Tolstoy: War and Peace

One reason for the paucity of posts. I read two versions, the above hardback at home in the superior, richer translation, and the no-nonsense paperback below for transit.

It would be difficult to explain why and whither ants whose heap has been destroyed are hurrying: some from the heap dragging bits of rubbish, larvae, and corpses, others back to the heap, or why they jostle, overtake one another, and fight, and it would be equally difficult to explain what caused the Russians after the departure of the French to throng to the place that had formerly been Moscow. But when we watch the ants round their ruined heap, the tenacity, energy, and immense number of the delving insects prove that despite the destruction of the heap, something indestructible, which though intangible is the real strength of the colony, still exists; and similarly, though in Moscow in the month of October there was no government no churches, shrines, riches, or houses--it was still the Moscow it had been in August. All was destroyed, except something intangible yet powerful and indestructible.

Peter Shapiro: Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco

Peter Shapiro is a regular Wire magazine contributor, particularly on US House and Techno and this book had long appealed, but I borrowed it from the library on a whim after enjoying Simon Reynold's Retromania so much and wanting to return to music writing. Turn the Beat Around doesn't disappoint either, offering a fascinating 'secret' history of what the publishers describe as a much maligned genre, but from where I sit nowadays that's hardly the current perception.

Interesting was Shapiro's analyses of disco's early beginnings in German youth rebelling against the conformity of Nazi Youth, then through Parisian post-war underground clubs then onto gay New York. The image of Bette Midler singing while a semi-clad Barry Manilow tickled the ivories in an underground spa was wonderful, and hedonistic anecdotes of crazed activities in clubs, discos and makeshift venues of all stripes abound. Shapiro too is great on the music, and I'll xerox the extensive discography before I return it to the library, falling apart and missing pages.

I've started listening to the Disco Discharge series of compilations through Strut and they're wonderful. There's around 25 hours of material on the three sets of series so a lot to wade through.

Witold Gombrowicz: Ferdydurke

Considered a neglected modernist masterpiece Witold Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke is rapidly becoming less neglected, with particularly vocal support having come from Susan Sontag among others. Like Kafka written by a frustrated schoolboy with a strong satirical agenda, Ferdydurke tells of the narrator's transformation from thirty year old write to 16 year old child/adolescent, and follows the trials and tribulations associated with these stages of life in modern society.

Kotecki: 'But I don't understand, sir. I don't understand how I can be sent into transports of delight if I am not sent into transports of delight.'
The master: 'But Kotecki, how can you not be sent into transports of delight if I have already explained to you a thousand times that you are sent into transports of delight?'

Like Kafka and other early twentieth century European modernists Canetti, Walser and Svevo, events change rapidly and drastically throughout Ferdydurke. Once in school 'backsides' become a central focus of both the masters, who lust after them, and the students, who value the power they hold. The protagonist himself stops resisting the pangs of adolescence upon viewing the daughter of his minders, becoming obsessed with her 'irresistible thighs'. He later escapes with a schoolfriend to the country, following his chum's desire to 'fra... ternise with stableboys', but finding the peasants reverted to barking dogs, is rescued by well-to-do relatives. There the customs of the upper class are ridiculed, as are those of their servants, before the entire novel collapses in chaos, all values, structures, and meaning rendered absurd, especially education

Operation pedagogue continued relentlessly, and innumerable specialists worked on the masses, teaching and instructing, influencing and developing, awakening and civilizing them, with simplified grimaces ad hoc.

... and culture

When a concert pianist plays Chopin, for instance, you say: The audience was roused and carried away by a brilliant interpretation of the master's music. But it is possible that not a single member of the audience was carried away; it is perfectly possible that, if they had not known that Chopin was a great master and the virtuoso a great pianist, they might have received the performance with less enthusiasm... For, gentleman, there exist in the world human groups which are some less, some more, disgraceful, shameful, and humiliating than others - and stupidity is not spread equally everywhere. At first sight for instance, the world of hairdressers has always seemed to me to be more liable to stupidity than that of shoemakers. But the thigns that happen int he world's artistic circles beat all records ins tupidity and ignominy - to such an extent that it is impossible for a normally constituted person not sweat with shame in the presence of their childish and pretentious orgies!

