich last year--I'm just too slow reading in Spanish), but hopefully it will see an English translation soon enough.

A Brief History of Bespoke Bookselling in New York Circa 1916

2011-02-24T11:31:00.000+11:00

'The [Sunwise Turn] bookstore opened in 1916 on Thirty-first Street just east of Fifth Avenue...The decor was designed by Arthur Davies...who had been a principal organizer of the famous Amoury Show in 1913. Davies colored the walls a "burning orange" and worked the other colors of the prism into the woodwork and detailing...The shop was lavish in displaying "beautiful pieces of sculpture and textiles and paintings"...But the emphasis on display and exhibition also stemmed from less personal considerations. When planning the store, Jenison and Mowbray Clarke had borne in mind "that an art dealer needs only five patrons buying $20,000 a year to keep him afloat, and that if we could have fifty patrons who bought $500 worth of books a year, we would be safe."...But this attempt to assimilate the bookstore to the art gallery, to operate on the principles derived from art dealers, proved difficult in actual practice, for the two owners soon discovered "how few people there are, except collectors, who buy $500 worth of books a year." The shop turned out to be a paradox: a store could not survive if it relied on only "fifty patrons," and yet it also could not survive by selling to a mass of undifferentiated buyers, since the profit margin on books was simply too small (roughly 30 percent at this time). To survive and succeed, the store had to sell other wares (such as stationery), goods with higher profit margins that would offset the low return on books...Jenison discovered through experience that only collectors spend five hundred dollars on books each year and that rare books bring in larger profits; these larger margins were critical to the store's survival and success. The Sunwise Turn, in short, exhibited paintings, textiles, and sculptures for the same reason that it pursued an extensive trade in rare books and signed editions: profit margins on them supplemented the meager returns on ordinary books, and they attracted an elite of cultured well-to-do clients whose every purchase was not only larger but more profitable. To thrive, a bookstore needed not just readers but a core group of collector-patrons.

There was a second reason as well. The display of textiles and artworks also fostered a distinctive marketing profile...Every feature of the store--the decor, the stationery, even the bookwrappings--was marshaled to this end. "The sale of thousands of books strayed into our shop because we wrapped them in curious brilliant packages. Some artists who worked on the designs made them so deliriously lovely that it was difficult to make up one's mind ever to open them." Yet the unremitting emphasis on display and image, as such remarks suggest, could lead to a paradoxical state of affairs, one in which active readers were slowly replaced with passive consumers, mere buyers who were less engaged with a book's contents and more bedazzled by its wrappings. The attention given to rare books and artworks, the insistence on exhibition, display, ambience, packaging--all originally conceived as supplements to the core activity of bookselling--inexorably altered the relations among the store's functions. Buying was no longer a means to an experience of reading but an experience in its own right, an autonomous activity that threatened to overshadow and replace the reading event that it was meant to facilitate.'

--Lawrence Rainey Institutions of Modernism, 66-7.

McSweeneys fans and other print fetishists, take note--you're still living in this contradiction (and I am, too, for that matter).

Book Review: Visitation

2011-02-22T09:30:00.000+11:00

Visitation
By Jenny Erpenbeck
New Directions

Jenny Erpenbeck’s Visitation is yet another work of fiction that’s not quite a book of short stories and not quite a novel either. Yes, each individual piece in this collection could stand on its own as a story, but—taken together—there’s a much larger narrative scope than readers could expect from ‘just’ a linked collection of short stories. Most of the stories revolve around a piece of property on a lake in the country outside of Berlin, and the fate of this property serves as a synecdoche for the history of Germany in the 20th century. Moreover, the stories are further connected by a prologue and epilogue, as well as a series of brief episodes relating to a gardener who maintains the property over most of the period the book covers.
    Given that the stories cover an enormous sweep of history, including both World Wars, the Holocaust, and East Germany under communist rule, the stories are (legitimately) quite serious and sombre, although brief moments of playfulness and humour occasionally do shine through. But this book works for the reason that Erpenbeck simply writes beautiful, restrained prose and always frames her tales in oblique ways, so that large topics are approached from a fresh and unexpected angles. Consider the opening story, called ‘The Wealthy Farmer and his Four Daughters’, which is about a marriage, but opens by recounting the local superstitions about how a wedding day should be conducted:
    ‘When a woman gets married, she must not sew her own dress. The dress may not even be made in the house where she lives. It must be sewn elsewhere, and during the sewing a needle must not be broken. The fabric for a wedding dress may not be ripped, it must be cut with scissors. If an error is made while the fabric is being cut, this piece of fabric may no longer be used, instead a new piece of the same material must be purchased.’
    Erpenbeck repeats these platitudes throughout the story, and they do an exceptionally economical job of bringing the reader into the culture and society of late 19th-Century Germany—particularly illuminating the role of women in rural society at that time. And this is what is so exceptional about Erpenbeck’s work—she is able to convey an incredible breadth of experience through small gestures that suggests the scope of a much larger narrative without needing to state it explicitly.
    In ‘The Architect’, we learn about the designer of the house on this property, but we learn about his plans for it precisely at the moment he has been forced to leave, due to the coming of World War I. These details are not insignificant, either, since the unusual design of the house—including a secret room—comes to play an important role in later stories, like ‘The Red Army Officer’. Another story that plays with similar themes is ‘The Girl’, which is about a young Jewish girl attempting to hide from the Nazis in a hidden compartment; Erpenbeck’s depiction of her containment and the inevitably of her discovery is simultaneously brutal and deeply moving.
    Visitation is a marvel of what can be achieved through precise, minimal prose. Conveying the depth and complexity of this relatively short book is virtually impossible in such a small space of time, but any fan of either short stories or contemporary, European literature needs to rush out and buy this book now.

My Interview with Verity La

2011-02-21T10:02:00.000+11:00

Over the weekend, Alec Patric at Verity La posted an interview with me, which you can read here. Alec, much to his credit (and as his really interesting Verity La interviews always do), eschewed the normal writer-interview questions, and we got to talk about a lot of different topics, including being an expatriate seppo, the persistence of Modernism, Joyce vs. Hemmingway and the relationship between literary criticism and 'average' readers. Anyway, I enjoyed it--but whether or not you do is a separate question . . .

Book Review: Spurious

2011-02-15T09:43:00.002+11:00

Spurious

By Lars Iyer

Melville House Publishing

Lars Iyer’s debut novel, Spurious, is about two British intellectuals who travel around Europe, drinking and talking about such topics as literature, continental philosophy and how they have failed to achieve their dreams—but if this description sounds dreary, it’s only an illustration of the inability of a plot summary to convey the actual experience of reading a novel. Spurious is a hysterically funny comic novel comprised almost entirely of conversations between its two protagonists, W., a sharp-tongued scholar who constantly bemoans his inability to understand complicated maths, and Lars, a portly, middle-aged academic whose apartment is slowly succumbing to an untraceable damp and who wastes much of his time writing down all of the things that W. says and posting them to a blog (and, indeed, Spurious began its life in a blog of the same name written by Lars Iyer, who is, of course, a scholar and an expert on the work of French author and critic Maurice Blonchot).

For all of its intellectual references to Kafka, Blanchot, Kant and Schelling, the focus of the book is on the close-but-dysfunctional relationship of the two main characters (indeed the tone and form of Spurious isn’t entirely dissimilar to the film Withnail and I, and fans of that movie would almost certainly enjoy this novel). Most of their conversations begin with W. asking such questions of Lars as these: ‘When did you know you were a failure? When was it you knew you’d never have a single thought of your own—not one?’ and the joy is in watching their semi-serious attempts to answer these absurdities. W. and Lars belong to a long tradition of great comedic duos, from Laurel and Hardy to Vladimir and Estragon from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, but there’s also a good deal of fun at the expense of scholarly life in the grand tradition of academic satire, such as in this passage about the publication of W.’s most recent book:

‘W.’s book has come out, he says. His editor went down to dine with W. and brought him twenty copies of his own book . . . His book is better than him, W. and I both agree. It’s greater. What’s it about?, I ask him of a particularly difficult section. He’s got no idea, he says.’

This book is full of wonderful, little comic scenes, most of them initiated by W.’s barbs at his friend Lars; indeed, this is suggested in the title Spurious, which technically refers to a false correlation or inference, but in this instance could similarly describe the book’s many verbal spurs—W. attacks and insults Lars in a way that’s only possible within the confines of a close relationship. And for all of its highbrow references, the novel is also written in a surprisingly plain and simple language and it’s not afraid to go lowbrow for a laugh (i.e. for a book that’s got a lot of references to philosophy, there are also quite a few dick jokes).

Spurious is one of the funniest books I’ve read in years, and I can also say that I enjoyed reading Spurious more than any novel I’ve read this year—it’s just bad, unclean, mean-spirited fun in the best possible way. But Spurious also manages to find real warmth and humanity in the discourse of two marginal misanthropes without ever swerving into easy sentimentality. Buy one copy for yourself and extra copies for those friends you have who always end up talking about intellectual topics at parties—trust me, they need to read this book, if only to remember that the overexamined life is also not worth living.

Book Review: Night Soul and Other Stories

2011-02-08T12:02:00.005+11:00

Night Soul and Other Stories

By Joseph McElroy

Dalkey Archive

Despite the fact that he’s been publishing books for over 40 years and has won just about every prestigious fellowship that exists in the United States, Joseph McElroy has never achieved the notoriety of his contemporaries, like Don Delillo, Thomas Pynchon, or even, for that matter, the still-criminally-underrated William Gaddis. In publishing circles, McElroy is often best-known for his 1192-page novel Women and Men (by all accounts, a masterpiece), which has the dubious distinction of allegedly being the most-remaindered novel of all time (indeed, I have a first-edition hardback of Women and Men that I picked up in an op-shop five years ago, and which stares out at me from my bookshelf like a dare). But for any reader looking for a place to start with McElroy’s fiction, his ‘new’ collection of short stories, Night Soul and Other Stories (which were, in fact, written over a period of 30 years), is an excellent way to become acquainted with McElroy’s unique and mesmerising style.

McElroy’s work—like the work of those writers he is often compared to—is indubitably difficult, but not in the way that most readers conceive of a book as being difficult; Night Soul and Other Stories won’t overwhelm you with big words, sentences that sprawl for pages at a time or overtly erudite allusions (although there are certainly erudite allusions). Rather, McElroy’s prose works by making language itself strange; he has a (wonderful) habit of using everyday words in unexpected ways that can make an otherwise grammatically straightforward sentence seem completely otherworldly. Moreover, his stories often jump quickly between different points in time and points of view with relatively little warning, forcing the reader to infer these shifts from the context.

