Digital Publishing Has Arrived

I wrote a very, very brief overview article about digital publishing for the Melbourne University Staff Newsletter last week. My hope is that, with the arrival of the iPad and the launch of Kobo, we can stop talking about the future of digital publishing in Australia and start talking about what's actually happening in the present. Anyway, if you want to have a look at it, go here.

Promo Clip for Known Unknowns

In case anyone has ever wondered why I am not an actor, the below clip should offer a sufficient explanation. So, if you're looking for a good reason to laugh at me, today is your day. Oh, yes, I do say something about the book, too.

Book Review: Antwerp

Antwerp

By Roberto Bolaño

Although Roberto Bolaño only died in 2004, it appears that virtually all of his work will soon be available in English translation; at least four more books are slated for an English-language release over the next twelve months or so (and a recently discovered ‘complete’ novel from 1989, entitled El Tercer Reich (The Third Reich), has already been published in Spanish, with an English version tentatively scheduled for 2011). The enormous interest in Bolaño’s work derives from the acclaim for his final novel, 2666, a massive 898-page masterpiece, which I reviewed earlier this year.

Now, however, his first novel, Antwerp – which was written in 1980, but remained unpublished until 2002 – has finally been released in English. On the face of it, this book couldn’t be more different from Bolaño’s later work. Prior to writing Antwerp, Bolaño mostly wrote poetry, a fact that shows in the book’s composition. Unlike the sprawling narratives of 2666 or The Savage Detectives, Antwerp is a slim novella of only 76 pages, which is composed of a series of discrete aphorisms, written in impressionistic, fragmented language. But despite these differences of form, the book does occupy itself with many of the themes and situations that recur in his later fiction: Antwerp is a book about a murder, which offers portraits of a variety of shadowy figures who may or may not be linked to the crime.

Even more than Bolaño’s mature novels, Antwerp is an explicitly avant-garde work; although it is still a sort of experimental detective novel, the larger narrative of the book is intentionally disjointed and concealed. Some details, however, are clear: the book is set in Barcelona, and revolves around a murder at the Estrella del Mar campground, which is situated near some tennis courts and a horse-riding school (where a young South American writer named Roberto Bolaño is living). It appears that, on the night of the murder, many of the people at the campground were watching a movie projected onto a bed-sheet stretched between two trees. The police investigate several people in relation to the murder, including a small hunchbacked man, an English writer, and an unnamed woman. There is also some discussion of a shadowy figure named Colan Yar, who many people in the novel seem to be running from.

But this description makes Antwerp sound more straightforward than it is. Indeed, I was able to piece together the above details only after reading the book twice; this is a novel written to be read not just once, but again and again. Antwerp is definitely not a book for readers who want straightforward plotting or clear narrative resolution. Moreover, it’s not a good place to start for anyone who hasn’t read Bolaño before (for those readers, I would suggest either beginning with 2666 or his collection of short stories entitled Last Evenings on Earth).

For those readers who enjoy experimental fiction, however, Antwerp is a fascinating read, which recalls a great number of other writers and works, including Alain Robbe-Grillet, William S. Burrough’s The Naked Lunch and The Ticket that Exploded, J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, Julio Cortazar’s short fiction, and Samuel Beckett’s Molloy, among others. In the very fact that it recalls so many other books, though, Antwerp does ultimately feel like an apprentice work; it’s excellent, but isn’t the equal of the exceptional books that Bolaño would go on to write.

That being said, I’m already convinced that Bolaño is one of most important writers of the last several decades (I’ve begun resurrecting my half-remembered Spanish in the attempt to read his work in the original language), and even the publication of his minor work is a legitimate literary event. In this sense, the next few years promise to be an exciting time for readers of literary fiction as Bolaño’s obras completas are made available to English speakers.

 This review initially aired on Triple R's Breakfasters.

Bad Brains - Banned In DC

I love Bad Brains (they get a brief mention in my book, which is my excuse for posting this here), and this, of course, is their classic DC anti-anthem. This track also basically created the template for every hardcore song written afterwards. If you want to see what their live shows were like--and check out some embarrassing dancing--you can see a clip of them from 1982 here.

Book Review: The Norseman's Song

The Norseman’s Song

By Joel Deane

The Norseman’s Song is a novel that seems packed with literary homage and allusion – to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, and even to Catullus’s poem 85, (known as ‘Odi et amor’). But for all of this intertextual reference, The Norseman’s Song is ultimately a page-turning thriller, albeit one with an unusual, inventive structure.

Deane cleverly weaves together multiple narratives from multiple narrators. The bulk of the story is about a Taxi driver named Farrell (and, fittingly, he is quite feral), who picks up an elderly and seemingly delusional man named Bob. Not only is Bob in possession of a box that contains a human face, but also he is searching for a shadowy figure called the Norwegian – a man alleged to have slaughtered his own wife and daughter on a whaling ship. Bob slowly reveals how he first came into contact with the Norwegian just after WWI (and exposes much of his own dark past in the process). This contemporary narrative is interspersed with excerpts from the Norwegian’s journal, which has apparently been bound in human skin, and recounts his own mad and bloody history. In this sense, the story is a record of multiple voyages: the Norwegian’s life aboard whaling ships, Bob’s story of his first search for the Norwegian, and Farrell’s contemporary taxi journey through Victoria.

The book also abounds with gothic imagery and gruesome violence, but, thankfully, Deane imbues even the grimmest moments with a bleak, absurdist sense of humour. The novel is at its best in its second half when it revels in its own gothic excess, pushing the genre into a kind of kitsch: Bob relates a string of increasingly ridiculous anecdotes, the best of which involves the story of two farmers who believe their sheep are being bayoneted by communists living on the edges of their property.

