BOOKS @ VOLUME #110 (12.1.19)
Read this week's NEWSLETTER.
Find out what we've been reading. Find out about our Book of the Week, and about new books that have arrived this week. Find out about our forthcoming writing classes.
Sunday, 13 January 2019
>> Read Stella's review.
>> "When you're writing from a feminist lens, you have to imagine a different world."
>> Sleigh on the radio.
>> The author's website.
>> A selection of Thomasin Sleigh's art writing.
>> Every story tells a picture.
>> The book is published by Lawrence & Gibson, New Zealand's most independent independent publisher.
>> Ad Lib.
 | Tales from the Inner City by Shaun Tan {Reviewed by STELLA} Imagine seeing horses running wild across a city landscape - along the freeways, across the rooftops, through the alleys and over the inner city parks. Imagine that these are the horses of all the time of the city: horses that pulled carts, horses who plodded in the same circle driving the millstone, horses that worked to build a city, that carried people, were connected to carts and when they were old were still mechanisms for making money - were sold for their meat, their bones - were glue. Imagine that you are two years old in the back seat of a car travelling along the highway at night, the horses running beside, free and wild, until they come to the edge of the city landscape where they stop, unsure of this foreign place of which they know nothing. This is just one of the stories in Shaun Tan’s mesmerising collection Tales from the Inner City. Looking at the relationship between animals and humans across the ever-changing urban landscape, Tan brings us a mysterious yet familiar world, a lament as well a beautiful observation. The tales, 25 in total, take us to the brink of our humanity in their strangeness, yet also have echoes of our ability to care, to relate to the beasts in our lives that we yearn for, fear, conquer and embrace. He describes the changing relationship between human and dog - one of the earliest domesticated animals - in verse and breathtaking illustrations that explore the chasm between the two, the worlds that each inhabits and the desire to close this gap. There is a charming story about the death of a cat - a cat that a young girl and her mother discover belongs to all, not just them - that has numerous names and humans that miss it just as much - it is the cat of all cats - nicknamed by the child ‘The greatest cat in the world’, which brings a whole neighbourhood together, freeing them from their isolation and sadness. The sea and rivers no longer exist in any form for fish to live in. People fish from the rooftops of buildings, their lines stretching into the sky, the fish mostly beyond reach aside from a few tiddlers - but oh, to catch a Moonfish, the rarest delicacy! When Pim, the brother who never jerks the line, whose bait is eaten and never catches anything, does, the family are overwhelmed by excitement and surprise. Yet their pleasure doesn’t come from the expected quarters (selling the fish to the wily Mr Hiro for his famous restaurant in the subterranean city), but from something much simpler and more beautiful. Each of these stories asks us to confront our behaviour towards our mammal cousins and our fellow creatures, to imagine the world from an animal's perspective, to take responsibility for the harm we do and, conversely, for the friendship we offer, to take pleasure in reaching our own beast within, and the care with which we should protect the environs that sustain the animals we have an unfathomable yearning for. The inner city belonged to them first, and we are yet another element in the mix, entwined by history, politics and emotion. Shaun Tan’s books are exquisite, and this is no exception. Metaphysical and philosophical, the text and illustrations are stunning. Endlessly thoughtful and thought-provoking for children and adults alike. |
 | People in the Room by Norah Lange (translated by Charlotte Whittle) {Reviewed by THOMAS} “I only believed in hopeless lives,” states the seventeen-year-old narrator in Norah Lange’s beautifully written and disconcerting novel, first published in Argentina in 1950 and now, at last, translated exquisitely into English by Charlotte Whittle. Introverted and pathologically understimulated, the narrator becomes obsessed with three young women she can see, indistinctly, each evening, sitting in the drawing room of the house facing that of her family’s. Imagination cannot help but fill in the voids in knowledge, and, in this case, as the narrator has no knowledge at all of the three women, if they indeed exist, her imagination cannot rest in applying to them every possible permutation of the sorts of stories the narrator thinks may apply to them, stories principally, it seems, drawn from her reading of Romantic novels (apparently, Lange was prompted to write this book by Branwell Brontë’s painting of his sisters Charlotte, Anne and Emily (a painting from which Branwell had erased the image of himself)). At times the narrator achieves a vividness that thrills or horrifies her: “It rained so close to their faces, and on mine, on the carriage, on the patient horse, and it seemed as long as I was still young nothing so complete or perfect could ever happen again.” The three women in the room are no more animated than dolls upon which the young narrator projects her fears and desires. Their features and characters and histories slowly accrete through speculation, but the details are impermanent, attaching and detaching from their objects with equal ease. It is as if the narrator is obsessively inflating them into three dimensions, whereas it is natural for them to revert to two dimensions, into silhouettes. In this way, the novel is about the way in which the novel is written, the way in which all novels are written. “It was as if I was slowly composing a silent film that