Yes, this takes work, but the tales in Night Souls and Other Stories are absolutely worth the work. Most of them have a slightly paranoid atmosphere that develops when two strangers are brought into contact with each other. In ‘Silk, or the Woman with a Bike,’ a young scientist is profoundly affected by a woman he meets briefly on a subway, who—without any explanation—offers him her bike as a gift. In 'Mister X’, an aging architect develops a complicated relationship with his acupuncturist, who may or may not also be involved in a foreign plot to discover the formula for a new building material he has developed (which is, by the way, a new form of water). In ‘Canoe Repair’, several strangers are drawn together by their mutual and inexplicable attraction to an antique canoe made of tree bark.

Other fixations appear across the stories, including a variety of meditations on water and a deep interest in the furthest frontiers of science, such as bio-engineering and advanced physics like String Theory. Indeed, this should be no surprise, as McElroy has penned one science fiction novel—Plus a story about artificial intelligence published in 1977. McElroy also has one science fiction story here, called ‘The Last Disarmament but One’, a story about the sudden and complete disappearance of one country from the face of the earth due to unexplained physical forces, but it’s a science fiction written in McElroy’s deeply idiosyncratic style.

Indeed, if you’re looking for an apt comparison for McElroy’s writing, you’d almost need recourse to a medium outside of prose; the 20th Century poet Wallace Stevens (whose poem ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ McElroy briefly references in a story by mentioning ‘thirteen ways of looking at a lake’) might be the closest stylist. Simply put, Night Soul and Other Stories is already easily my favourite new book I’ve read this year, and it’s a wonderful introduction to McElroy’s body of work, which represents one of the most important achievements in American literature over the last 50 years. Go buy it now.

Book Review: The Distant Sound

2011-02-01T10:56:00.000+11:00

The Distant Sound

By Gert Jonke

Dalkey Archive

Despite being one of the most respected Austrian writers of the late 20^th Century, Gert Jonke remains largely unknown in the English-speaking world. In an excellent introduction to Jonke’s new novel, The Distant Sound, translator Jean Snook helps to explain some of the reasons why this is the case. Firstly, as Snook points out, translating Jonke’s unusual prose and sentence-structure is virtually impossible to render in anything like a truly faithful English version. The second reason, however, lies in the difficulty of Jonke’s novels; in Austria, novels like his are described as Gehirnjogging, which translates as ‘brain jogging’. While these difficult books are prized among German-speakers, they are typically marginalised and accused of wilful obscurantism in the English-speaking world.

Unsurprisingly, The Distant Sound is not a novel that one reads for tight, conventional plotting, but, for all of that, it nonetheless has an interesting premise: a well-known composer (who has now ceased composing) wakes up in a mental hospital without knowing why he is there. He is told that he has attempted suicide, but has no recollection of this act and feels no desire whatsoever to kill himself. He soon falls in love with a young nurse in the hospital who is sympathetic to his plight, and after she suddenly disappears the composer plots his escape to go in search of her. But even after regaining his freedom, his every attempt to locate her is hampered by another absurd turn of events, which shows that the outside world is just as claustrophobic as the insane asylum. (In point of fact, The Distant Sound is actually a sequel to an earlier novel called Homage to Czerny: Studies in Virtuoso Technique, but ignorance of this first book isn’t likely to disrupt your enjoyment of The Distant Sound).

Despite the seemingly dark, Kafka-esque nature of this material, The Distant Sound is also very much a funny book, filled with humour that recalls the work of absurdist writers like Eugene Ionesco. And it is fittingly full of often-surprising twists and turns that operate with a dream-like logic, resulting in the appearance of a tight-rope walker who can quite literally walk on air, a newspaper staff that spends all day in a train-station café reading newspapers, and the appearance of a horde of strange parasites that may well threaten the future existence of the human race, among many others.

The Distant Sound is a book that sure to appeal to fans of writers like Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Max Frisch, and, most of all, the Argentinean author Cesar Aira, But whereas Aira’s books are typically brief novellas, The Distant Sound clocks in at close to 300 pages. It’s not that The Distant Sound is boring—indeed, it is never, ever boring—but many of its jokes intentionally take on a repetitive form (in which different characters offer mutually exclusive—and equally ridiculous—interpretations of the exact same phenomenon); while I liked this conceit, most readers’ enjoyment of the novel will depend on the degree to which they appreciate this style. But overall The Distant Sound is an extremely enjoyable farce, which shows that Gert Jonke is certainly deserving of a much larger English readership.

My Book Is an eBook

2011-01-27T12:40:00.000+11:00

Buy it here.

Known Unknowns is now officially available as an ebook from Readings new ebook store, available for download globally (so you can get it even if you don't live in Australia). You can have a browse of the first three chapters above. The ebook is powered by a new Melbourne-based company called Booki.sh, which uses a reader based in your web-browser (exactly what you see in the sample above). If you have any questions about whether or not it will work on whatever reading device you use, look here.

Book Review: A Visit from the Goon Squad

2011-01-25T10:12:00.001+11:00

A Visit from the Goon Squad

By Jennifer Egan

Knopf Doubleday

We could probably spend quite a bit of time discussing whether Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad is a short story collection or a novel (N.B. that’s an inclusive ‘we’ not a ‘royal we’). Sure, every so-called ‘chapter’ in the book could stand on its own as a short story, but at the same time these stories are very much interconnected in ways that form—if not exactly a novelistic narrative per se—at least an interconnected web of concerns (you know like that big web metaphor in Middlemarch that I can’t quite remember and am too lazy to look up on the interweb). And the concerns in the book are upfront—most of the people in this book are in some way connected with underground and/or punk music, and the book tracks how—over a period of forty years—their subcultural dreams are transformed and shattered by the burdens of ageing; indeed, the 'goon squad' of the title is precisely the spectre of ageing, which the book’s characters approach with varying degrees of grace and resentment.

If this makes A Visit to the Goon Squad sound overly weighty and ambitious, there’s good news: it’s not at all (and in point of fact Egan’s actually pretty bad on the big picture stuff, on which more below). A Visit to the Goon Squad is ultimately a clever, funny book that feels like a novel but reads like a book of short stories. And most of the tales in this book have very clever premises, such as stories about an administrative assistant at a record label with a penchant for kleptomania, an aging rock n’ roll promoter on an African Safari, a down-and-out publicist charged with the duty of improving the image of a dictator who may be guilty of genocide, and a celebrity gala that goes so awry that hundreds of famous people end up permanently disfigured.

But more impressively, Egan’s stories are often told in inventive ways, including a story written as a bio for a celebrity magazine (by an extremely disturbed interviewer) and another story that’s written entirely in the form of PowerPoint slides. This PowerPoint story—called ‘Great Rock and Roll Pauses,’ which is indeed about famous caesuras in rock songs—is a highlight of the collection, particularly in its ability to be deeply moving and even poignant despite its unusual formal conceit. And Egan is very, very good at stories that hit the spot between comedy and sadness. On a page-to-page level, Egan’s book is impressive, combining a talent for innovative and unusual forms with a deft sensibility that allows the reader to connect with its many characters in a very short period of time.

Despite all these many impressive qualities, however, I was underwhelmed by the final story in the collection, which is a piece of speculative fiction set in a near future, and which doubles as a piece of cultural critique. In this semi-dystopia, people are increasingly dependent on electronic ‘handsets’ (which are basically pimped-out iPhones) for every aspect of their lives, forced to live in cramped apartments, and are constantly subjected to insidious forms of viral marketing. The problem here is that Egan’s critiques are just not very interesting and repeat a variety of well-worn contemporary cultural tropes, including the ideas that reliance on digital communications technology results in alienation, that corporate marketing is insidious and awful (which it is, but we already know that), and that young people are basically semi-autistic and technology dependent. We’re in the territory of Today Tonight headlines here.

I may be making a mountain out of a molehill, but while these problems are local to this story, they highlight a larger problem for the book: A Visit from the Goon Squad is great at telling clever, little vignettes that conclude with beautifully poignant moments, but these little revelations don’t add up to much beyond a series of slightly dull platitudes, like that getting older is hard to deal with, long-term relationships are difficult to maintain and youthful dreams are often overrun by the vicissitudes on the world. I don’t want to pick on Egan; A Visit to the Goon Squad is really a very, very good book, and has rightly been nominated as a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, but it also strikes me that the problem here is one endemic to the contemporary U.S. novel more generally.

[Warning: digression on the problems of contemporary mainstream U.S. literature, which has relatively little bearing on whether or not most people will enjoy Egan’s generally very good book.]

Egan occupies a slightly odd cultural position—but it’s a strange position that’s shared by a whole swath of U.S. writers who are clearly influenced by the ‘experimental’ U.S. writing of the 1960s (e.g. Barthelme, Brautigan, Coover, Pynchon) on the one hand, while still being very much ‘mainstream’ authors on the other. We could include various other U.S. writers in this strange trajectory, including Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers, Rick Moody, Gary Shteyngart, Adam Levin, and even David Foster Wallace, for that matter. What’s common to all of these writers is a desire to occupy two often contradictory positions: 1) a ‘high art’ imperative to write unusual and ‘experimental’ prose on the one hand (despite his more recent, populist aw shucks-isms, Franzen’s The Corrections still has some pretty innovative writing in it) and 2) a populist will to do so on terms that will speak to the broader American public about their lives.

As a result of 2), all of these writers have, at some point in their careers, attempted to write books that double as social novels that investigate the problems of the contemporary U.S. And given the vaguely left-wing orientation of the above writers combined with the swing to the right (to put it very mildly) in U.S. politics over the last ten years, these types of books seem to be appearing with more and more frequency. The result—of which A Visit to the Goon Squad is ultimately an example—is what I am calling the ‘how we live now’ novel (N.B. I wrote this last week and in the interim Laura Miller has published an article on ‘the way we live now’ novel, which you can read here. It’s unrelated to my point, though.).