Wesley Stace: Charles Jessold Considered As A Murderer

I can't recall where I'd read a recommendation for Wesley Stace's Charles Jessold Considered As A Murderer but it was from some reputable blog, with the line that it was ideally suited to music lovers. Well I'm one of those I thought, but alas, not quite. Stace's protagonist is Charles Jessold, a young up and coming English composer interested in English music, especially traditional folk forms, and furthering English music on the world stage. Stace creates an eloquent and convincing voice in critic Shepherd (his name a rather obvious pun) but the narrative is too straightforward and nationalistic (albeit satirically - reminded of too many unpleasant Harold Moores customers and Radio 3 programs), the links with Gesualdo too obvious, and the terrain too familiar and conventionally explored. It remains unfinished.

Simon Reynolds: Retromania

I'm fascinated by the current state of music and how its production and reception have changed since the internet came and fucked everything over. Sure, there have been benefits, but try finding me one person as excited by music now as they were ten years ago. Or, as Reynolds puts it - play me one piece of music from the 2000s that doesn't sound like it could have come from the 1990s.

Retromania explores all the obvious issues affecting music and popular culture - the interweb, file sharing, Youtube, sampling, pastiche, irony, etc etc etc. but many beyond these, and points to a widespread rejection of the new and the exciting that dates back to the late sixties. Despite Reynolds' final note of optimism, his declaration that he remains a committed modernist futurist and holds out hope for change, Retromania paints a bleak, largely hopeless picture. I'd not expected anything else, but just how much we're locked into the past hadn't completely registered. The book's real message is that the West's time has past, that we're in the midst of the decline and fall, that 'It's time for the West to rest'. Reynolds looks instead to the prospect of other powers taking charge - China and India - and developing new forward thinking approaches to art and cultural production. But even this is merely glanced at, and anyone even slightly aware of the way these two countries are pursuing capitalist greed will not see much hope in the future being in their hands.

Unlike the society he critiques, Retromania keeps expanding and updating itself, of sorts. Reynold's essay in the Wire some months back kicked it off, and his final post for Bruce Davison's Wired blog looks at hyperstasis and contemporary classical composition (and other genres - heck, aren't they they all interchangeable in this polystylistic world?).

David Foster Wallace: The Pale King

I'd read some of David Foster Wallace's short stories and non-fiction before, enjoying his essays on David Lynch and tennis and especially cruise ships, quoting lines from the latter to anyone stupid enough to go on one, but I'd never tackled his novels. Given my fondness for long books, Infinite Jest has always tempted me, but the comparisons to Pynchon, the deep postmodern multiplicity of it, and all those damned footnotes, had me daunted. Details of The Pale King however had me itching to read it: its exploration of the tedium and emptiness of life in contemporary white-collar employment seemed both enticingly Kafkaesque and incredibly prescient. It's one of those books I enjoyed so much being immersed in that I'm sad I no longer have it to look forward to. Sadder still that we no longer have Wallace around to give us more.

There is no disguising the unfinished status of The Pale King, but editor Michael Pietsch has done a commendable job of fashioning the book into a cohesive and highly readable structure. For the most part it reads like a short story collection linked by the IRS, with the majority of stories taking place around an internal revenue processing facility in Peoria, Illinois in the 1980s. Tangential stories exploring the earlier lives of characters who wind up in this facility are less closely linked, yet the air of bleak cynicism is consistent and ties them to the overall plot regardless of narrative divergence.