might go on forever: a film without action or scenery.” The three women suck up, take possession of, transmit, both embody and nullify, all tragedies and stories that exist in the narrator’s mind. We are told that the narrator sees them at the post office, sending a telegram, that she observes a visit to their house by a man who touches off some rivalry of feelings between them, and that the narrator thereafter visits the three women in their drawing room almost every evening, but we cannot be any more certain that any of this *actually* happens than we can of the recurring motifs of the dead horse in the street or the fire that claimed three infants’ lives. To spy, to observe, is to be disempowered, to be outside. The spy, the voyeur, has no identity but the object of their obsession, but the object of any obsession is always primarily indicative of suppressed impulses in the one who is obsessed. When the narrator states of the three women that “I know that they alone had the right to speak of death, of ill-timed affairs, of suicides, of bitter loneliness,” she is projecting upon them, among other things, her own suicidal impulses. The three women could be seen as future versions, ten or fifteen years older, of the narrator herself, future versions she both yearns for and wishes dead with desperate ambivalence. Several times she notes a similarity of voice or demeanour between her and them: “My face, which must express - it was impossible that it shouldn’t express - their three faces behind my own, expressionless.” “I only believed in hopeless lives.” At what point would tragedy or suicide relieve her from her future? Are the three women the future selves she will never become, unachieved futures, or are they each future possible exit points from an unfulfilling life? “That is what you get for not dying,” she tells them. She senses the fragility and unsustainability of her obsessive ‘watching’, of being “alone with my gaze”. What is achieved immediately starts to slip away: “Everything changed, it was my fault, and anything could come between them and my watching them, and destroy what had begun, what had scarcely begun.” Lange keeps the melancholy and the tension perfectly balanced as the book charts the disintegration of the narrator’s (and the reader’s) ability to distinguish internal and external realities as the novel moves towards its jaw-dropping paragraph-length final exquisite sentence. |
Friday, 11 January 2019
NEW RELEASES
New books for a new year
A darkly comic fable from the 2017 Man Booker winner. Fox 8 has learned 'Yuman' by listening under the windows of children's rooms to their bedtime stories. In language falling somewhere between that of The BFG and Riddley Walker, Fox 8 tells of his quest to save his fellow foxes when their habitat is threatened by development. Charming.
When a friend dies, a woman inherits his Great Dane. As she gets to know this dog, so large, so inconvenient, so representative of her grief, she comes to understand the dog's grief, too, and their lives begin to change in subtle ways.
"Nunez's prose itself comforts us. Her confident and direct style uplifts--the music in her sentences, her deep and varied intelligence." - The New York Times
2018 (US) National Book Award winner.
In 1814, Hokusai's sketches were published in a handbook of some 4000 images. It surpassed expectations as a student reference book, and became a bestseller. Here, in a three-volume package, an expansive selection of these works is revealed, presenting all of the themes, motifs and drawing techniques found in Hokusai's art. The caricatures, satirical drawings, multi-panel illustrations and narrative depictions found in the book can clearly be seen as the basis for manga as it is understood today.
Structured to impede the progress of the middle-aged love affair that it describes, this novel charts the steps two people take towards each other and asks what it means if the two people have taken those steps before.
"This is a guide for instructing posthumans in living a Dada life. It is not advisable, nor was it ever, to lead a Dada life." Codrescu uses an imagined chess game in 1916 between Tristan Tzara and V.I. Lenin to discuss the sometimes-shared and sometimes-opposed approaches of the the arts and politics to assail the status quo and enact a new way of being.
"No other book has treated the relationship between the artistic and revolutionary avant-gardes as originally and provocatively as Codrescu's. This is both an immensely illuminating essay of intellectual history and a disturbing meditation on absolute ideals turned into alibis for tyranny." - Vladimir Tismaneanu
"Highly original, beautifully written, and charming." - Marjory Perloff
A lovesick kraken slowly drags the object of its desire - a ship of sailors - into the sea; a group of cantankerous saints materialise in a well-appointed parlour, and must unravel the mystery of how they got there; ageing fathers are sunk to the bottom of the ocean in pressure-sealed crates in a time-honoured ritual. Andreasen romps through the lunatic and surreal with a tender generous ease; there is a joyous absurdity to each premise. Just because a sister is born without a head doesn't mean her brother won't love and protect her; just because an adulterous tryst ends in alien abduction doesn't mean the man doesn't miss his wife.
For centuries, art has documented the atrocities of wars, participated in propaganda campaigns, and served as an advocate for peace and social justice around the world. How can art assist in creating dialogue and bridges across cultures? 100 leading and emerging architects, artists, curators, choreographers, composers, and directors of art institutions around the globe explore the potentially constructive role of the arts in resolving conflicts or building bridges among opposing groups. Interesting, and beautifully presented.