These ‘how we live now’ novels attempt to wrestle with contemporary issues, but more often than not simply reproduce the kind of banal, sentimentalised platitudes that A Visit from the Goon Squad seems to suggest. And I think I know why. The reason is that these U.S. ‘how we live now’ novels are entirely formed by the liberal-democratic mode of thinking. This is a particular limitation in the U.S., which hasn’t had a legitimate socialist movement to speak of since Eugene Debs and lacks anything like a true left-wing tradition of critique. When these otherwise intelligent writers try to formulate something like a critique of their culture, they fail for the simple reason that they are too much a part of the very culture they would like to critique. The result is not a political novel at all, but rather a narcissistic novel that, in its obsession with the present, is unable to gain the kind of self-reflexive purchase needed for critique (indeed, it is the incredible self-reflexivity of David Foster Wallace’s work that has enabled him to bridge these two desires without falling into an uninterrogated, sentimental desire for the ‘universal truths’ of literature).

For my part, I wish that many writers of ‘how we live now’ novels would jettison their larger aims for the simple reason that they just aren’t very good on political maters. This, of course, is not to say that writers cannot write novels without express political content—and the developing world, in particular, has seen an explosion of great novels with explicitly political content, probably for the reason that in such places ‘politics’ means a lot more than what Pundit X has said on Fox News. I suspect that the reason that most of the U.S. writers I’ve mentioned above haven’t been very successful with political novels is that, quite simply, they don’t have a politics beyond the liberalism that has (unconsciously) shaped them. I also note that, from my point of view, often the books that are the most interesting in their ‘political’ content are precisely those in which the political is often not explicitly addressed (Evan Dara’s The Lost Scrapbook, which I’ve been raving about for months, is one of the best political novels written in the last twenty years, but you don’t even know it’s a ‘political’ novel until you are 400 pages into it.).

Anyway, as I noted, this is all a bit unfair to Egan, who has managed to write a funny and inventive book that is really, really good—and contains some individual stories that are actually great. A Visit from the Goon Squad is an excellent work of literature, but it’s a book that would actually be better if it tried to do less, since it falters precisely in the moments where it tries to tackle ‘big issues’.

Quote of the Day: Theodor Adorno

2011-01-13T13:29:00.000+11:00

"Poetry in philosophy means everything that is strictly not relevant." -- Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic

On Pseudo-Hiatus

2010-12-30T11:38:00.000+11:00

Just a quick note for anyone who's noticed the lack of posts on this blog over the last few weeks: I'm taking a break from the blog until the end of January when my Triple R reviews will resume (unless, for whatever reason, I decide to post something in the interim). I have been reading away, trying to get through some books from 2010 that I missed along the way, so you can expect reviews of some or most of the following next year: Gert Jonke's The Distant Sound, Jenny Erpenbeck's Visitation, Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, Evan Dara's The Easy Chain, and a 'classic' novel--Henry Green's Loving. Oh, and happy new year and all of that.

Best AusLit 2010

2010-12-09T11:51:00.003+11:00

Once again, in no particular order, I've listed my favourite works of Australian literature from 2010. This is an admittedly selective list and I'll just note quickly that it omits areas I tend not to read in, specifically 1) Australian genre-fiction, and 2) realist novels written by big-name authors. I have no doubt that I'm missing a lot of great genre work (and, of course, I hate the term 'genre', since much genre writing is both less formulaic and more innovative than much 'literary' writing), but--as to the second category--I'm simply allergic to that kind of fiction, so you won't see it here. Anyway, below is a list of great books definitely worth reading (and most of them were published by small publishers, too).

Other Stories by Wayne Macauley

I think I've raved about this book about as much as is possible, including naming it my favourite book of short stories from 2010, and being given the honour of launching it. If you haven't bought it yet, do so now, and if you want to know why you should, then read this or this.

Glissando by Dave Musgrave

To me, this is a book that really didn't get its due this year; many of the reviews of the book seemed more puzzled by it than anything else (or, worse, simply called it 'clever'). For my money, this is the most interesting Australian novel published in the last year, and it's full of inventive, comic prose, while still dealing with important Australian themes. All I can say is that from here on out, I'll read anything--absolutely anything--that David Musgrave publishes. Read the review here.

Like Being a Wife by Catherine Harris

This collection of stories reveals a sharp, dry wit and presents everyday situations through a wonderfully strange lens that never settles into either realism or surrealism. Harris is an extremely talented author and demonstrates mastery over the short form without ever simply falling into the trap of Carver-esque minimalism. Basically, it's a great book. Read the review here.

How a Moth Becomes a Boat by Josephine Rowe

Rowe offers a set of delightful stories in miniature, but, despite their brevity, they never feel slight or undernourished. This collection is real accomplishment and manages to do something genuinely interesting with the short story form. Read the review here.

The Mary Smokes Boys by Patrick Holland

The Mary Smokes Boys is a weird little book--and I mean this with the absolute greatest respect. Written in beautiful prose, this book keeps seeming like it's a realist novel, but, when you finish it, you realise it was something else entirely: a romance (in the medieval sense) or a fable that seems both in the world and somehow outside of it. Read the review here.

Child of Twilight by Carmel Bird

This is the first book I've ever read by Carmel Bird, and I'll have to admit that I was genuinely surprised to find that I really, really liked it, given that the themes within the book are outside of my usual interests. For me, it's not 100% perfect (I still have a few reservations about the framing device), but, at the end of the day, Bird is a world-class prose stylist. This is quite an unconventional novel full of weird and wonderful characters and which always manages to surprise, twisting and turning in directions that the reader wouldn't have expected. Read the review here.

Best Fiction in Translation 2010

2010-12-08T12:34:00.000+11:00

Below is a list of my favourite books in translation from 2010 (in no particular order--I refuse to do 'top ten' lists as if such rankings are aesthetically meaningful). But these books are all incredibly great and worth reading. N.B. I've decided not to include any Roberto Bolano, for two reasons: 1) he's basically his own phenomenon at the moment (deservedly, I'd argue), and 2) I haven't read all of his books that have been translated this year.

Zone by Mathias Enard

This novel composed of one continuous 517-page sentence is rightly being described as a masterpiece; it combines high modernism with spy-novel conceits and--whether or not you like it (and I did)--is a book that's certain to provoke a reaction. Read the full review here.

Broken Glass by Alain Mabanckou

This hysterically funny novel filled with stories told by unreliable narrators in the Congo is an exceptional mixture of literary erudition, bleak humour and prosaic brilliance (and it's yet another novel basically devoid of full stops). I got to meet Mabanckou at a conference in Melbourne this year, and he was also very gracious, which was exciting for me (at least). Read the full review here.

The Literary Conference by Cesar Aira

Aira--who uses a pseudo-Dadaist compositional technique that involves not revising--writes weird, mad, little novellas. The Literary Conference, a book about cloning Carlos Fuentes, is an otherworldly delight. Read the full review here.

Prose by Thomas Bernhard

This book, Bernhard's first, is a collection of stories that could ultimately be construed as his juvenilia--but Bernhard's juvenilia is still better than 99% of all other authors' mature prose. The story 'The Cap' in here was my favourite short story of 2010. Read the full review here.

Microscripts by Robert Walser

Even if Walser weren't one of the most singular prose stylists of the 20th Century, this book would be worth its price just for its reproductions of his 'microscripts'--stories written in pencil on the back of little scraps of paper with tiny letters that are less than 1 mm tall. Read the full review here.

Running Away by Jean-Philipe Toussaint

This book could be best-described as a cross between the movie Lost in Translation and a Three Stooges slapstick film. Toussaint is a writer who would appeal to fans of both Samuel Beckett and Haruki Murakami, and, for all of his jokes, his books also manage to locate a real sense of melancholy and loss. Read the full review here.

Best European Fiction 2010 edited by Aleksander Hemon

Technically, not every story here is in translation, but 95% are. For my money, the Dalkey Archive, who published this collection, is pretty much the best press in the world, and while not every excerpt in here may appeal to you, Best European Fiction 2010 is a treasure-trove of authors who are still undeservedly unknown in the Anglophone world. Read the full review here.

Book Review: Zone

2010-12-07T10:12:00.002+11:00

Zone

Mathias Énard

Open Letter Press

Mathias Énard’s Zone tells the story of a day in the life of Francis Servain Mirkovic, a French secret service agent of Croatian heritage, who is travelling by train through Italy; Mirkovic’s journey is no simple holiday, however. He is carrying a briefcase filled with secret documents that he intends to turn over to a man in Rome in exchange for enough money to retire from his life as a spy. Despite this set-up—which may sound worthy of an Alfred Hitchcock movie—Zone is no page-turning thriller, or at least not one in any conventional sense. Indeed, this novel, which has been translated from the French, is best-known for its unusual formal qualities: its 517 pages are composed of one, continuously running sentence.

Technically, there are few full-stops in the book (at a few points Mirkovic reads chapters of an imaginary novel with standard punctuation and formatting), but by and large the book is written in a stream-of-consciousness style that catalogues Mirkovic’s freely associating thoughts while he is riding on the train. The use of this mode has lead some reviewers to compare Zone to some of the monumental works of 20th-Century Modernism, like James Joyce’s Ulysses and Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. With its political themes, pulp-fiction conceit, and more modern setting though, Zone is considerably more accessible than either of those two books. (And I would argue that more apt comparisons might be Claude Simon’s Flanders Road and Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil, which share both Zone’s breathless style and its thematic emphasis on war and empire). Zone is, nonetheless, a highly allusive and intentionally ‘literary’ book, which references such writers as Ezra Pound, Jean Genet, Robert Walser, Proust, Hemmingway, Ferdinand Celine, Homer, William S. Burroughs and Malcolm Lowry, among many others.

But more than anything, Zone is a book about the history of European wars and genocides (with a particular emphasis on the eastern end of the continent where it elides into the Middle East). Indeed, the spies that Mirkovic works with simply refer to Europe as the ‘zone’, and Énard shows an incredibly vivid and interesting familiarity with this material cataloguing the Trojan War, Napolean, World War II, the Balkan Wars, and the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, in which Mirkovic served as a soldier. Mirkovic also spends a great deal of time ruminating on the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide and the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the Yugoslav Wars, as well. All of which is to say that Zone isn’t exactly light reading, and Énard does nothing to spare his readers from the gritty details of life in a warzone.

But for all of this ugliness, Zone itself is a beautifully written book, and Énard demonstrates incredibly precise control over his prose, which moves easily between Mirkovic’s present ride on the train and his often-harrowing memories. I’ll be honest—readers who are put off by difficult books (and don’t like stream-of-consciousness works by writers like Virginia Woofe and William Faulkner), probably won’t be converted by Zone, but for any reader willing to give something a little bit more challenging a go, Zone is an absolute must-read, and would certainly appeal to readers who have enjoyed Roberto Bolaño’s longer books like 2666 and The Savage Detectives. Zone is perhaps the most important literary work to be translated into English in 2010, and it’s absolutely essential reading for anyone with an interest in world literature.