In the NY Times Tom McCarthy, author of Remainder and C, discusses two ways of reading The Pale King:

The first is as a coherent, if incomplete, portrayal of our age unfolding on an epic scale: a grand parable of postindustrial culture or “late capitalism,” and an anguished examination of the lot of the poor (that is, white-collar) individual who finds himself caught in this system’s mesh. The setting that Wallace has chosen as his background (and foreground, and pretty much everything in between) could not be more systematic: the innards of the Internal Revenue Service — the sheer, overwhelming heft of its protocols and procedures...

...the second way of understanding the whole document: as a much rawer and more fragmented reflection on the act of writing itself, the excruciating difficulty of carrying the practice forward — properly and rigorously forward — in an age of data saturation. The Jesuit presents “the world and reality as already essentially penetrated and formed, the real world’s constituent info generated . . . now a meaningful choice lay in herding, corralling and organizing that torrential flow of info.” He could just as well be describing the task of the novelist, who, of course, is also “called to account.” It’s hard not to see in the poor pencil-pushers huddled at their desks an image of the writer — nor, given Wallace’s untimely end, to shudder when they contemplate suicide.

Sadness, nostalgia, regret, hopelessness all pervade The Pale King, making it a particularly bleak suicide note. Combined with his speech to graduates about the difficulties of daily life and 'making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head', it makes a conclusively depressing suicide note, but one so beautifully drawn as to allow readers to effortlessly succumb to its downbeat charms. Furthermore, as an essay on the hopelessness, meaninglessness and misery of contemporary working life, and the soullessness of consumer society, from its pervasive ugliness, overcrowded roads, bad architecture, meaningless drudgery, unsatisfactory personal relationships, selfishness, unfairness, violence, etc. etc. etc., The Pale King provides an articulate summary of what's wrong with life, and an urgent - but failed - plea to open our eyes, notice this horror we're in, and do something about it.

Terry Castle: Do I Like It?

Fascinating article in the 28 July issue of the London Review of Books (and first of my subscription to arrive) on Oustider Art. Castle's personal and constantly self-critical approach to writing about art is infitnitely more arresting than the dry and detached earnestness of NYRB's art writing. Here's Castle on artist and illustrator Louis Wain:

My interest in such bizarrerie only intensified over the years. Thanks to an artistic mother I’d grown up with a precocious liking for post-impressionism, modern art and especially surrealism: Klee, Calder, Bacon and Salvador Dal í were all icons in this junior-varsity phase. But I remember being mesmerised, too, by a short documentary I saw in high school about art made by schizophrenics. (This would have been in the late 1960s, the heyday of R.D. Laing’s radical anti-psychiatry movement.) Most gripping were the magnificently demented illustrations of Louis Wain (1860-1939), a hugely popular British artist who after a successful international career as an illustrator and cartoonist, spent the last ten years of his life in an asylum near St Albans. Wain specialised in comic illustrations of cats, and scores of his cat postcards, cartoons and children’s books can still be found.

Like Degas or Mary Cassatt, Wain could draw a perfectly normal-looking cat when he wanted to – at least for a while. But over time the anthropomorphised expressions become more and more intense, bug-eyed and oddly sinister (notably when the feline subject is shown smiling). Colours and backgrounds gradually turn more febrile and abstract. Late 19th-century ‘mad-wallpaper’ backgrounds proliferate. And especially when rendering Persians and Angoras and other long-haired breeds, Wain begins to show his cats with fur brushed up, as if full of static electricity. The effect is often so marked that in some images the pointed tufts of fur surrounding the cat’s body make a kind of jagged, phantasmagoric aura that fills up or overwhelms the picture space. In the psychedelic sequence below, one can see this development taking place in an almost stop-action way:

Once the quintessential (if eccentric) insider, Wain seems here to metamorphose into an outsider – which is to say, a lost soul – before our very eyes.