A tale of two philosophical journeys: one made by John Kaag as an introspective young man of nineteen; the other seventeen years later, in radically different circumstances: he is now a husband and father, and his wife and small child are in tow. Kaag sets off for the Swiss peaks above Sils Maria where Nietzsche wrote his landmark work Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Both of Kaag's journeys are made in search of the wisdom at the core of Nietzsche's philosophy, yet they deliver him to radically different interpretations and, more crucially, revelations about the human condition.
Unanticipated reading pleasures (with great maps).
A fascinating exploration of Chinese bapo paintings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in which messages, often politically or socially critical, were encoded in seemingly realistic depictions of historical documents and fragments.
A gripping and perceptive account of the 1819 St Peter’s Field massacre, in which an assembly of 60000 campaigners for parliamentary and suffrage reform were charged by the 15th regiment of hussars and the Manchester and Salford and Cheshire yeomanries, leaving fifteen dead and 650 injured, is a reminder of the role of class conflict in political change.
"Quite simply magnificent: splendidly researched, thoroughly well written, and very difficult to put down." - The Guardian
>> Of course, Mike Leigh made a film of it.
Quietly unassuming and full of subtle ways in which a few simple ingredients can be transformed into classic Italian dishes (and some of his own creation). One of The Guardian's 'Best Food Books of 2018'.
Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in art, architecture and film by Giuliana Bruno $65
How is our understanding or art, film and architecture predicated on the experience of the body? What is the connection between sight and site? Between motion and emotion? A fascinating history of the spacio-visual arts.
"One of those critical works packed with learning and insights that at the same time takes you on an exhilarating ride through its author's imagination." - Marina Warner, Guardian
The narrator recounts her progress to motherhood, while remembering the death of her own mother ten years before, and the childhood summers she spent with her psychoanalyst grandmother. Woven among these personal recollections are significant events in medical history: Wilhelm Rontgen's discovery of the X-ray; Sigmund Freud's development of psychoanalysis and the work that he did with his daughter, Anna; and the origins of modern surgery and the anatomy of pregnant bodies. Sight is a novel about being a parent and a child: what it is like to bring a person in to the world, and what it is to let one go.
"Unusual and absorbing. The novel as a whole exudes a strange consoling power." - The New Yorker
Restaurants in Wanaka, Dunedin, Christchurch and Timaru.
Identifies collaborative arts practices emerging in response to planetary challenges including energy and financial crises, climate change, and hunger.
A beautifully presented menu notebook, evoking the ways in which mood and place can be reflected in cuisine.
"This is an extraordinary piece of food writing, pitch perfect in every way." - Nigella Lawson
Visit the studios of Henri Matisse, Alberto Giacometti, Paul Gauguin, Keith Haring, and many other artists. Find the magnifying glass that got left behind on Claude Monet's desk. Spot the owls in Pablo Picasso's paintings. Play with Andy Warhol's flowers. Find the apples in Paul Cézanne's studio. Colour in Jeff Koons's Balloon Dog. Identify the silhouette of a sculpture by Brancusi. An enjoyable introduction to a range of interesting artists, ideal for 6-to-12-year-olds.
As a girl climbs the stairs top her apartment she imagines who might live behind each of the other doors in the building - and what an imagination she has!
>> Book trailer (in Dutch).
Wealth is just as capable of ravaging cities as is poverty.
The first articulation of democracy in Britain was made in 1747 in a series of debates between the Levellers and Oliver Cromwell. Human rights Lawyer Geoffrey Robinson shows the importance of this argument to political situations today.
In this classic work, Rodney argues that grasping "the great divergence" between the west and the rest can only be explained as the exploitation of the latter by the former. This analysis of the abiding repercussions of European colonialism on the continent of Africa remains an indispensable study for grasping global inequality today. Introduction by Angela Davis.
Lindqvist set out across Central Africa, obsessed with a single line from Conrad's Heart of Darkness - Kurtz's injunction to "Exterminate all the brutes". His account of his experiences moves in parallel with a historical investigation, revealing what Europe's imperial powers had exacted on Africa's people over the course of the preceding two centuries. A new edition of this classic, jaw-dropping work.
Anne Lister was a Yorkshire heiress, a traveller and a lesbian during a time when it was difficult simply to be female. She chose to remain unmarried, dressed all in black and spoke openly of her lack of interest in men. The first woman to climb Vignemale in the treacherous Pyrenees, she journeyed as far as Azerbaijan and slept with a pistol under her pillow. She also kept a diary, written in a code that has now been cracked.