Read an excerpt from Zone. Buy Zone here.

What I've Reviewed in 2010 (with a Digression on Sexism and the Avant-Garde)

2010-12-02T14:12:00.001+11:00

Next week, I'll be going through a series of my favourite books from 2010 (grouped to some degree by genre or country). In preparation, I thought I'd list the books I've reviewed this year; of course, this isn't the totality of what I've read (not even close), but these are basically the books I'll be choosing from next week. Here they are:

1.)  Zone by Mathias Enard (coming next week)
2.)  Six Tenses by Ryan O’Neill
3.)  Aliss at the Fire by Jon Fosse
4.)  A Naked Singularity by Sergio De La Pava
5.)  The Philanthropist by John Tesarsch
6.)  The Empty Family by Colm Toibin
7.)  The Lost Scrapbook by Evan Dara
8.)  Leaving Home with Henry by Phillip Edmonds
9.)  The Literary Conference by Cesar Aira
10.)  The Mary Smokes Boys by Patrick Holland
11.) The Convalescent by Jessica Anthony
12.) C by Tom McCarthy
13.) Like Being a Wife by Catherine Harris
14.) Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things by Gilbert Sorrentino
15.) Other Stories by Wayne Macauley
16.) Richard Yates by Tao Lin
17.) Prose by Thomas Bernhard
18.) Kraken by China Mieville
19.) Broken Glass by Alain Mabanckou
20.) Selected Short Stories by Janet Frame
21.) Ilustrado by Miguel Syjuco
22.) Epitaph of a Small Winner by Machado de Assis
23.) Microscripts by Robert Walser
24.) How a Moth Becomes a Boat by Josephine Rowe
25.) Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya
26.) The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
27.) Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives by Brad Watson
28.) Antwerp by Roberto Bolano
29.) The Norseman’s Song by Joel Deane
30.) Child of Twilight by Carmel Bird
31.) The Theory of Light and Matter by Andrew Porter
32.) Reality Hunger by David Shields
33.) Glissando by Dave Musgrave
34.) Running Away by Jean-Philipe Toussaint
35.) Best European Fiction 2010 edited by Aleksander Hemon
36.) Barley Patch by Gerald Murnane
37.) 2666 by Roberto Bolano
38.) The Supply Party by Martin Edmond
39.) Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon

I'm pleased that I was able to review authors from many different countries around the world, including Austria, Australia, Brazil, Chile, The Congo, El Salvador, France, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway, The Philippines, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. (I'm not quite sure what happened to continental Asia, which is something to consider for next year.)

There is, however, also some bad news: I only reviewed books by five female authors (about 13% of my reviews). I didn't consciously intend to exclude women writers, but--in looking at this list--it's clear that I need to at least think about gender in relation to what I review next year.

One reason for this skewing--or so I suspect--is that my preference is very much towards work that is in an 'experimental' or avant-garde tradition; despite the importance of many women in this tradition (just off the top of my head: Djuana Barnes, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Mina Loy, H.D., Marianne Moore, Muriel Rukeyser, Kathy Acker, etc.), it still often seems--and this may well be due to media bias and coverage--that there's a lower percentage of women writing in the 'experimental' tradition than in other areas (although I'm not naive; I realise there is a larger bias against women authors in all areas, full stop). I do wonder about the reasons for this: are women writers in this tradition simply facing an uphill battle for exposure, or is this an area of writing that is, in fact, overwhelming male--and, if so, why? (N.B. I'm not sympathetic to the argument that formally experimental writing is inherently sexist, although I'd certainly be willing to agree that its current cultural formation is sexist). I'd love to hear your thoughts and comments about why women appear under-represented in this area of fiction...

If nothing else, this gives me a good reason to look at a few authors I've been meaning to read, like Herta Muller, Elfriede Jelinek and Ingeborg Bachmann. Who else am I missing? What other female writers in the aftermath of the avant-garde are out there that I need to read?

Book Review: Six Tenses

2010-11-30T11:26:00.000+11:00

Six Tenses

By Ryan O’Neill

Ginninderra Press

Australian short-story writer Ryan O’Neill has now begun to get a bit more public attention—this year alone he’s had work appear in Best Australian Stories 2010, The Sleepers Alamanac, Vol. 6, and Scribe’s New Australian Stories 2. Although I have seen (and enjoyed) Ryan’s work in other journals, as well, I had no idea that he had already published a book of short stories, called Six Tenses, in 2005.

Indeed, 2005 was a year that marked the end of a dark time for Australian short stories; during the early oughties, publishers had become convinced that short stories were not marketable, and, as a result, very few collections by first-time authors were published. With the publication of Cate Kennedy’s Dark Roots in 2006, which was soon followed by Nam Le’s The Boat in 2008, publishers started taking short stories more seriously again. There has now been a renaissance of the short story, with more and more collections published over the last several years, but the truth of the matter is that many of these ‘new’ collections have been receiving polite rejection notes from publishers for years; thus, what seems to be a sudden cultural groundswell of short-story writing is in fact merely a reflection of what our cultural gatekeepers determine to be a marketable product.

But O’Neill’s Six Tenses had the (unusual) misfortune of being published at least one year too early, and, as a result, this collection—which displays a compelling virtuosity—has been largely ignored. One of the pleasures of O’Neill’s work is that—unlike so many AusLit authors who are afraid of formal experimentation—Six Tenses displays a deep investment in innovative storytelling. The first story, also called ‘Six Tenses’, for example, is related out of chronological order and is divided into sections based on the tense and aspect of verb conjugations (eg. ‘Present Continuous’, ‘Present Simple’, ‘Future Perfect’ and so on). The story ‘Rasa’ (whose title is probably a pun on the notion of Tabula rasa) is intentionally written in the a-grammatical pidgin of a young Lithuanian woman enrolled in an ESL course, who opens the story by saying, ‘English is very beautiful for me. But I am not good at it. Also, I am not bad. I think I am normal. It is easier than Lithuanian, which is my mother tongue because it is my motherland.’

And language is the seminal theme of these stories; not only do many of the stories discuss language education and explicitly ruminate on grammar, syntax and punctuation, but also O’Neill repeatedly invokes figures of those who have lost their ability to speak, read or write (or else who are—like Rasa—not completely in control of their own language). In this sense, these stories are “metafictional” (i.e. fiction about fiction), but not in a purely formalist or clever sense; O’Neil’s stories are about the importance and value of language in our daily lives, and how language shapes the world that we live in.

That being said, many of these stories do have clever conceits and employ unusual techniques that betray the influence of several authors; Vladimir Nabokov looms particularly large, and ‘Rasa’ in particular could be read as a sort of inversion of his novel Lolita (whereas Lolita tells the story of a European man perverting an American innocence, ‘Rasa’ has an American perverting a European innocence; Lolita tells the story from the perspective of the older man, ‘Rasa’ from the perspective of the girl).

But while O’Neil’s work does have a formalist emphasis at points, his work is also often surprisingly tender and even sentimental. The story ‘A Hundred Words’, for example, opens with the birth of a girl named Lizzie in 1900. We are told the story of her entire life in a mere eight pages, but only at the end do we realise the story is, in fact, a deeply moving and loving elegy written by her grandson. The collection’s final story, ‘The Bookmark’, portrays the strained relationship between a father and son, but shows how words and reading bind together people who otherwise lack the vocabulary to articulate their emotions.

Six Tenses is weird and wonderful little book that—had things been a little different—might be seen as a minor masterpiece of Australian short fiction; anyone interested in the Australian short story who missed this book when it was initially published in 2005 will find much here that is worth both reading and re-reading.

You can buy Six Tenses here (HINT: you’ll need to scroll down to find it!).

Book Review: Aliss at the Fire

2010-11-23T09:13:00.001+11:00

Aliss at the Fire
By Jon Fosse
Dalkey Archive Press

Aliss at the Fire is the new novella by John Fosse, a Norwegian author who, aside from being a novelist, is also generally considered to be one of Europe’s greatest living playwrights; his work has been translated into more than 40 languages, he placed number 83 on The Daily Telegraph’s list of the top 100 living geniuses (certainly one of the most fatuous lists ever compiled), and he has also been awarded a lifetime stipend from the Norwegian government in anticipation of his future literary efforts. As befits the lowly place of literature-in-translation within English-speaking countries though, it remains unsurprising that few Australian readers will have ever heard of him.

While I very much doubt that Aliss at the Fire is likely to make Fosse a household name, it is a beautiful and clever shorter novel. In the language known as book reviewese, this is the kind of book that would normally be described as ‘haunting,’ ‘dreamlike’ or ‘hallucinatory’, and, indeed, all of these descriptors would be apt. The story starts out in the mind of Signe who is sitting in her kitchen in 2002 and thinking about the night that her husband, Asle, disappeared while out in a boat on a fjord in 1979. But despite the seeming simplicity of this narrative conceit, the story quickly turns in a series of different directions, jumping into Asle’s head, and then again further back in time to Asle’s great-great-grandmother, Aliss, who is tending a fire, and then again to the death of Aliss’s grand-nephew, also named Asle (and who is the great-uncle of the Asle who disappeared in 1979), who also suffered an untimely death.

I don’t want to say too much more about the plot for fear of ruining its interesting and complex twists and turns, but the effect is extraordinary: the novel jumps across time such that every different moment seems to be happening at once. It becomes increasingly difficult to differentiate Signe’s thoughts from memory and hallucination; the reader can’t be certain what is fact and what is fiction.

Despite the complexity of the narrative, Fosse’s language is incredibly restrained, repetitive and minimal in the tradition of Samuel Beckett, which only further serves to lend an otherworldly quality to events otherwise associated with the banality of daily life. Unsurprisingly for a playwright, Fosse’s dialogue is particularly wonderful, often conveying the inability of his characters to communicate with each other:

‘What are you thinking about, Signe says

No nothing special, Asle says

No, Signe says

I guess I, Asle says

Yes I, he says

and he stands there and looks at her

I, he says

I, I, yes well. I’ll just, he says

You, Signe says

Yes, Asle says

You’ll, Signe says

I, Asle says

I guess I’ll go out onto the fjord for a while, he says

Today too, Signe says

I think so, Asle says’

It may be hard to appreciate how wonderful (and funny!) this dialogue is when removed from its context, but it works wonderfully within Aliss at the Fire, and has also made me quite interested in tracking down and reading some of Fosse’s dramatic work, too.