Wain’s valedictory works illustrate a characteristic many contemporary outsider artists share: an aversion to blank space: a horror vacui and a manic compulsion to fill every inch of the available paper or canvas with some kind of colouring or mark. Seeing pictures by Wain no doubt prepared me for this obsessive mark-making: the worked-over supports, the tendency to hypnotic patterning and the distorted and ambiguous figure-ground relationships one finds in an important strand of outsider art. You might call Wain’s ‘mad’ style a version of the outsider mode in its paranoid or maximalist aspect. It’s as if one needs protection and this protection is best achieved by filling in the image to absolute repletion. Obviously the creation of such imagery takes a great deal of time and requires thousands of small repetitive actions with brush or pencil or tool. Yet one can imagine how such a practice might serve a victim of mental agitation as a form of superstitious magic, as self-soothing or self-medication.

Find it in its entirety here.

George Prochnik: In Pursuit of Silence

The introduction to George Prochnik's In Pursuit of Silence sets the author up as a cranky old killjoy, despite his protestations. A self-confessed quiet freak, Prochnik is more obsessive than most in his quest for quiet:

I've snitched on contractors who started work early. I've battled neighbours who hold large parties - and befriended them to get into their parties as a way of trying to befriend the noise itself. I've worn so many earplugs that if they were laid end to end they would probably extend all the way around a New York City block.

Yet the key to this book's success is to be found in the second sentence above - Prochnik is less opposed to noise itself than in praise of silence and the diversity of (moderate) sound, and is both realistic and adaptable, again as the sentence above demonstrates, in how best to make sense amid the noise of contemporary urban life.

Prochnik's journey then is personal, and it's this modest approach, combined with his self-deprecating personality and an awareness of the futility of his mission, that makes his book such an understated joy. We follow his travels among the freaks obsessed with both noise ('boom car' enthusiasts, audio marketing execs and sonic weapon manufacturers) and silence (monks, quakers and agoraphobes) and realise how similar they are - both sensitive to sound in one way or another. Having not read Steve 'Kode 9' Goodman's Sonic Warfare I wonder how much overlap there is in the sections on the military and deterrent use of sound. He notes that the first use of Muzak in the workplace was soon stopped by unions who viewed it, rightly, as an incentive to speed up the pace of workers. Prochnik also notes the effects loud music has on shopping, eating and drinking and how this has had a major impact on the retail and restaurant industries, but his assessment as 'worrisome' the way that 'acoustic stimulation heightens the effect of MDMA' is naive and misguided.

Interesting too is the currently-defunct-but-bound-to-return phenomenon of 'Audiac', audio analgesia. Once used widely and successfully by dentists and in birthing clinics, Audiac therapy involves the use of high level sound by subjects experiencing mild pain. Apparently contemporary firm Sound Pain Relief is looking into reviving this practice, which would seem to work as a sensory distraction much like a sonic form of the vibrating Tens Machines used during labour.

Where I found myself warming most to Prochnik and his mission is where he describes his love of the richness of sound to be found in quiet places. He repeatedly echoes John Cage - and quotes him - in emphasising that true silence doesn't exist, and his time spent in the Japanese gardens in Portland, Oregon made me recall the incredible sonic experiences I'd had in gardens in Japan.

Unlike in Western landscape design where a single structure serves as a focal point, a Japnese garden will present myriad centres of attention: stepping stones, pines, a lantern. All the elements are presented: the movement of branches, the sound of wind in the branches, our own movement.

After visits to an expo on soundproofing, through the bureaucratic malaise of European 'Noise Maps' and on architectural soundwalks with the deaf, Prochnik's final plea is for governments to recognise the value of silence and to lobby for the creation of more silent spaces: parks, pocket parks, and church-like places of 'silence-worship'. This is the most easily achievable outcome one could envision in the war against noise, and certainly the most positive, if somewhat resigned: an understanding of the necessity of noise within contemporary capitalist society and the futility in opposing the true creators of noise: marketing and the military.

Robert Walser: The Assistant

Robert Walser’s The Assistant tells of Joseph Marti, a young rambler who commences employment in the titular position for well-to-do inventor Carl Tobler in the (presumed Swiss) town of Barenswil. Tobler has a number of inventions he is trying to peddle, with limited success, the most noteworthy being the ‘Advertising Clock’, containing pop-out promotional banners, space upon which is intended for sale to ‘enterprising capitalists’. There is also the ammunition-distributing ‘Marksman’s Vending Machine’ to be located at shooting ranges and hunting grounds.