Once the centre of Palestinian modernity, Jaffa was the country's cultural and political capital. There Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived, worked, and celebrated together. Even after 1948, Jews and Arabs gathered at the Jewish-owned spice shop Tiv and the Arab Abulafia family's twenty-four-hour bakery. Through intimate personal interviews and memoirs, letters, and diaries, LeBor gives a crucial insight into the human lives behind the apparently intractable story of national conflict and a vivid narrative of cataclysmic change. LeBor weaves the personal stories of six families, three Jewish and three Arab, into a rich and complex history of Israel and Palestine in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
"Bleakly and outrageously comic. Reading Thom Jones's fiction is like speeding in an open car: the landscape blurs, the momentum becomes intoxicating - and then the brakes are applied, with no warning." - Joyce Carol Oates
"Jones was a master of the short story. Night Train will be an amazing discovery for anyone who cares about literature." - Philipp Meyer
Omrani follows the routes of the invading Romans and tells the story of the Gallic Wars and how the Celtic culture was first destroyed and then transformed by the invaders.
Authoritarian governments, elite populists, and 'freextremists' are exploiting our digital information infrastructure and the vulnerabilities in the democratic system to distort and undermine politics and elections.
A posthumous collection of poems, excerpts from his notebooks, lyrics, hand-drawn self-portraits.
>> 1967
>> 1968
>> 1972
>> 1979
>> 1993
>> 2013
Sunday, 6 January 2019
BOOKS @ VOLUME #109 (5.1.19)
Read our first NEWSLETTER of the year and find out (among other things) what we've been reading.
>> Whet you appetite with some spreads.
>> Some fun facts about coffee.
>> This infographic is not in the book and we do not understand it (but we like it).
>> Information is Beautiful!
 | A Winter's Promise by Christelle Dabos {Reviewed by STELLA} Step through the mirror into a world of Animists, Dragons, Mirages and Nihilists. These are just some of the clans in the world of Arks. The Arks are celestial states floating above the old earth. On Anima, Ophelia is happily ‘reading’ objects in her museum, unaware of the plans the Doyennes have made for her. A grand alliance is in the making and Ophelia is the central pawn in the game. She has been betrothed to a stranger from another clan from an Ark at the Pole. Ophelia is bookish and clumsy - a misfit and a genius - her special gifts are exceptional - while Thorn, powerful and taciturn, has hidden powers of his own and is as icy and cold as the Pole itself. At the Pole, Ophelia (along with her chaperone Aunt Rosaline) must decide who can be trusted in this place of deception and illusion. Why has Thorn sneaked them into his homeland? Why are they holed up at his Aunt Berenilde’s house, in effect prisoners, unable to go beyond the bounds of the manor? And why is Thorn always at work at the Treasury, barely noticing Ophelia’s presence? When Ophelia manages to sneak out into the back streets of the city, she is intrigued and confused by the inhabitants’ behaviour. Yet this is just the beginning of the adventures and dangers. When Berenilde, a favourite of Farouk, the Great Spirit, is taken into the supposed safety of The Ambassador’s realm, the city of Citaceleste, Ophelia’s life becomes further complicated and she finds herself in a world of subterfuge, deception and illusion that will test her strength as well as her skills. Here is a city of such extreme delusion and abhorrent behaviour that one could easily lose one's mind or life. Making the wrong overture or displeasing an influential person can spell certain dishonour or disaster. When no one can be trusted all that is left is one’s self - the person you see in the mirror (as long as it tells the truth). A Winter’s Promise is the first in 'The Mirror Visitor' Quartet. This translation of the award-winning French bestseller is a welcome treat and will become a firm favourite for both teens and adults, especially for fans ofPhilip Pullman, Frances Hardinge and Cornelia Funke. This is an excellent fantasy epic with compelling characters. Ophelia and Thorn are both intriguingly complex, the clans and their gifts fascinating, and the interpersonal relationships between the main characters complex and ever revealing. There is amazing world-building and the plot is tight and tense, with plenty of twists and turns, political games, and machinations of seduction, threat and trickery as the story and its characters feed on the desire for power and status. You will be craving the next instalment. |
Saturday, 5 January 2019