Aliss at the Fire is a little wonder of a novel, taking a simple concept and spinning it out into something that has a melancholic and strange beauty. Most impressively, Fosse is actually able to draw the whole work together at the end, with a conclusion that both sums up much of what has occurred, while simultaneously raising as many questions as it answers.

That being said, this is a book that—in its emphatic European-ness—probably won’t appeal to the sensibilities of most Australian readers, which is a shame, since this a wonderful and moving work of world literature. But this book would appeal to those readers who have an interest in the classic European cinema of the 1960s (the mood of this novel occupies a similar space to that of Ingmar Bergman’s classic 1966 film Persona, for example). For those willing to be open-minded about their literary experiences, Aliss at the Fire is wonderfully suggestive narrative, and an exceptionally affecting work of contemporary literature.

Quote of the Day: Giorgio Agamben

2010-11-22T12:14:00.000+11:00

'What is new about modern poetry is that confronted with a world that glorifies man so much the more it reduces him to an object, modern poetry unmasks the humanitarian ideology by making it rigorously its own the boutade that Balzac puts in Beau Brummel’s mouth: “Nothing less resembles man than man.” Apollinaire perfectly formulated the proposition in Les peintres cubists, where he writes, “above all, artists are men who wish to become inhuman.” Baudelaire’s antihumanism, Rimbaud’s call “to make one’s sole monstrous,” the marionette of Kleist, Lautremont’s “is it a man or a stone or a tree,” Mallarme’s “I am truly decomposed,” the arabesque of Matisse that confuses human figures and tapestries, “my ardor is rather of the order of the dead and unborn” from Klee, “the human doesn’t come into it” of Gottfried Benn, to the “nacreous snail’s trace” of Eugenio Montale, and “the head of the medusa and the Robot” of Paul Celan.'

--Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas, 50.

Literary Links: Wherein Everything is Explained

2010-11-18T11:54:00.000+11:00

So this basically explains everything.

Here's a nice, little heartwarming (which is better than heart-worming) story about indie publishing in Melbs. And I agree, we are totally awesome.

Are you a latecomer to the Roberto Bolano party? Fear not, for here is your syllabus. (You still have to do the reading yourself, though).

N+1, in their usual style, publish an article that's kind of half awesome and kind of half really, really scarily wrong in a disastrous way. There is some bemoaning of the anti-intellectualism of writers' events ('As soon as you hear behind the bookish chatter, “We’re all writers here, what’s to disagree about?” you know we’re sunk, intellectually.'), when, in reality, these are basically complicated marketing opportunities (Shhhh! Don't tell anyone!). Then there's some stuff I think is pretty dead on: 'The novel’s anxiety to have a ready-made public makes it less and less deserving of one. The novel needs to get over the 19th century.' Then, of course, we have the inevitable fall back into a nostalgiac humanism: 'The novel is unexcelled at one thing only: the creation of interiority, or inwardness. How does life look and sound from the inside, where no public observes it and not even a friend listens in?' Ugh. Is this really so, because it seems to me that Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy (as well as just about every good book ever written) do a lot more than that? Aren't there other trajectories for the novel, other possibilities that lie somewhere beyond the old (and typically mutually exclusive) claims of morality, psychology, inwardness, or social critique? I think so, but finding it requires that we kill off humanism, and--since naive Romantic notions of the novel's 'insight' into the human condition form so much of both literature's marketing strategy and cultural aura--I don't see it disappearing anytime soon.

Stupid Article of the Week: Don't you love it when Gen-X Yaleies (right, right--they are technically Elis, as every good denizen of crossword-puzzle land knows) from elite cultural institutions like The Paris Review say banal things (e.g. 'According to Stein, the two tricks for contemporary magazines are to publish work that even he would want to read, and to use social media to inform people of what they should be reading.') and then we're all meant to pretend that it's interesting? Me, too. I love that.

Book Review: A Naked Singularity

2010-11-16T09:55:00.002+11:00

A Naked Singularity

By Sergio De La Pava

Amante Press

Recently, The Quarterly Conversation, a U.S. literary magazine, ran a review of Sergio De La Pava’s A Naked Singularity calling it one of the best and most original novels of the last decade. While there is perhaps nothing unusual in a reviewer heaping praise on a book, De La Pava’s novel presents an interesting case: it was actually self-published via the company Xlibris in 2008. Even more impressively, there is no hyperbole in The Quarterly Conversation’s claim: A Naked Singularity is, without a doubt, one of the best and most original novels of the last decade, and the fact that it was self-published is simply astounding, given the complexity, formal inventiveness, and the brilliant writing in this novel.

The book follows the story of a public-defense attorney named Casi (which is Spanish for ‘as if’), and opens by following him during a standard day as he negotiates a series of clients through the inhuman order of the New York criminal justice system. This opening section not only suggests an intimate knowledge of these processes, but also offers a blistering critique of the U.S. justice system and the disastrous consequences that result from calls to implement stronger notions of law and order; De La Pava renders the violence produced by state systems of control in all of its naked reality. But these grim insights are also alleviated by a dark comedy that delineates the absurdities of legal, bureaucratic processes.

The first 200 pages or so of the book continue following Casi through his day as we are also introduced to his neighbours, including a Columbia psychology student who is watching every episode of The Honeymooners on repeat in an attempt to make Ralph Kramden into a person that feels psychologically real to him. We are also introduced to Casi’s family (who come from the other Colombia), through a hysterically funny party scene.

But despite these wonderful digressions, at the heart of this book is a complicated and thrilling crime novel depicting a dangerous caper that involves international drug dealers. As this moment slowly approaches, the novel becomes increasingly compulsive reading, and the climax is a tense affair that is sure to set your pulse racing. And this is what is so impressive about De La Pava’s achievement: his book is both an innovative novel of ideas and a plot-driven thriller all at the same time, as both genres are thrown together (which is a sort of naked singularity of its own).

This book has everything and then some: reflections on Descartes’ radical scepticism, The Jetsons, a discussion of Hume’s doubt that cause and effect exists, contemporary physics, a human embodiment of Hobbes’ Leviathan, a comprehensive history of middleweight boxing, an eight-page poem translated into broken English, a developmentally disabled inmate sentenced to death in Alabama, and a hotel that bears a strange resemblance to the Garden of Eden. This is a truly encyclopaedic novel, which is full of clever, punning prose. Consider this debate between two characters over the greatest man (with the gender specificity of said discussion noted in the novel) to have ever lived:

‘We have Homer . . . um . . . Simpson, Virgil. Aeneid. Who else did we say? Milton . . . Bradley. Bach, all the three B’s in fact, Bach, Leonard Bernstein and the other B. Hume, Kant, all the guys in that book, Descartes, Leibniz, Berkeley, anybody who went to Berkeley. In fact anybody who went to any institution named after a dead philosopher including naturally Georgetown and Stanford, which are of course named after Phyllis George and Stanford Marsalis respectively. Gutenberg who conducted the Gutenberg trial. Nureyev Rudolph. Rudolph Valentino. Engelbert Humperdink for that matter. The guy who invented the Gouldberg variations, T.S. Eliot Gould. Oppenheimer and Manhattan, you know, of the Oppenheimer project [. . .] Hannibal. American Vespucci. Verdi. Vendredi. Veni, Vidi, Vici, all three of them. The Marx Brothers, Karl and Groucho. The guys they worked with, Engels and Harpo. Socrates and the guy who poisoned him then put him in a hemlock. Darwin and the first guy who coined the term Darwinism. Don Quixote and his sidekick . . . Tonto . . . Villa I think. The guy who discovered the nap. The guy who founded the Freudian slip. Pasteur, the inventor of milk. The guy who unearthed the tango, the guy who discovered cash. Tango and Cash. Locke along with Stock . . . even Barrel.’

A Naked Singularity is raucous, wild writing that will appeal to readers who already enjoy writers like Thomas Pynchon, Don Dellilo, Evan Dara and, especially, David Foster Wallace (indeed, fans of Infinite Jest need to run—not walk—to their nearest computer and buy A Naked Singularity immediately). But while it shares some surface similarities with these writers, A Naked Singularity isn’t imitation either. And more impressively, for all of its cleverness and artifice, this is a book that also contains moments that are truly moving as well; De La Pava seems able to master every genre and every possible register of prose.

A Naked Singularity announces the presence of one of the most interesting and important voices in contemporary American literature. This novel isn’t good, and it isn’t great—it’s phenomenal. Go buy it now.

Quote of the Day: William Gaddis

2010-11-12T12:16:00.003+11:00

"--When we were sitting here listening to him read, it didn't occur to me, it's funny, it never occurred to me about him, pictures I've seen of him, and his poems, and the things he says in his poems . . . and I'd wanted to meet him. Esther's eyes had come to rest on the floor, and the shadow there from the chair meaningless until it moved.
   --And you're surprised . . . upset over this?
   --I'd wanted to meet him, she commenced, following the shadow's length back to its roots.
   --Meet him? And now a thing like this . . . I don't understand, you Esther, you're the one who always knows these things about people, these personal things about writers and painters and all the . . .
   --Yes, but . . .
   --Analyzing, dissecting, finding answers, and now . . . What did you want of him that you didn't get from his work? [. . .] this passion for wanting to meet the latest poet, shake hands with the latest novelist, get hold of the latest painter, devour . . . what is it? What is it they want from a man that they didn't get from his work? What do they expect? What is there left of him when he's done his work? What's any artist, but the dregs of his work? The human shambles that follows it around. What's left of the man when the work's done but a shambles of apology.
   --Wyatt, these romantic . . .
   --Yes, romantic, listen . . . Romantics! they marry cows and all kinds of comfort, soon enough their antics betray them to what would have been fatal in the work, I mean being obvious. No, here, it's competence right here in the world that's rewarded with romantic ends, and the romantics battling for competence, something to eat and carfare home . . . Look at the dentist's wife, she's a beauty. Who's the intimate of a saint, it's her Jesuit confessor, and the romantics end up anchorites in the desert."

-- William Gaddis, The Recognitions (pp.94-6)

Literary Links: Special Link Edition, Now with Extra Links!

2010-11-11T13:51:00.002+11:00

Do you want to read the first chapter of Evan Dara's The Lost Scrapbook? Of course, you do! So here it is.

Just say yes to NaNoWriMo.

