Prizes and Infinity

Forgive my long silence - my hands have been incapacitated and I am only now - slowly - returning to my laptop though I have never stopped reading of course.

I was so excited last Saturday to read in the Guardian Review about a new prize for fiction being launched by Goldsmiths College which will go to a book that celebrates the spirit of invention and 'characterises the genre at its most surprising'.   Finally, a reprieve for the English literary novel!  Think Tom McCarthy, Will Self, Julian Barnes and so on.   There are four judges and my delight was increased by seeing Gabriel Josipovici numbered amongst them.   Some time ago, I drew readers attention to Whatever Happened to Modernism in which he lamented the state of English literature;  a judge of this calibre can only bode well and, to quote Blake Morrison, 'will encourage more risk-taking among novelists, editors and agents alike'.

Coincidentally, I had just finished reading Infinity The Story of a Moment by Josipovici, published 2012.   The juxtaposition of two concepts in the title was enough to draw me and feel I was in for a treat.   The book takes the form of an interview of one, Massimo, who was man servant/chauffeur to a wealthy and eccentric Sicilian nobleman and avant-garde composer, Pavone, who is now dead.   Massimo talks about Pavone's life and particularly his extraordinary opinions and theories of the workings of the world and especially music and art.   About the latter, he opines that he sees a decline in standards:  'I do not say according to the highest standards, he said, but according to the highest standards that still prevail' - pure Josipovici!   Josipovici said in an interview that 'he [Pavone] is based on the wonderful reclusive Italian composer, Giacinto Scelsi (1905-1988), whose pronouncements about everything from rhythm in music to beautiful women and the future of civilisation are a curious mixture of profundity and bullshit.   In fact it was this mixture I found so appealing and tried to mimic'. 

Together with the comedy of Pavone's outrageous opinions, there is the pathos and charm of the relationship that Massimo had with his employer and, at times, in the interview, he stops talking as if trying to understand and make sense of the account he is giving.   There was no doubt a close bond between the two though Massimo is frequently at a loss in trying to articulate Pavone's thoughts and conversations.   He does give us some clue to the title when he talks about Pavone's account of a visit to Nepal and Tibet where Pavone felt that the music there had taken 'many lifetimes, many generations to produce ... that each sound is a world, an infinite world ... yet which is over in no time at all'.

Maybe Josipovic will bring Pavone's opinion that 'many artists haved been ruined by half-baked ideas about what will make them modern' to his judgement of the new prize!

Infinity The Story of a Moment, Gabriel Josipovici, Carcanet paperback, 2012, £12.95

Boring Booker

They've done it again!   As Eileen Battersby says in today's Irish Times, 'in true Man Booker tradition, [Hilary] Mantel has won with an inferior work'.

The British love affair with historical fiction continues unabated and the judges have turned their backs on the astonishing work of Will Self's, Umbrella, and the no less impressive Lighthouse by Alison Moore.   No wonder the demand for European translations is rising!  Bring up the Bodies is the second book of the trilogy Mantel is composing, the first one, Wolf Hall, having already won the Booker.   It continues the story of Thomas Cromwell who was Henry VIII's right hand man and this time centres on the life and execution of Anne Boleyn.   No great excitement then nor any great writing.

Back to the Booker

16 October is fast approaching - can you believe our makeshift summer is actually over?   On 16th we shall know the winner of this year's Booker Prize.   My money is on Will Self as I do believe his book Umbrella is a triumph and marks a milestone in today's British publishing world.   However, a more than worthy contestant has to be The Lighthouse, by a first time novelist Alison Moore.   This is a wonderfully well crafted piece of work.  Born in 1971, Moore is not totally unknown in that she has had short stories published and won first prize in the novella category of The New Writer Prose and Poetry Prizes.

The narrative concerns one, Futh [he doesn't appear to have any Christian name] who embarks on a walking tour of the Rhineland in an attempt to assuage his torment and puzzlement at the break up of his marriage to Angela.  On the face of it, it seems to be a straightforward story but it is anything but.   At least two critics have referred to the 'Russian doll' element of the narrrative which is a good description of the novel as we have a story in a story in a story creating a circular effect much as the walk Futh is undertaking in Germany.    In the hands of a lesser writer, such circularity could be a disaster but here it is captivating.