 | Resistance by Julián Fuks (translated by Daniel Hahn) {Reviewed by THOMAS} “Sometimes all that fits inside a pain is silence. Not a silence made from the absence of words: a silence that it absence itself,” writes Sebastián, the narrator of Julián Fuks’s subtle and quietly disconcerting seemingly autofictional novel, in the memoir he is writing as an attempt to gain understanding of, or some connection with, his adoptive older brother. Fuks’s prose is precise, crystalline, superbly translated by Daniel Hahn. Fuks is rigorous in his examination of the relationships within Sebastián’s family, and, more particularly, of the consequences of any attempt to put anything actual into words. “My brother is adopted, but I can’t say and don’t want to say that my brother is adopted. If I say this, if I speak these words that I have long taken care to silence, I reduce my brother to a single categorical condition, a single essential attribute: my brother is something, and this something is the set of marks we insist on looking for, despite ourselves, in his features, in his gestures, in his acts.” Fuks is aware that words, terms, labels subjugate the people and the actualities to which they are applied, pulling them towards consequences and interpretations that may not be inherent but are forced upon them by extrinsic narratives. The ways in which stories and histories are told inevitably affect the patterns and outcomes of those stories. Language is dictatorial over its objects, and Fuks/Sebastián is very aware that, in his “desire to forge the meanings life refuses to give us … I know that I am writing my failure,” unable to avoid “a constant oscillation between silence and error.” The brother’s unknown origins are irresolvable. He cannot be assimilated into the family. He resists nourishment and nurturing. But what is the source of this alienation? The brother was adopted just before the parents fled Argentina’s dictatorship in the 1970s for Brazil, where Sebastián and his sister were born. During the period of state terrorism that lasted from 1974 to 1983, Argentina’s so-called ‘Dirty War’, over 30,000 people were murdered by military and security forces in collaboration with right-wing death squads. Hundreds of babies were stolen at birth from political prisoners and given to supporters of the regime for adoption. For Sebastián, his brother somehow represents these children, even though he can hardly be one of them, given their parents’ dissident status. Why does the Sebastián cling so tightly to this possibility? Why does he feel the need to include himself, via his brother, in this national trauma? To resolve his brother’s lack of identity by overwriting it with a trauma that makes that lack of identity a necessity further depersonalises the brother, as Sebastián recognises. “This wouldn’t give his life meaning. It’s me, not him, who wants to find a meaning, it’s me who wants to redeem my own immobility, it’s me who wants to go back to belonging to the place where I’ve never actually belonged.” Sebastián wants to undo the brother’s exile within the family by writing the book but intuits that this cannot be achieved. The irresolvable persistence of the unknown, the lacunae, the gap, the missing information that is replaced by narrative prevents this, and prevents the supposed healing that this might provide. But does Sebastián really want to undo his brother’s exile, or is he, along with his parents, responsible for it? The brother becomes the expression of the political and personal traumas visited on the whole exiled family, and his alienation is integral to their identities. The brother, who remains unnamed, cannot bear the narrative weight of an entire family (or an entire nation), but his inability to bear this weight is necessary to this narrative. The brother’s voice is suppressed by Sebastián: “How can I let him speak, attribute even the smallest phrase to him in this fiction?” But the brother is also a sort of catalyst for everything Sebastián does or writes, unreached and unchanged, but enabling some reach or change. Although Sebastián necessarily fails in his memoir to rescue his brother from his status as a cypher, his ostensible objective, or to say anything definitive about the family’s history, Fuks succeeds in this novel, via his character’s failure, in providing insight into the brother’s functional role as the dysfunctional cypher in a ‘happy’ family’s dynamic, and into the way that collective trauma creates a narrative, a single story, that obliterates the individual stories of those affected by that trauma.Resistance is remarkable for its textual reticence, for Julián Fuks’s reluctance to fill in gaps, to create ‘fictional’ replacements for what is lost, for his uncertainty about the absent’s place in the process of resistance, a process which necessarily continues even in memory (or lack thereof), for his portrayal of the quiet, ‘undramatic’ persistence of trauma and its ongoing centrality to the dynamic of survival of that trauma, as well as for the wonderful clarity of the prose. |
Saturday, 29 December 2018
>> Read Stella's review.
>> Stella also reviewed the book on the radio.
>> Read an extract.
>> Read another extract.
>> Drive Your Plow was made into a film, Spoor.
>> The book's title comes from the 'Proverbs of Hell' section of William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. There are references to Blake throughout the book.
>> Yes, Blake did prefer 'plow' to 'plough'.
>> On Poland.
>> Tokarczuk won the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for Flights.
>> Read Thomas's review of Flights.