These moments don’t necessarily signify anything larger, but they aren’t meant to; while the reader needs to completely suspend any sense of disbelief in order for the novel to work, Deane is clearly in on the joke, parodying the schlocky language characteristic of noir and gothic fiction, such as when Farrell notes that, ‘I feel small. Exposed. Like a cartoon character just before the piano drops on his head.’

At other points, Deane’s overblown language ultimately does feel like overkill, however. The Norwegian’s journal entries are clearly intentionally bombastic (e.g. ‘it was plain for all to see through the permutations of his expression, from expectant to inchoate to corybantic, that his second wife had been as unfaithful as his first’), but, even though they are a sort of ironic pastiche, their grandiloquent prose can occasionally become tedious.

But this doesn’t really matter: The Norseman’s Song ultimately isn’t a novel that’s attempting to offer some contemplative, literary experience. It presents bracing action recounted through a clever narrative structure. Sure, if you step back and think about it, some aspects of the plot don’t quite tally, but neither, for that matter, do most Phillip K. Dick novels. Moreover, one suspects that Deane has wilfully avoided such narrative closure, much as Poe did in his strange and fragmentary The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym – a key influence. Ultimately, The Norseman’s Song is a keen, clever piece of entertainment, and if you’re looking for a cleverly told yarn, it will certainly fit the bill; without a doubt, this will be one of the sharpest, most intriguing Australian thrillers released this year.

Read a Story from My Book!

The good people at Affirm Press have put a sample chapter of my forthcoming book of short stories, Known Unknowns, up on their website. In this case, 'sample chapter' just means a short story, which is called 'The Russians Are Leaving.'

To read it, go here, and then click the teeny-tiny download link at the bottom-right of the screen.

The page also includes a little bit of background on the book, a photo of the cover, two very generous blurbs from Tony Birch and Nick Jose, and a foppish photo of yours truly (see also the very same photo on the right side of this page).

It also contains a link back to this blog, enabling you to alternate between these two pages in an infinite loop...

Book Review: Child of the Twilight

Child of the Twilight

By Carmel Bird

Harper Collins

Carmel Bird’s wonderfully beguiling new novel Child of the Twilight is full of delightful surprises. But I was ultimately surprised that I enjoyed this novel at all, since, theoretically, virtually everything about Child of the Twilight seems to work against its success: it is a book largely about Australians travelling through Mediterranean Europe, and, worse still, most of these characters are wealthy people who seem blissfully unaware of their own privilege. These are precisely the tropes that Andrew McCann attacked in his excoriating Overland essay, ‘How to Fuck a Tuscan Garden’ (2004), which decried the middlebrow pretensions of novels about bourgeois Australians searching for their identities while touring the continent (usually with a romantic subplot thrown in for good measure). But while I suspect McCann is generally right about these kinds of books, Child of the Twilight succeeds through sheer force of style alone.

Bird’s prose is luminous, full of mesmerising idiosyncrasies; she evades cliché at all moments, opting for unusual metaphors and unlikely (but brilliant) similes. In one instance, a character falls on the floor injured, resulting in ‘a finger of blood slithering across the tiles until it burst and branched into its little fractal folly of webbed rivulets, and slid in gleaming patterns of trees and corals and underwater weeds.’ Here not only is the commonplace made strange, but also the abject image of human blood becomes something full of an intricate, almost delicate beauty. Bird’s prose constantly turns on a dime, taking us to unlikely places.

While Bird’s prose is inventive, it also makes for addictive reading. Indeed, the prose is so forceful that it causes the reader not to notice the strangely fragmented and oblique nature of the story, which is not so much a chronological narrative as a series of detours, anecdotes and evasions. Although the book has a consistent narrator, many parts are told through other voices, such as that of Father Cosimo, a priest whose stories are charged with a fanciful, spurious logic that is absolutely absorbing. Hidden under these digressions lies the basic outline of the plot: Child of the Twilight is ultimately about a statue in Italy called the Bambinello, which was stolen in 1994, and how the theft of this statue comes to indirectly affect the lives of the many characters in the book.

And, for all of its style, Child of the Twilight takes on a series of very interesting issues, including the nature of belief (both religious and otherwise) and the ways in which reproductive technologies have forever changed our notions of identity, ancestry and inheritance. Moreover, the novel also investigates some other interesting and arcane theological concepts, including the manner of speaking in tongues called both ‘green language’ and ‘the language of the birds’, as well as the conception of Furta Sacra, a doctrine by which religious relics are said to have their own agency and can choose to move from one location to another (which is also, of course, a convenient way of disguising theft). The names of many of the characters (such as Avila and Pieta) resonate with these religious interests.

But for all of these wonderful qualities, there are one or two places where Child of the Twilight isn’t completely successful. The story possesses a metafictional premise; a young novelist named Sydney Kent narrates the book, and her intrusions sometime feel more contrived than inventive. Moreover, her reflections on the changes wrought by the internet, particularly Facebook and Google, sound like an older person trying to write from the perspective of a younger person, rather than being the thoughts of a legitimate digital native. I also suspect that these references will not age well, but, in fairness to Bird, very few literary novelists have successfully integrated depictions of the internet into their work. And these occasional missteps are few and far between. Overall, Child of the Twilight is an enchanting novel, and its beautifully wrought – if strange – narrative voice makes for compelling reading.

This review initially aired on Triple R’s Breakfasters.