As he walks he remembers a trip he took with his father whose marriage had also collapsed, his wife also called Angela, leaving him with what seemed to Futh great suddenness.   The memory of his mother's perfume consumes him and clearly influenced his choice of career as a manufacturer of scents.   His first night on his tour is spent in a guesthouse run by Ester and Bernard.   Ester also is obsessed by scents and always wanted to be a perfumier.   Now, as the landlady of the Hellhaus, she occupies herself seducing her male guests as being the only way of attracting the attention of her rather brutal husband, Bernard.   Already we feel a sense of impending doom and we want Futh out of the place while dreading his inevitable return there at the conclusion of his walking tour.  

Moore makes us very intimate with Futh and his grief at the loss of both his mother and wife.   We suffer with him and his feet that become blistered and bleeding because of wearing new and untried walking boots;  he loses his way and seems continually to miss planned meals;  he worries that the stick insects he collects are being properly looked after and he ponders endlessly over the curious relationship that he has left behind  - that of his best friend Kenny whose mother, Gloria, lavishes attention on him - whether to seduce Futh or his father is never totally clear.  We puzzle over the role of the little silver perfume bottle holder in the shape of a lighthouse that was his mother's and which he never leaves out of his possession.

Though none of this sounds like gripping stuff, this book is a page-turner and we care desperately about Futh and empathise with him, really worrying that it is all going to go dreadfully wrong.   Moore has in a superb way created an unforgettable, vulnerable, curiously innocent man.   This slim paperback [only 180 pages!] is definitely a must read.  

Published by Salt Publishing, it is available in paperback, freepost for €7.71 from bookdepository.co.uk

Casement .... and Booker

A non-working left hand has kept me away from my laptop for nearly a month now - apologies!   No doubt everyone has been pondering the Booker Short List - well, ponder no more.   There are only two really worth your time [and hopefully the judges' time too!] and thats Will Self's Umbrella which is a totally brilliant book and the most exciting to appear on the English literary scene for a long time.   I shall review it later.   The second book that is both interesting and thought provoking is by a new author, Alison Moore, The Lighthouse and if Self's amazing tome is rejected, this might be a worthy winner.

But first I want to tell you about The Dream of the Celt by Mario Vargas Llosa.   This is a fictional account of Roger Casement's life [or is it factional?].   I was lucky enough to get to see and hear Llosa when he was in Dublin recently for the Literary Festival.   Following his reading, he was questioned widely about different incidents in Casement's life and his general reportage and I felt he finally got a little annoyed by the seeming refusal of his audience to accept that this was a 'novel' and not an historical document.   Sadly I am not sufficiently conversant with the detail of Casement's life to know to what extent Llosa is creative with it but the historians who have reviewed it appear happy with the detail of Casement's career though of course that is well established.   Though once an attempt is made to explore the mind of the man, his demons and struggles, his hopes and despairs, then one is truly in the realm of fiction. 

Casement was an extraordinary man, a human rights campaigner and a fierce opponent of the evils of colonization before Albert Memmi was born!   His horror at the evils perpetrated on the natives in the Congo, Amazonia and Peru resonate loudly with our generation familiar with the Court of Human Rights and the fall out from Nuremberg but he was well ahead of his times and though knighted for his work in these regions, his opinions raised eyebrows in many circles at the time.   Alison Ribeiro de Menezes who reviewed the book for the Irish Times is guilty of a category error in lamenting that Llosa makes no 'truly searching critique of Casement’s contradictory positions or of his unthinking mixing of human rights with nationalism' as Casement saw no conflict between the rights of self determination for the natives of the Congo and those of Ireland.   Nationalism was a relatively new political movement at the time, before the Great War, and human rights as a discipline did not exist.