 | Crimson by Niviaq Korneliussen {Reviewed by STELLA} Greenland is a small country, and the town of Nuuk, where Crimson is set, even smaller. Especially so for the characters in Niviaq Korneluissen’s novel about being a Greenlander and being young and queer. There are five distinct voices in the novel: Fia, who has just broken up with her long-term boyfriend; Inuk, Fia’s reporter brother who has just landed himself in a sticky situation; the wild and unreliable Arnaq, Inuk’s best friend who Fia is staying with while she finds her feet; Sara, a young woman who Fia is extremely attracted to; and Ivik, Sara’s girlfriend. As these characters dance a complex and messy polka around each other, the reader is hooked into the world of the young and confused. Korneluissen lays open prejudice, boredom and anger with humour (albeit black) and sympathy towards her fellow Greenlanders. The novel moves along at a clip as the young people go to parties, suffer hangovers, wheedle money and alcohol out of others, have personal crises, and find love. Crimson is enjoyable and believable and doesn’t shy away from painting a realistic picture. Fia’s despair and revulsion at her predictable relationship wakes her up - her complete annoyance finally drives her out of the mundane towards at first a crazy few weeks with party-girl Arnaq and then something more curious (a discovery about herself and her desires), to something ultimately more satisfying. Arnaq, for all her bluster, is a vulnerable young woman with a complex past - trauma rooted in alcohol and neglect. Inuk escapes to Denmark after finding himself in a tricky situation, yet this flight just pulls him back tighter to his homeland despite the homophobic attitudes that are ironically ingrained in him as well as in society. Crimsonisn’t all doom and gloom - in fact, the lively writing gives it a lightness that keeps you engaged. The different viewpoints are the exceptional part of this slice-of-life novel - each voice is distinct even while their problems and joys are shared. Each story adds to and builds on the former, with the change in perspective creating those full circle moments. Korneluissen became a sensation in Greenland, especially among the young and LGBT communities, when she published her book in Greenlandic (rare for contemporary works) in 2014. She translated it into Danish, and in 2018 the English translation was produced. Like Sally Rooney’s Normal People, this is a book that will appeal for its candid approach to relationships, for its portrayal of imperfect yet endearing human behaviour, and for its reflections on claustrophobic situations. And you might find yourself humming along to Joan Jett's 'Crimson and Clover' as you read. |
 | Walking by Thomas Bernhard {Reviewed by THOMAS} It is thought that makes life intolerable, suggests Bernhard in this 1971 novella that both anticipates and provides a key to reading his subsequent novels of ineluctable self-erasure (notably 1975’s Correction). Bernhard is constantly in mind of the widespread complicity of his fellow Austrians in Nazism, both a symptom and a cause of many of the societal ills he is most perplexed and disgusted by. “I ask myself, says Oehler, how can so much helplessness and so much misfortune and so much misery be possible? That nature can create so much misfortune and so much palpable horror. That nature can be so ruthless toward its most helpless and pitiable creatures. This limitless capacity for suffering, says Oehler. This limitless capricious will to procreate and then to survive misfortune.” But there is no real difference, suggests Bernhard, between objective and subjective suffering. “When we imagine ourselves to be in a state of mind, no matter what, we are in that state of mind, and thus in that state of illness which we imagine ourselves to be in.” We are unavoidably perplexed by our existence and cannot help thinking about it, but thought will not do us any good, as we are always carried towards the conclusion we strive most to avoid, drawn to it by this striving. “If we see something, we check what we see until we are forced to say that what we are looking at is horrible. If we do something, we think about what we are doing until we are forced to say that it is something nasty, something low, something outrageous.” In Bernhard’s works, thought is a kind of a chute leading towards madness and suicide, a chute down which all characters slide, faster or slower, obsessed, losing perspective. “Circumstances are everything, we are nothing.” How, then, are we to carry on existing? “There is little doubt that the art lies in bearing what is unbearable and in not feeling that what is horrible is something horrible. Of course we have to label this art the most difficult of all. The art of existing against the facts. If we do not constantly exist against, but only constantly with the facts, says Oehler, we shall go under in the shortest possible time.” “The art of thinking about things consists in the art, says Oehler, of stopping thinking before the fatal moment.” In common with many of Bernhard’s novels, the unnamed narrator of Walking is effectively passive, effectively annihilated by his role of *merely* reporting what his friend Oehler tells him during their walk or walks together. Oehler’s observations chiefly concern another one-time walking companion, Karrer, who has recently gone “irrevocably mad” and been confined to the Steinhof lunatic asylum. Karrer’s madness followed the suicide of his friend, the chemist Hollensteiner, and you can feel the pull of this annihilation reaching through the layers of narration as far as the narrator himself, each character being effaced by their narration. “I am struck by how often Oehler quotes Karrer without expressly drawing attention to the fact that he is quoting Karrer. Oehler frequently makes several statements that stem from Karrer and frequently thinks a thought that Karrer thought, I think, without expressly saying, what I am now saying comes from Karrer.” The second of the three paragraphs that constitute the novella describes Karrer’s breakdown in Rustenschacher’s clothing shop, irrevocably losing perspective, ranting about what he perceives as the inferior cloth from which the trousers are sewn, repeatedly banging his walking stick upon the counter. At times the layers of narration are wonderfully deep, such as when the narrator tells us what Oehler tells the narrator that Oehler told the psychiatric doctor Scherrer about what Karrer said and did in Rustenschacher’s shop, and the novella becomes as much about the migration of narrative burden as it is about what the narrative is about. Habit, character, tendency, circumstance comprise a trap, a trap we find ourselves in when we begin to think but into which thinking can only drive us deeper. “When we walk, we walk from one helplessness to another. It is suddenly clear you can do what you like but you cannot walk away. No longer being able to alter this problem of no longer being able to walk away occupies your whole life. From then on it is all that occupies your life. You then grow more and more helpless and weaker and weaker.” All Bernhard’s subsequent novelsaddress this problem of the obliterative nature of thought. “We may not think about why we are walking, says Oehler, for then it would soon be impossible to walk.” |
Friday, 28 December 2018
The last new releases bulletin of 2018.
l'Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (workshop for potential literature) was founded by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais in 1960 as a sort of laboratory in which members can perform experiments - chiefly experiments of constraint - in order to use the mechanisms inherent language to express new literary forms. This wonderful anthology presents the results of experiments various members through the decades, and provides a primer for you to run the experiments yourself.