Check out J. Safran Foer's new book Tree of Codes, which is a book made of die-cut pages that stack on top of each other and whatnot in a way that I can't explain so just look at the thing already. There's more good news: Foer didn't "write" the book, but rather cut up text from Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles, which means that this could well be the least annoying book that Foer has ever written. Huzzah! [Added: there's an even better link to info on the book here.]

Joshua Cohen, author of an 800-page Jewish novel, reviews Adam Levin's The Instructions, a 1000-page Jewish novel. Did he like it? Survey says no.

The LRB on old Tommy Bernhard. Yup, he's still great.

Tried and failed to buy an ebook in our lovely, little convict colony? Register yer frustration at Lost Book Sales.

It's been 150 years and poor Emma Bovary is still misunderstood. Oddly, it seems that Amanda Lohrey (author of the recent Reading Madame Bovary) falls prey to the exact same misreading of Emma (at least based on the interview she gave to the ABC Book Show): "Flaubert is very, very condescending towards [Emma], he says that she reads too many books from the public library, too many romances that corrupt her mind and her loyalty to her husband." Is she Misreading Madame Bovary? (N.B. I haven't finished Lohrey's book yet, so I'm probably totally wrong about this...)

The Guardian asks the following question: will there ever be a great European novel? Answer: Yes, which The Guardian would know if its staff writers ever read any books from that area just across the Channel over there...what's it called? Switzerfrance? Or something.

Rejecting Wittgenstein's Mistress

2010-11-10T12:03:00.001+11:00

Above is David Markson's handwritten list covering the 54 rejections his classic novel Wittgenstein's Mistress received.

Book Review: The Philanthropist

2010-11-09T09:18:00.001+11:00

The Philanthropist

By John Tesarsch

Sleepers Publishing

John Tesarsch’s debut novel, The Philanthropist, centres around Charles Bradshaw, an Australian industrialist in charge of a corporation worth nearly a billion dollars, who is also a prominent philanthropist. Charles, now in his 50s, is a wealthy and powerful man, but in the book’s opening pages he suffers a heart attack. While he narrowly survives, Charles is left in a physically debilitated state thereafter, and must step down from his corporate position. While he has plenty of money, Charles is left with nothing to fill his days, and is both forced to confront the grim realities of his family life and haunted by his own past actions.

For all of his ‘generous’ acts of philanthropy (which, in many cases, were also convenient tax write-offs), Charles, himself, has been anything but kind in his personal life. Struggling with his ill-health, he quickly realises that he has ignored both his wife and his children, who have little interest in supporting him during his time of need. As a result, Charles tries to reach out to Anna, a woman he loved in his youth, in an attempt to come to terms with his unpleasant past.

The book is populated by people who have intense emotions but are completely incapable of expressing them, and the the tone is generally melancholic. This combination is effective in a way that might recall novels like Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter. The tone is aided by Tesarsch ’s writing, which is simple and sure, almost as if he were compiling the facts of a case for a legal brief (indeed, Tesarsch is a lawyer); this technique conveys an effective subtlety to character relationships and descriptions. There’s a good deal of legal knowledge in the book (usually delivered through the character of Anna, who is a judge), but it never becomes too heavy, and Tesarsch himself ironises such material by noting that ‘it is said that to study law is to allow the left brain to encircle the right and finally eat it.’

Tesarch also does an excellent job of re-describing important events through the eyes of different characters, forcing the reader to acknowledge that our understanding of events is dependent on our point of view. Indeed, this is a book that attempts to investigate the notion of morality and what constitutes a ‘good’ act (as the title The Philanthropist suggests), but finds that, in the complex muddle of life, defining our own actions according to a rigid moral schema is extremely difficult, if not impossible. This is reflected in the character of Charles, who in so many ways desires to make amends for his past actions, but, due to his many character flaws, finds that all of his attempts at restitution only result in creating further problems.

The Philanthropist is a tightly plotted novel with strong and interesting characters, written in prose that has an economic, concise beauty. This is a strong and compelling first novel that raises big questions, but refuses to provide us with easy answers.

Literary Links: pollytiks v. fiction

2010-11-05T11:38:00.004+11:00

So, um, yes, the debate about Politics and Fiction rages on at Overland's blog. I don't have too much more to say about it than what I've said there. My bone(s) of contention at this point is basically twofold: 1) I don't think authors have a moral/ethical imperative to write about politics and 2) I don't get why this whole argument is so focused on authors anyway; I think there are systemic issues regarding the dissemination of fiction that are much larger than authorial intent, basically.

OK, some links for this week:

Jeff Sparrow's 'What We Talk about When We Talk about Politics'. Obviously.

Re: the above, why not read Mayakovsky's 'Order No. 2 to the Army of the Arts' (1921)? I love this poem even though it calls for exactly what I'm arguing against (which, weirdly, kind of supports my argument about literature and potentiality).

There is, of course, another possibility in the above debate that's been left more or less unexplored: anyone for a spot of désoeuvrement?

I'm late on this but it's a previously unpublished David Foster Wallace story, so whatever.

Just say no to NaNoWriMo.

Joshua Cohen has quickly become one of my favourite reviewers eva. This one on Doc Zhivago doesn't contain his trademark weisenheimerism, but, you know, it's still really good.

Book Review: The Lost Scrapbook

2010-11-02T09:37:00.000+11:00

The Lost Scrapbook
By Evan Dara
Aurora Publishers (www.aurora148.com)

Evan Dara’s The Lost Scrapbook was originally published in 1996, after being selected as the winner of the Fiction Collective 2’s innovative fiction contest by William Vollmann. The book received little press coverage at the time, but over the intervening fourteen years, it has gradually built up a rabid cult-following—and with good reason.

The book is anything but mass-market fiction; this innovative novel is organised by a set of wildly inventive formal principles, which the first scene announces: The Last Scrapbook opens with a young person speaking to a career counsellor and refusing to settle on one occupation, saying ‘I am interested, almost exclusively, in being interested.’ The novel follows this logic: instead of focusing on one straightforward narrative, it offers a multiplicity, constantly jumping between characters, locations and scenes; even more impressively, these switches often occur in midsentence. While these radical transitions can be disorienting at first, readers will quickly adjust to this unusual style.

These individual vignettes, which range over such topics as Warner Bros. cartoons, Noam Chomsky’s language theory, the music of Phillip Glass, and a pirate radio station that beams directly into Sony Walkman cassette players, are all funny and completely engaging.

But for those who like more traditional narratives, The Lost Scrapbook isn’t simply clever textual artifice. The links between the different narratives slowly build over several hundred pages; some characters recur, as do occasional references to a lost scrapbook that belonged to one character’s grandfather (although these references are so oblique that you could easily miss them if you aren’t paying attention).

Eventually, however, the narrative shifts again, focusing on a new set of voices in the small (imaginary) town of Isaura, Missouri, who begin to face an environmental disaster caused by a large, local corporation.

For all of its erudition and formal experimentation, this is a book whose ending is moving and even sentimental (in a good way); even more impressively, the book’s many strands are ingeniously drawn together, as well. Dara’s project is effectively an attempt to imagine the social totality of a small community by representing all of the different voices in a locality—it is a genuine attempt to represent late capitalism in all of its networked complexity.

I’ll be honest: I only found out about this book a few months ago, and upon reading it, I was blown away. It’s the best book I’ve read in years, and I liked it so much that I almost find it difficult to talk about clearly. Some readers have even called it the best American novel of the 1990s—whether or not this may be hyperbole, there’s certainly no doubt in my mind that it’s one of the best. This is a great book that deserves a wider readership and would certainly appeal to readers who like such authors as William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, Don Dellilo and David Foster Wallace—particularly his novel Infinite Jest (which, interestingly, came out in the same year).

There is, of course, another possible reason for the book’s obscurity, too. Evan Dara is a pen name, and no-one knows who the real author behind this book is aside from the author’s claim to live in Paris (Paris, Texas?). Although he’s maintained his anonymity, Dara began to have very minor interactions with the public when he started his own publishing house in 2008 to produce his second novel, The Easy Chain (which infamously contains 40 blank pages in the middle of the book), and keep The Lost Scrapbook in print. There is also one possible clue about Dara’s identity here: his publishing house is called Aurora, and The Lost Scrapbook refers to Aurora, Nebraska (‘I found myself on I-80…somewhere between Lincoln and Aurora…’). Could there be a link?

But ultimately, anyone with even a passing interesting in the contemporary novel in English needs to read this book, which is truly a lost classic. Unfortunately, you won’t find The Lost Scrapbook in bookshops, but it can be purchased from Aurora publishers at their website: www.aurora148.com.

Writers and Values: A (Final?) Response to Overland

2010-10-29T12:10:00.001+11:00

Earlier this week, new Overland Fiction Editor, Jane Gleeson-White, posted a response to my recent article in Kill Your Darlings on political fiction. By this point, I’ve already discussed these issues at length with several Overland editors, and there’s not too much new for me to say. But it might be useful to try to explain where I’m coming from and why I even took issue with Overland’s position to begin with. I’ll also note from the outset that my article was wrong on (at least) one point: Overland is clearly not advocating social realism as such—my bad, guys!

As to Gleeson-White’s article, I think she’s misunderstood my point—it’s not that I’m necessarily against including the ‘political’ within fiction (and thus she registers surprise when I point out that it’s possible to write great fiction with explicitly ‘political’ content). My concerns, thus far, have been twofold: 1) I (still) don’t understand what it means to write ‘politically engaged’ fiction and suspect the notion rests on problematic assumptions, and 2) I worry that Overland’s position is basically proscriptive, saying that writing must be ‘politically engaged’.

Gleeson-White, however, denies this second assertion, claiming ‘It seems to me that Woodhead and Overland are not claiming that all work “must be overtly political” – and nor would I,’ but this doesn’t square with Woodhead’s previous statement that: ‘our generation of writers is confronted by major political challenges; we have a moral and aesthetic imperative to confront them, and write them.’ From my perspective, an ‘imperative’ is imperative, not a matter of preference (but perhaps Gleeson-White is disputing that such fiction need be ‘overt’).