Llosa deals in a new way with the infamous Black Diaries.   Though they are referred to mostly by innuendo in the course of the novel, they only come up strongly at the end and, in fact, he writes about them in an Epilogue to the book saying, that as a novelist, it is his impression that 'Roger Casement wrote the famous diaries but did not live them, at least not interally, that there is in them a good deal of exaggeration and fiction, that he wrote certain things because he would have liked to live them but couldn't'.   This appears to be  a happy conclusion.

The book itself is simply constructed with separate chapters for his journeys to the Congo, to Amazonia and Peru interspersed with chapters chronicling his final days in Pentonville Prison when he agonises not only over the failed Rebellion and execution of the leaders and his own failed role therein but also his time in Germany when he attempted to put together a brigade of Irish prisoners of war to fight alongside the Germans.   Llosa also deals in some detail with Casement's religious angst.   Apparently, his mother had him secretly baptised a Catholic and now with death approaching, he turns to the prison Catholic chaplain, Fr Carey, searching for both an intellectual and physical peace.

Fascinating as the book is, sadly I don't feel Llosa is at his best here and were it not for an intense interest in the man, Casement, I might have lamented the style and uneven writing so uncharacteristic of the great Nobel winning author of The Feast of the Goat or Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.

Dream of the Celt published by Faber can be easily obtained in trade paperback post free from bookdepository.co.uk 

     

Canada

I am always nervous of massive tomes as, with few exceptions, they turn out to have needed a good editor and blue pencil.   However, with Richard Ford's new book, Canada, four hundred pages just weren't enough.   I wanted more!   This is Ford at his best and if it at times recalls The Sportswriter, it also surpasses it in the beauty of his language, the laconic style of narration and authenticity.

The story is told in three parts with its opening lines being already as widely quoted as Tale of Two Cities, viz: 'First I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed.   Then about the murders, which happened later.'   He then goes on 'The robbery is the more important part, since it served to set my and my sister's lives on the courses they eventually followed'.  It is told by the now retired English teacher, Dell Parsons, and recounts his life with his twin sister, Berner, as fifteen year olds, living in Great Falls, Montana, a small town concerned mainly with 'cows and wheat' as his mother Neeva describes it.   Great Falls was where the family settled following his father Bev's retirement from the airforce but where Neeva feels alienated and superior and thinks that if her children fitted in 'it would only increase the chance [they'd] end up right where they were'.   Neeva teaches fifth class in a neighbouring town, is rather bohemian and intense, a poet with a penchant for French poetry.   Bev is a handsome extrovert who took up car selling and before long got involved in a nefarious scheme selling meat to the army.   Dell likes Great Falls and anticipates with pleasure starting High School in the fall, joining the chess club and learning more about bees while coping phlegmatically with the peculiarities of his own family life.  

Ford recounts his story in a low key leisurely fashion but because every sentence literally is so wonderfully well crafted it makes riveting reading and we almost fall into the robbery the parents commit with as little foresight as they do and which is inevitably doomed to failure.   The second part of the book then deals with the fall out from the robbery, Berner running away and Dell being spirited away by Mildred, a friend of his mother's, to live with Arthur Remlinger in the small town of Fort Royal, Saskatchewan, in Canada.   There he is given a small shack outside of town in which to live and employed in Arthur's hotel doing odd jobs.   School is a forgotten dream.   Arthur is a mysterious character and Dell thinks that 'there must be an enterprise attached to him, a significance that was hidden from view and wished to stay hidden and that made him not predictable or ordinary', a remarkably astute observation from a fifteen year old.   Within months, the murders happen - that we were warned about on page 1 and Dell is once again spirited away to Winnipeg of which we hear nothing.

The third section then is the current life of Dell, now retired, and his reunion with his sister whom life has not treated well.   Thinking back on his life teaching, Dell remarks on the fundamentals he tried to teach his students, 'to think of their existence on the planet not as just a catalog of random events endlessly unspooling, but as a life - both abstract and finite' and this in so many ways is  how he has been able to make sense of his own life.   It seems to be something close to Ford who asks us 'not to hunt too hard for hidden or opposite meanings ... but to look as much as possible straight at the things [you] can see in broad daylight.   In the process of articulating to yourself the things you see, you'll always pretty well make sense and learn to accept the world'.   And again at the very end of the book, he says 'I believe in what you see being most of what there is ... so, while significance weighs heavy, that's the most it does.   Hidden meaning is all but absent'.