Tobler’s misguided enthusiasm for the profitability of his gadgets finds him frequently on the road, purportedly in the pursuit of finance for his projects but increasingly down the local pub drowning his sorrows. This leaves Marti responsible for helping out Tobler’s wife and four children around the house, playing Jass, drinking coffee and smoking endless cheroots. His chief business responsibility concerns writing letters to fend off creditors. Business difficulties prevent Marti from receiving any salary owed him, but his fondness for the members of the household, from the abused Silvi to the doted upon Dora, and their provisions prevent him from leaving.

Written in 1907 when Walser was under 30, The Assistant has much in common with other European modernist fiction of the time, particularly Kafka and Canetti. It was apparently written in 6 weeks so as to enter a competition, and the easy, drifting narrative flow, often unpredictable and occasionally chaotic, like Canetti’s Auto Da Fe, supports this. Marti’s erratic frame of mind meanwhile, mistrustful of his own thoughts, leading to verbal outbursts with Frau Tobler, only to humbly apologise and about face, recalls the quandaries of Kafka’s characters. However, with such an engaging premise relayed in Walser’s dry and witty style, as conveyed bu Susan Bernofsky’s translation, he is much funnier than either of them.

Had the Advertising Clock suddenly proved a washout? Not a bit of it. On the contrary, the elegant wings of the advertising fields shone brighter and more resplendently than ever, and the Marksman’s Vending Machine? Hadn’t the fabrication of the very first specimen been underway for weeks now? Didn’t the most efficient and assiduous of mechanics turn up almost daily at the villa in order to play cards with Tobler? Other people played cards as well and enjoyed a glass of wine, and yet continued to prosper – why shouldn’t Tobler prosper as well?

The depiction of the Toblers’descent to financial ruin, and Marti's to joblessness, provides Walser with a vehicle with which to critique and satirise contemporary commerce, and it’s here that The Assistant is particularly modern.

The grotto in the garden had now been completed as well, except for a few minor details. The contractors submitted their bill, which ran to approximately five hundred marks, a sum that had not been seen in the Villa Tobler for quite some time. Where would they get it? Could they dig it up from beneath the earth? Should they set Leo on some retiree out for a nocturnal stroll, knock him down and rob him? Alas, it was the twentieth century, the age of moonlit robberies was over.

And later:

Leo was no dragon. He might even have responded somewhat currishly to such outrageous Medieval assumptions. All in all, it was a twentieth century tableau.

The befuddlement felt by the Toblers and their inability to engage with the new realities of twentieth century society point to nostalgia for earlier, simpler times, and seem to reflect the insecurities of the author. Walser’s brother Karl, also a writer, was a successful member of Berlin high society, a world Robert, Bernofsky tells us, found difficult to engage with. Not long after the publication of The Assistant Walser attempted suicide, his depression misdiagnosed as schizophrenia, and he was committed to an asylum. There he spent the remaining 35 years of his life, never to write again. ‘I’m not here to write, I’m here to be mad’. After the joys found herein I’ll be reading everything the young Walser wrote.

Deszo Kosztalanyi: Skylark

Dezso Kosztalanyi was a 'faithful lover' of Budapest and a passionate modernist, champion of Joyce, Kafka, Musil; editor, journalist, poet, novelist. Skylark is an apparently representative Kosztalanyi work, telling of an elderly couple devoted to their overweight, unattractive and aging daughter Skylark, and the surprising joys they experience when she goes away on a week's holiday. Hilarious and tragic, I've rarely encountered so funny a drama and so bleak a comedy. And what powers of description:

Her flesh was powdery and voluptuously weary,as if tenderised by all the different beds and arms in which she had lain. Her face was as soft as the pulpy flesh of an overripe banana, her breasts like two tiny bunches of grapes. She exuded a certain seedy charm, a poetry of premature corruption and decay. She breathed the air as if it burned her palate, baking her small, hot, whorish mouth. It was as if she were sucking a sweet or slurping champagne.