As to the first point, I’ve already delineated my concerns with Overland’s previous attempts to define ‘politically engaged’ fiction: their use of uninterrogated assumptions about ethics, aesthetics, the nature of language, and what constitutes a ‘political’ disposition in fiction, as well as a reliance on simplistic notions of hermeneutics (i.e. the interpretation of texts) and of the relationship between authorial intent, textual effect and reader response. I raised these concerns because these assumptions suggest a basically anti-intellectual notion of the ‘literary’. I expect such gestures in broadsheets, but not in Overland, one of the few journals that presents complex, critical analysis for a popular audience in Australia. (And if Peter Craven’s comments about Meanjin are to be believed—along with the (temporary?) discontinuation of Heat—it appears that we’re about to lose several of the other journals that provide such a space.)

I also disliked the emphasis of Ted Genoways’s original piece (although he’s got his own problems right now), which Woodhead then took up: both place the ‘blame’ for problems with contemporary fiction on writers. This blame is misplaced. Over the last two decades, the publishing industry has been subjected to an incredible regime of economic rationalism. As a result, it is now incredibly hard for new writers of ‘literary’ fiction to place a book with a mainstream publisher, and those lucky/stubborn/talented enough to publish with a smaller house will rarely be paid anything even remotely resembling a liveable wage. This is not even to speak of the forces pushing writers to produce books that are ‘marketable’ rather than, you know, good.

Writers increasingly find themselves powerless in the face of a globalised, networked industry—are we now going to blame them for the output of those industrial networks? Even many ‘successful’ writers I know (I’m speaking here of people who’ve won major Australian prizes) are not able to support themselves through writing. Are the current struggles writers face—to maintain a ‘real’ job while finding time to write—not enough, or do we need to accuse them of ruining literature and laden them with ‘ethical’ burdens, as well?

I similarly took issue with Rjurik Davidson’s critique of Creative Writing programs. Not only are such programs often the only space in which emerging writers can receive both instructional and financial (via scholarships and stipends) support, but also they are one of the last institutions in which aesthetic merit is held to be a more important criteria of a text than its marketability. Whatever the flaws of such programs, they can’t be held accountable for the larger production of literature (and, indeed, few Australian publishers pay much attention to Creative Writing programs in any systematic way), and I fail to see how attacking either writers or Creative Writing programs will result in any material benefit. To do so is both bad theory and bad praxis.

The issue here is one of ‘value’: in the face of overwhelming economic rationalism, what possibilities exist for maintaining other forms of value—such as aesthetic merit—or, indeed, of creating new forms of value that are about something more than just the bottom line. Attacking writers, so far as I can see, does nothing to achieve this end, nor does attacking one of the few institutions that still supports some form of value outside of economic exchange.

My interest—which is reflected in both my radio reviews and this blog—is in locating the good fiction that is already out there, but, for the above reasons, has remained largely obscure. And good fiction is already out there, including ‘political’ fiction, like Martin Edmond’s Luca Antara (which offers a creative re-imagining of Australia’s discovery and colonisation placed alongside contemporary narratives of a man named ‘Martin Edmond’ driving a taxi in Sydney), or Evan Dara’s The Lost Scrapbook (a narrative about industry wreaking havoc on a small, U.S. town, in which the entire town is given a voice, thereby connecting the alienated individual with the social), or Wayne Macauley’s Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe (a surreal narrative about Melbourne’s housing crisis that also plays with notions of utopia and autonomy) or his Caravan Story (which is in fact a narrative about economic rationalism being applied to the arts!). All of these texts contain ‘political’ themes but do so in imaginative ways, and can’t just be reduced to ‘politics’ or even ‘political engagement’ as such (although they can be read that way—as I have just done). They are also all published by small publishers who still believe that there are values more important than money.

So that’s where I’m coming from, but I’m not sure that these larger objections really affect Overland much on a practical level: if these arguments for a ‘politically engaged fiction’ result, as Gleeson-White suggests, in Overland working to shape the future of Australian fiction by publishing new voices and new types of literature, then I have nothing to protest. Locating and publishing such voices (who, I presume, will include authors less well-known that Christos Tsoilkas, Alexis Wright, and Janette Turner-Hospital) is, in and of itself, a laudable goal, and I, for one, look forward to seeing what they uncover.

The Genius of Wayne Macauley

2010-10-27T14:51:00.003+11:00

Last night I was lucky enough to launch Wayne Macauley's new book, Other Stories. Below is the text of my launch speech:

Tonight I have the enviable honour of launching Wayne Macauley’s new book, Other Stories. I’m excited to speak about that, but, before doing so, I’m going to begin with a brief anecdote, as launchers of books are so often wont to do.

Several years ago I was up very late one evening trying to finish reading submissions for Wet Ink: The Magazine of New Writing in order to meet an impending deadline. For those of you who’ve never had the pleasure of reading unsolicited fiction manuscripts, this might sound like not such a bad gig. Those of you who have, though, know it’s quite a different story: we get several hundred submissions for each one of our four yearly issues, and if I had to identify any quality that would characterise most unsolicited submissions for literary magazines, it would certainly be that they are almost uniformly not very good.

I’m not saying this to attack those kind enough to send their work to Wet Ink or anywhere else—I’m certainly grateful to have the opportunity to read these writers’ work—but given that the vast majority of those sending in their writing are emerging authors still honing their craft, as well as my own peculiar editorial sensibilities, reading through cold submissions can often feel more like an endurance test than an aesthetic experience, especially at around three in the morning.

My reading that night wasn’t going particularly well: I’d just had a run of about ten stories in which authors had included the words ‘The End’ at the end of their stories (a note to would-be authors, I can tell when your story ends by the fact that there aren’t any more words). Then there were another five where the writers listed their name at the bottom of each page followed by the copyright symbol and the year (another note to neophyte authors: even if anyone did want to steal your story—which, by the way, no-one does—that little copyright symbol won’t stop them). After wading through many more run-of-the-mill submissions, I then read a story that inexplicably detailed a very sincere and passionate sexual relationship between a human being and a wallaby. At this point, I could feel despair setting in.

And no doubt it would have, had I not read the next story, called ‘The Loaded Pig’, a brilliant, brutal satire based on Henry Lawson’s ‘The Loaded Dog’ about some despicable men engaging in a despicable occupation which the opening lines described: ‘We were digging way out there in the middle of nowhere looking for blackfella bones that we’d heard were somewhere around there and which we knew we could get good money for—you can get good money for blackfella bones so long as you know where to look.’ The story itself went on to offer an acerbically funny and surreal vision of the slow death of rural Australia and the brutality of our colonial past.

After finishing this story, I knew that I was in the presence of a phenomenal authorial voice and of, I believe, a great author, who was, of course, Wayne Macauley. Of all the many great stories Wet Ink has been lucky enough to print—and there are many—Wayne’s remains the one that I’m most personally proud of publishing. I’ll also note this: shortly after its publication I sent Wayne a brief email telling him how much I liked it, and he responded with the following: ‘“The Loaded Pig” was rejected seven times before it landed on your desk. This says either (a) the story is bad and you’re a fool or (b) the traditional literary magazine circuit in Australia is suffering from a serious failure of nerve. I wonder which one it is?’

There’s one slight problem in opening my talk with this anecdote, however. ‘The Loaded Pig’ isn’t actually in Wayne’s new collection, Other Stories; nonetheless, it’s good to know that Wayne has other stories beyond those in Other Stories. But there’s even more good news here: you won’t miss it, because this is a book filled with wonderful short fiction, and reading it produced the exact same feeling I got on that night many years ago.

Consider the story ‘Bohemians’: here, a real-estate agent in a once-hip inner-Melbourne suburb faces a problem; local housing prices have skyrocketed to the point where artists and intellectuals can no longer afford to live there. The solution, of course, is to rent bohemians from a dealer; the entire story consists of a letter written by this bohemian-dealer in response to the real-estate agent, and opens by saying, ‘Do I have bohemians? Of course I have bohemians, Matt, but probably not in the quantities you require.’ (If you haven’t worked it out by now, Macauley arguably writes better first lines to short stories than almost any other writer in Australia).

The book is filled with other stories like this, all of which are funny and wonderfully odd: in ‘The Man Who Invented Television’, a Melbourne man named Henry Walter invents the television in 1855, which, of course, plays contemporary American TV programs. In ‘Simpson and His Donkey Go Looking for the Inland Sea’, we hear about—who else—but Simpson and His Donkey, who have been looking for the inland sea for 94 years. These stories view the world through a satirical and often surreal lens that attempts to present what we accept as ‘reality’ as something very different indeed; in this sense they are truly Other Stories.

But this is a book that isn’t just quirky or inventive; in my opinion, it’s a serious contribution to Australian literature. In September, I reviewed Other Stories on Triple R, and part of my review sums up my feelings about the book pretty well, so I will be lazy and simply read out what I wrote then: ‘although [Macauley’s] formal experimentation might bear the influence of international writers like Beckett and Kafka, his work also suggests the local inheritance of Henry Lawson and Peter Carey’s early short stories…figures from Australia’s cultural history are a signal fixation in Macauley’s work, [including] Adam Lindsay Gordon, the dig tree, the inland sea and Melbourne’s trams…While [Macauley’s] aesthetics are influenced by the great traditions of world literature, the content remains recognizably Australian.’

And this is a particularly important point in the contemporary landscape, I think. If you just went by the broadsheets, you’d be forgiven for thinking that there are only two short story writers in contemporary Australia. And while I have nothing against those authors and think their writing is of a high quality, I do think that the contemporary Australian idea of what a short story is suggests a pretty limited cultural imaginary. Thankfully, though there are always Other Stories—and this, obviously, is part of the point of Wayne’s title. This is brave and powerful writing that seeks to do something more than simply reinforce what we already believe or serve as just another bourgeois entertainment. These stories present an alternative—an otherness—that Australian literature desperately needs.

The other day, an interview with Wayne was posted by the online journal Verity La in which its editor, Alec Patrick, lead off with what I think is a most unusual question: in a roundabout way, after noting all of the awards that Wayne has won and all the places where his fiction has been published, Alec basically asked Wayne why he isn’t better known. It’s a sort of wonderfully naïve question; Alec may as well have asked Wayne why he isn’t taller or why he doesn’t have six arms. Wayne, of course, has already indirectly addressed the odd workings of literary recognition himself in Other Stories’ final tale about Adam Lindsay Gordon and his suicide in the face of both poverty and obscurity. But I don’t think Alec’s question is so absurd, and in fact I would challenge anyone in this room to read Other Stories and not find themselves asking the same question.