Is he asking us not to look for hidden meaning in this important and deceptively deep book or is he articulating a philosophy of life?   Either way, it is a remarkably sanguine acceptance of being in the world.

Tweeting Ulysses

I wonder if any of you missed the pontifical declamation by Paulo Coelho asserting that “Today writers want to impress other writers . . . One of the books that caused great harm was James Joyce’s Ulysses, which is pure style. There is nothing there. If you dissect Ulysses, it gives you a tweet.”

What pomposity from someone who churns out such banal pseudo intellectual mysticism.

A great supporter of Joyce and the modernists is Will Self and I would recommend reading his article in the Guardian Saturday Review on 4 August in which he quotes JG Ballard who wrote that it is 'impossible any more to suspend disbelief in those omniscient and invisible narrators of naturalistic fictions, whose tendency to play god with their characters had surely always been a function of their own status as personations of God'!

I would further recommend everyone to read Will Self's new novel, Umbrella, not an easy read but surely one of the most exciting novels to appear on the Booker list for years.   Self does excoriate himself that despite his best efforts to escape the strictures of naturalistic fiction by 'diving into the dangerous waters of the continuous present' and embracing 'the slippery evanescence of the stream of consciousness' he thinks he has failed again.   Read it and judge for yourselves.

The Cove [Ron Rash]

Ron Rash  has a long list of fiction and poetry to his credit but this is the first that I've read and that because it was picked by our book group and discussed last Saturday.   I have to say that not only did everyone love it but I felt positively deprived that I hadn't read him before this.   This is a beautiful book - beautiful in its style and beautiful in its narrative.   It is very clear that Rash is a poet as at times the book reads like an epic poem.

The story is essentially about outsiders and by setting it almost at the end of the First World War, in the Appalachian mountains in an isolated community full of lore, hidebound traditions and superstition, it in some ways calls to mind Claudel's Brodeck's Report.   Rash lives in the Appalachians and his love of the area is apparent in his poetic descriptions of the flora and fauna so delightfully described by one of his main characters, Laurel.   Laurel is a young woman who, with her brother, Hank, is struggling to make a living on a farm left to them by their parents in a 'cove' which essentially is a small narrow valley heavily overshadowed by a high cliff.   Laurel, born with a port wine stain on her face, is regarded as a witch in the local community, shunned and mocked and, at times, feared.   Hank who has recently returned from the war minus a hand is endeavouring to restore the farm to a condition where it will provide a living for Laurel as he himself wishes to marry and leave the cove.  

At the beginning of the narrative, Laurel is transfixed by the music of a flute coming through the trees which initially she mistakes for a bird.   The musician, who later she rescues and brings to the house after he is attacked by wasps, apparently cannot speak, read or write but carries a note which identifies him as Walter Smith.   Restored to health, Walter stays on in the farm helping Hank with the heavier chores and falling in love with Laurel.  

Meanwhile, in the town, anti German feeling is being whipped up by a cowardly, mean spirited local recruiter, Chauncey Feith who struts around in complete uniform far from the horrors of the Front.   He takes his venom out on an elderly German language professor at a local college and takes pleasure in attempting to purge the library of all 'German' literature.   As one reviewer has pointed out, Rash is describing here the state of fear created repeatedly by men like Chauncey over the decades - not only the war mania in 1914, but the suspicion of Japanese-Americans in 1941,and more recently the fear of any Muslim.   It is the fear of outsiders.   And as the narrative gently progresses, it becomes clear that sooner or later the worlds of Chauncey Feith and Laurel are going to collide.

If the story appears to have an almost oneiric quality - the beautiful young girl, the enigmatic stranger, the hardworking one-handed brother and the irredeemable villain - the ending obviates such ideas with its stark and elegant tragic simplicity. 

I highly recommend this book and personally I shall now search out his previous writings.