The couple hold an interesting position within the town, once welcomed and respected, they now lock themselves away with Skylark, enjoying calm domestic pursuits, eating blandly, abstaining. With her gone it's not long before they, almost reluctantly, start to fall off this wagon and enjoy themselves, re-establishing old friendships, gorging themselves at the restaurant, Mother shopping, Father smoking, drinking and gambling. But like all benders the end remains always in sight. This from an old friend and poet who follows them home and stays on to observe:

He could hear rummaging from inside the house, the old couple preparing for rest. And he could see quite clearly the wretched rooms, where suffering collected like unswept dust in the corners, the dust of lives in painful heaps, piled up over many long years. .. They had no tragedy, for how could tragedy begin to grow in such a wasteland? Yet how profound, how human they all were.

Of course, Skylark returns, and with it despair, resignation and hopelessness, for all parties. This is depicted metaphorically in the form of a pet bird Skylark has brought back from the country:

"Look, isn't he sweet? Tubi, Tubica. My dear little Tubica. Isn't he a darling?"
Seeing the electric light, the pigeon began scratching with its twisted, sooty feet, turning its stupid, harmless head and blinking at its new mistress with black peppercorn eyes.... It wasn't a pretty pigeon. It was a tatty, dishevelled little bird.

The catalogue of miseries, and tasty delights, is vivid and tactile, recalling Orwell, no doubt due in part to the excellent translation by Peter Esterhazy. Esterhazy also provides an insightful introduction to the book and a summary of Kosztalyani's life, written in a welcoming and idiosyncratically offbeat tone that suits the subject. After Skylark I'm very keen to read more Kosztalanyi, but Esterhazy's introduction makes him even more appealing, Especially with quotes from Kosztalanyi like this:

I have always been interested in just one thing: death. Nothing else. I became a human being when, at the age of ten, I saw my grandfather dead, whom at that time I probably loved more than anyone else. It is only since then that I have been a poet, an artist, a thinker. The vast difference which divides the living from the dead, the silence of death, made me realise I had to do something... For me, the only thing I have to say, however small an object I am able to grasp, is that I am dying.

Keizo Hino: Isle of Dreams

"For all of you not wasting away in concreteland, the Isle of Dreams is here!"

I was instantly enticed to read Keizo Hino's Isle of Dreams by the blurb on the back cover:

Though it has a lovely name, the real "Isle of Dreams" is a hunk of reclaimed land in Tokyo bay where the city dumps its garbage... and yet, Shozo Sakai, a middle-aged widower, does indeed find the place beautiful: gravitating more and more, since the death of his wife, toward the isle's massive piles of trash'.

How wonderful! I'd spent a lot of time in Odaiba, that reclaimed land site now filled with shopping malls (whose ceiling is decorated with clouds and features lighting which changes from day to night in an hour), TV studios, beaches and scale-models of the Statue of Liberty, reached by automated elevated monorail, and thought the place strange, but went nowhere near actual rubbish, only this simulated cultural kind. Also, it's published by Dalkey Archive Press, my new favourite publisher.

There's comparisons to be made between this little-known novel by little-known author with the work of Osamu Dazai (featured below) and similarly pessimistic Japanese writers, particularly as articulated through a close understanding of physical artifacts and modern urban detritus. This is especially present in Hino, in an almost metaphysical sense: that the inanimate matter of contemporary society has eclipsed human life, and that human society is doomed to be overrun by its own waste.