Let me offer you some proof in the form of the very first sentence of Other Stories, which begins like this: ‘In the dog days of summer, when the earth rolls and sighs and a heat shimmer wobbles and distorts everything in the middle distance and beyond, who has not wanted, as evening falls, to take their mattress and pillow outside and sleep like a well-heeled vagabond under an open sky?’ To ask a question of my own, who wouldn’t want to read a book that opens like this? This book isn’t just a good collection of short stories; it’s an exceptional work of Australian literature. Those already familiar with Wayne’s first two books, Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe and Caravan Story, know what an exceptional writer he is; if anything Other Stories—which presents stories that Wayne has published over the last two decades—is even better.

In my Triple R review, I ultimately made what is possibly a pretty big claim about both Wayne and his work. Here’s what I said: ‘Wayne Macauley should be recognized as one of Australia’s best living writers – that he isn’t is an indictment of Australian literary culture.’ I stand by that statement, and I believe that anyone who reads Wayne’s three books will come to the same conclusions that I have: even though I’ve been up here talking about it for some time now, I think Wayne’s work speaks for itself. It’s my hope that, by hook or by crook, Other Stories gets the recognition that it deserves. And, for those of you who are bored by the kind of short stories that currently get passed off as ‘serious contemporary literature’, I have a quick fix for you: it’s time to put those books down and read some Other Stories instead.

Book Review: Leaving Home with Henry

2010-10-26T08:59:00.003+11:00

Leaving Home with Henry

By Phillip Edmonds

Press On

At heart, Phillip Edmonds’s new novella, Leaving Home with Henry, is a sort of fictionalised travelogue about driving across Australia, albeit one with a significant twist: Trevor, who has departed from Adelaide in order to escape ‘terrifying domestic moments’ and to find ‘a way to talk about the big picture’, goes to the National Archives in Canberra, only to discover Henry Lawson living among the stacks of books. Soon enough, Henry decides to accompany Trevor, and the two set off in search of the ‘real’ Australia among the many small towns between Canberra and Queensland.

Edmonds handles this conceit effectively by never questioning the whys and hows of Lawson’s sudden reappearance, instead giving the text over to the magical realism inherent in the premise. But, of course, having Henry along in the car also enables Trevor to reflect on Australian history and how our notions of both Australia and Australian-ness have changed over the last century; part of this notion is implicit in the selection of Lawson, himself, of course, who is both arguably Australia’s most famous writer and yet largely goes unread by most contemporary readers.

Much of the book is taken up by dialogues between Trevor and Henry as they discuss the contradictions of contemporary Australian life; in the hands of a lesser writer, these interactions could be come off seeming forced and overly analytical, but Edmonds writes them with a wry, laconic touch that is both funny and engaging, as is evidenced when Trevor says to Henry, ‘This trip is your chance to wander innocently around the country and gaze upon the land with piercing eyes and impaired vision.’ Moreover, the inherent comedy of Lawson trying to come terms with the modern world also creates several moments of real humour, as well.

Ultimately, the book becomes about both characters’ search for what it means to be an Australian in the contemporary world, as is clear late in the novella when Trevor is asked to describe the Australian dream to a tourist from the U.S.: ‘The idea was that working people could live decent lives and that we are generous, good-hearted people who care for one another like mates, and it’s not just a gender thing. We can send ourselves up, and even if serious, we don’t want to walk over each other. But that’s changing. Now the Australian dream is to own a bigger house than any of your neighbours.’ In these and other moments (such as in references to the death of both socialism and unions as legitimate political forces in Australian society), Leaving Home with Henry makes clear its own particular viewpoints and allegiances, but Edmond’s critique of contemporary life always turns back on itself and never devolves into a simple fictionalisation of ideological positions or reportage of political ‘issues’.

Phillip Edmonds’s Leaving Home with Henry, which is only about 90 pages long, may be a physically small book, but it’s one filled with big and important ideas about contemporary life, politics and the continuing importance of Australian literature. I liked it, and I suspect that Henry Lawson would approve, too.

For more information, visit Press On Publishing.

Literary Links: How Creative Writing Programs Are Ruining Everything...

2010-10-21T16:34:00.004+11:00

This week, my number one link will come--in a gesture completely lacking in any humility whatsoever--from me. Recently I published an essay on Creative Writing programs and 'political' fiction entitled 'Engaging Fiction: Literature, Life and How Creative Writing Programs are Ruining Everything, Apparently', which is in the most recent issue of Kill Your Darlings. Although I wrote it back in August, it's part of an ongoing discussion with the good folks at Overland about the role of fiction in relation to the social (or, more specifically, if literature should have any such role at all). OK, enough about me; here are this week's other links:

This next link again comes from Overland, where Ben Eltham's modest proposal to dismantle the Australia Council has generated quite a bit of discussion. Initially, Christopher Madden responded with a critique, which Eltham then rebutted on his blog. Then, OzCo CEO, Kathy Keele, wrote a response highlighting some errors in Eltham's essay. I'll be honest: there's something about Eltham's proposal that really creeps me out. I don't know enough about the specific policy issues to say whether his facts are right or not, but my concerns lie at the level of ideology; particularly, I think his idea (as I noted in the comments section of his blog, albeit not very articulately), broadly speaking, reflects the logic of neo-liberalism in a pretty terrifying way. I need to think about this a bit more, but expect a post on it soon...

Daniel Wood reviews Tom McCarthy's C for Kill Your Darlings. He ended up liking the book much more than I did, but it's a thoughtful and interesting review, and comes from a position I'm very sympathetic to: 'Maybe it’s true that fiction is now on death’s door. If there’s life left in it yet, however, it lies in fiction that upsets popular notions of what fiction should be and instead illustrates what else it is capable of...'

Yet another negative review of Franzen's Freedom has appeared. It's interesting that the reviews seem to run so hot and cold on this book (probably due to the fact that Franzen is such a jackass. . . er . . . a divisive figure). My ultimate suspicion is that, with the passage of time and the waning of his particular celebrity, Franzen will be remembered as he should be: a very good--but not great--novelist (see also Norman Mailer and John Updike).

The Guardian has run an article pointing out that characters in novels don't have to be nice to be interesting. That this is newsworthy in and of itself says something very sad about the contemporary novel. In particular, I liked this line: ' Literature, after all, is not some cosy textual coffee morning populated solely with friends we haven't met yet.' But despite a few good one-liners and a solid basic point, this article predictably ends with the banal: 'Great art is challenging and sometimes uncomfortable: we might not like Patty in Franzen's Freedom or Gilbert Osmond in The Portrait of a Lady and we certainly don't like Nabokov's Humbert Humbert, despite his seductive, "fancy prose style", but these are characters through whom we may learn something of the human soul.' Oh, God. Do people still really believe that literature works like this? Apparently so...

Book Review: The Literary Conference

2010-10-19T09:16:00.000+11:00

The Literary Conference

By Cesar Aira

New Directions

Argentinian author Cesar Aira has recently started to gain some recognition in the Anglophone world, due largely to the fact that Roberto Bolaño named him as one of the most important authors currently writing in Spanish. But so far, only a tiny percentage of his work is available in English; although five of his books have been translated, Aira has allegedly written somewhere between 50 and 70 books, although the precise number is difficult to know for certain (even his Wikipedia page only lists a ‘partial bibliography’), as many of his books have been put out by small and relatively unknown publishers.

Aira’s output is so large for two reasons: first of all, most of his books are novellas of about 100 pages or so, and secondly, if we believe Aira’s own claims (and I’m largely inclined to do so), he never revises his own work. Aira’s lack of revision does not stem from laziness, but rather from an artistic methodology that uses an aleatory technique (i.e. the employment of random chance for aesthetic ends) in the tradition of artists like John Cage and the Dadaists. This ‘flight forward’ technique, as Aira terms it, forces him to be constrained by whatever he has written, and thus find an imaginative way out of any difficult situations he accidentally writes himself into.

Although such a technique could readily produce a sprawling mess, in Aira’s hands, this approach produces books that are wildly inventive and hysterically funny. The Literary Conference, Aira’s most recent novella to appear in English, is no exception.

The novella itself tells the story of a writer, also named Cesar Aira, who also happens to be a mad scientist and a world-leading expert in cloning technology. Aira desires to take over the world—as all mad scientists do—but quickly realises that he lacks the will for such a task, so he happens upon an ingenious solution: he will clone the world’s greatest genius and give him the job of taking over the world. After much careful thought and selection, Aira finally settles on the perfect candidate, who is, of course, none other than the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes.

In order to facilitate the cloning process, Aira travels to a literary conference that Fuentes will be at, and at this point the story begins to unfurl in a variety of even more unexpected directions. Despite it’s absurdist character, however, this is a book not without literary merits; in particular, Aira plays with notions of translation and transformation that are highlighted when he, inevitably, loses control of his cloning machine with hilarious results.

This novella, ultimately, is a comic farce that employs wilfully absurd plot twists in a way that would almost certainly appeal to fans of writers like Flann O’Brien and Jorge Luis Borges. This is the third of Aira’s novels I’ve read this year (which isn’t too impressive given their relative brevity), and every one of them has been a different and entirely worthwhile experience. That being said, those who have yet to read Aira might be better off starting with his book An Incident in the Life of a Landscape Painter, which at least proves that Aira is capable of successfully writing a more traditional narrative when he wants to, and is, above all, an exceptionally beautiful book that shares many thematic elements with Gerald Murnane’s classic novel, The Plains.

Book Launch of Wayne Macauley's Other Stories, etc.

2010-10-18T15:52:00.001+11:00

In September, I gave a glowing review to Wayne Macauley's new collection of fiction, Other Stories. As a result, I've now been given the honour of launching his book on Tuesday, October 26th at 6.30 p.m. at the North Fitzroy Arms. Come along!

Ryan Paine has done a sort of book review by synecdoche, reviewing one of my stories as a way of reviewing the whole collection (I like this technique, but would like to push it to the extreme, i.e. reviewing a book by reviewing one page, one paragraph, one sentence, even one word...). But yeah, it is a review, written in review form, that reviews a story from my book in the review-like manner that reviews have. Things are said, judgments are made and whatnot and whatnot, etc.

As those of you that read this blog know (yes, I'm speaking to both of you), I've been engaged in a pseudo-dialogue with some of the editorial staff at Overland on the relationship between politics, the social and fiction. Well, over the weekend that dialogue resumed in the comments section of my previous post entitled 'Commenting on Overland's Comments on My Comments on Overland', which I suppose means that I'm now commenting on Overland's comments on my post 'Commenting on Overland's Comments on My Comments on Overland', which is perhaps confusing for those who, like me, are easily confused.