>> N+7
>> Lille
>> Other extracts.
A young couple, involved in the struggle against the military dictatorship in 1970s Argentina, must flee the country. The brutality and terror of the regime is closing in around them. Friends are being ‘disappeared’. Their names are on a list. Time is running out. When they leave, they take with them their infant son, adopted after years of trying for a child without success. They build a new life in Brazil and things change radically. The book unfolds as an intimate portrayal of the formation of a family under extraordinary circumstances, told from the point of view of the youngest child. It’s an examination of identity, of family bonds, of the different forms that exile can take, of what it means to belong to a place, to a family, and to your own past.
"A brilliant achievement." - Le Monde
Essays, book reviews, short articles and obituaries handling subjects from mistresses to marketing, and seduction to psychoanalysts, from the immensely opinionated, witty and acute editor of the London Review of Books.
A remarkable novel from one of American fiction's outstanding stylists and observers, author of The Visiting Privilege and 99 Stories of God. First published in 1978, this novel blends myth with alcohol, time with desperation, motherhood with extinction, and is as fresh and urgent today as it was when first published.
"Like no book I have read, The Changeling is illumined by the spark of life, the life that wears a thousand skins. Its wisdom is unparaphrasable." - Karen Russell
>> 'Uncanny the Singing that Comes from Certain Husks.'
Frank Bidart, for several decades, has waged a collision between language and the human body which has resulted in some of the most original and surprising poetry produced in America.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry 2018
Bread and butter are first recorded as being eaten together in 1492. This book looks at a long association, and provides 40 outstanding and varied recipes that celebrate the marriage of bread and butter.
The island has run out of oxygen. The island is swollen. The island is rotten. The island has taken my beloved from me. The island is a Greenlander. It's the fault of the Greenlander. In Nuuk, Greenland, Fia breaks up with her long-term boyfriend and falls for Sara. Sara is in love with Ivik who holds a deep secret and is about to break promises. Ivik struggles with gender dysphoria as their friends become addicted to social media, listen to American pop music and get blind drunk in downtown bars and uptown house parties. Then there is Inuk, who also has something to hide - it will take him beyond his limits to madness, and question what it means to be a Greenlander, while Arnaq, the party queen, pulls the strings of manipulation, bringing a web of relationships to a shocking crescendo. Translated from Greenlandic.
"Ferocious, inventive and unlike anything I've read in a long time." - Sophie Mackintosh (author of The Water Cure)
A strange and strangely wrought novel (first published in 1914) in which, in the words of John Ashbery, "A prominent scientist and inventor, Martial Canterel, has invited a group of colleagues to visit the park of his country estate, Locus Solus. As the group tours the estate, Canterel shows them inventions of ever-increasing complexity and strangeness. Again, exposition is invariably followed by explanation, the cold hysteria of the former giving way to the innumerable ramifications of the latter. After an aerial pile driver which is constructing a mosaic of teeth and a huge glass diamond filled with water in which float a dancing girl, a hairless cat named Khóng-dek-lèn, and the preserved head of Danton, we come to the central and longest passage: a description of eight curious tableaux vivants taking place inside an enormous glass cage. We learn that the actors are actually dead people whom Canterel has revived with 'resurrectine', a fluid of his invention which if injected into a fresh corpse causes it continually to act out the most important incident of its life."
>> A brief biography of Roussel.
>> Interiors in the Void.
The author of The Queen of the Night delivers a series of superb essays investigating his development as a person and as a writer and activist, intimating how we form our identities both in life and in art.
"Alexander Chee is the very best kind of essayist, a boon companion in good times and bad, whose confiding voice you'd follow anywhere, just for the wonderful feeling of being understood like never before." - Charles D'Ambrosio
"Masterful." - Roxanne Gay
Brings together recent scholarship by experts in the field and featuring a wide array of objects from the region, including many that have never been published before. Included are many works that have historically been overlooked, such as painted and woven textiles, elaborate wicker assemblages and expressively sculpted vessels, alongside works by artists working in Oceania today. These objects reveal a complex web of social, mythological and historical influences.
Two novellas from the author of The Evenings. Young Elmer longs to make friends and tries to control the world around him by forming secret clubs, of which he is always the president, but when he invites Werther to become a member, a game of attraction and repulsion begins. During the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam, a boy watches as the family of one of his friends slowly loses everything and is then taken away.
