Book Review: Six Tenses

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

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

'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

• 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

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

"--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!

• 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.