Just moments after Duchamp died, his closest friend Man Ray took a photograph of him. His face is wan, his eyes are closed, he appears calm. Taking this image as a point of departure, Donald Shambroom begins to examine the surrounding context: the dinner with Man Ray and another friend, Robert Lebel, the night Duchamp died, the conversations about his own death at that dinner and elsewhere, and the larger question of whether this radical artist's death can be read as an extension of his work.
Useful.
What constitutes 'the people', and what constitutes 'the people's' assumed 'right' to exercise it's will, democratically or otherwise?
What does the sea mean? Humankind has a profound and complex relationship with the sea, a relationship that is extensively reflected in biology, psychology, religion, literature and poetry. Krell engages the work of an array of thinkers and writers including, but not limited to, Homer, Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, many Greek gods, Holderlin, Melville, Woolf, Whitman, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Schelling, Ferenczi, Rank and Freud.
Can Western nations preserve the liberal world order against rising authoritarian powers without the United States, or with Washington working against them?
An idiosyncratic, devastating graphic novel. Cassandra Darke is an art dealer, mean, selfish, solitary by nature, living in Chelsea in a house worth £7 million. She has become a social pariah, but doesn't much care. Between one Christmas and the next she has sullied the reputation of a West End gallery and has acquired a conviction for fraud, a suspended sentence and a bank balance drained by lawsuits. On the scale of villainy, fraud seems to Cassandra a rather paltry offence - her own crime involving 'no violence, no weapon, no dead body'. But in Cassandra's basement, her young ex-lodger, Nicki, has left a surprise, something which implies at least violence and probably a body, something which forces Cassandra out of her rich enclave and onto the streets. Not those local streets paved with gold and lit with festive glitter, but grimmer, darker places, where she must make the choice between self-sacrifice and running for her life.
"The thing to do is just begin. The question, of course, is where?"
So opens Thom Eagle’s description of the creation of a singular early spring meal. A cookbook without recipes, this is an invitation to journey through the mind of a chef as he works. Eagle muses on the very best way to coax flavour out of an onion (slowly, and with more care than you might expect), and considers the crucial role of salt in the creation of the perfect assembly for early green shoots and leaves.
Science is really beautiful. Artist and lay scientist Iris Gottlieb explains among other things: neap tides, naked mole rats, whale falls, the human heart, the Uncertainty Principle, the ten dimensions of string theory, and how glaciers are like Snickers bars.
With knowledge passed down from centuries ago, the presence of traditional crafts such as spoon carving, leather working, and knife making is becoming more and more pronounced in contemporary culture and on platforms such as social media and ecommerce. As the pressures of a fast-paced, modern-day life weigh on people, many seek solace in more manual, artful practices that take us out of our selves and produce something beautiful and useful. Forge & Carve looks at twenty crafters and how and why they create the items they do. Includes Takaka trugmaker Tony Hitchcock.
This is a book about a man's relationship with hawks, and his self-education as a falconer, and about his discovery that despite his Asperger's Syndrome, which hampers his normal social interactions, he can forge a loving bond with the young son he thought he had lost.
What does the weight of a lifetime of secrets, lies and deception do to a black body, a black family and a nation teetering on the brink of moral collapse?
"Unflinchingly honest." - Reni Eddo-Lodge
The opioid epidemic has been called one of the greatest mistakes of modern medicine but calling it a mistake is a generous rewriting of history. Driven by greed, incompetence, and indifference, it was an utterly avoidable tragedy.
The Bard of Salford's first poetry collection for over thirty years, proof he is still alive at least.
>> 'I Don't Want to Be Nice' (1978)
How Chinese characters triumphed over the QWERTY keyboard and laid the foundation for China's information technology successes today. Chinese writing is character based, the one major world script that is neither alphabetic nor syllabic. Through the years, the Chinese written language encountered presumed alphabetic universalism in the form of Morse Code, Braille, stenography, Linotype, punch cards, word processing, and other systems developed with the Latin alphabet in mind. This book is about those encounters, in particular thousands of Chinese characters versus the typewriter and its QWERTY keyboard. Thomas Mullaney describes a fascinating series of experiments, prototypes, failures, and successes in the century-long quest for a workable Chinese typewriter.
An essay on bridging the gap between writing and the visual arts.
>> An extract: 'Why Contemporary Art (and Literature) Needs More Sarcastic Critics'
The Life and Times of a Very British Man makes the case for a new conversation about race in Britain through personal stories and political analysis. Kamal recounts the extraordinary circumstances that led to his father, a Sudanese scientist, marrying his mother, a grammar-school educated woman from Yorkshire and the first white person he had ever met. It was a time when Enoch Powell's infamous 'Rivers of Blood' speech cast a shadow over the childhood of a schoolboy in Ealing.
The night flower blooms at night in the desert. Who notices it?
Well, of course.
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