With its blurring of the boundaries between dreams and waking life, inanimate objects and living beings, past and future, Isle of Dreams is also a lot like the later films of David Lynch, but given that Hino wrote it in 1985 its incredible how contemporary it reads. The manner in which the lead character, the widower Shozo Sakai, wanders haphazardly into strange, otherworldly scenarios also recalls the dream(y) sequences of Kazuo Ishiguro, specifically the battle scene of When We Were Orphans and the whole of The Unconsoled. Hino however is the less straightforward writer, creating more enigmatic scenes, and allowing his story to conclude without clear resolution. These are all commendable traits, and are brilliantly executed, and Isle of Dreams is among the most haunting and genuinely thrilling (in the sense of being energised by Hino's fictitious creations) novels I have read.

The narrative follows the gradual unravelling of Sakai, an office worker for a construction firm, from his harmless, lonely wanderings looking at modern buildings, through his growing obsession with the reclaimed land of Tokyo, to his nightmarish nocturnal excursions with a female motorcyclist and her son through bombed out relics of Tokyo bay islands. Mannequins appear to come to life, and window displays posses more reality than the 'real' scenes around them.

Hino's pessimistic philosophy is expressed through the thoughts of Sakai when charged by these new encounters, 'charged' in much the same way as the protagonist in Tom McCarthy's Remainder when experiencing reenactments, and presented in the book in italics. The most pointed of these occur when Sakai first visits the waste disposal site at Reclaimed Land Site #13:

Tokyo was expanding (vertically, having already reached its horizontal limits), brimming over with commodities (devoid of either the light or shadow of history), the ever-increasing refuse (with many items unnecessarily discarded) brought to life again between the water and the light (with glittering plastic bags and the wheezing cacophony of garbage)...

Tokyo Lives, thought Shozo. No, he pondered further, as he recalled the view he had just seen of the distant, smog-enshrouded city from atop the mound of refuse, "Tokyo" is only what we call a quivering, breathing, expanding presence, a shape maintained by the endless belching forth of waste, exhaust, sewer water, heat, radio waves, noise, and idle chatter; a circulatory mechanism, invisible but powerful, created and controlled by no one... And when I too have been twisted to the breaking point and cast upon the rubbish heap, will I too acquire light and shadow and begin to tell my story?

And later, upon entering a mannequin manufacturing warehouse:

The thickness of the hard concrete, the intersecting iron reinforcement bars, a steel frame holding up the broad, high roof... Shozo had walked around construction sites more times than he could count, but this was the first time he had felt so directly over the entire surface of his body the presence of cement and metal - their roughness and weight, their crushing oppression, the cracking sounds, the piercing smells, the colours of ash and rust, the bone-chilling cold... It is we who have bestowed on our country this hermetically sealed darkness, desolate and dead, where even the strange smelling air is stagnant.

Isle of Dreams is full of these quotable observations, all of which seem to perfectly embody contemporary hanutological musings and psychogeographic thoughts on non-spaces. Hino's supposed to be similar to Ballard, in which case I'd better read more Ballard. It's intoxicating, this uniquely Japanese cynicism and melancholia, and Hino adds to this by attempting to explore beneath this bleak surface, capturing the rotten, soul-destroying essence of contemporary society, and its in-built future destruction. I've been prattling on about this book to anyone who will listen, it's marvellous, and I hope Dalkey Archive, or anyone, translate his other works.

Allan Hollinghurst: The Line of Beauty

I'm usually hesitant to read contemporary British realist fiction but a friend recommended this and the premise was enticing. Set in the 1980s and book-ended by Thatcher's two successful elections, A Line of Beauty explores the world of upper-class Tory MPs and their Oxbridge educated children, particularly an interloper of sorts onto their scene. This is Nick Guest, his surname telling, who stays and eventually lives with the parents of his university chum and longterm crush, whose fatehr is an up and coming MP. Snugly cocooned in this crusty world Nick explores his sexuality, first with an older black council worker, later with an English-born son of multi-millionaire Supermarket-chain-owning Lebanese immigrants. Given its eighties Wall-Street-esque setting, 1980s tropes abound, lashings of cocaine and champagne, property development, rampant consumerism, vicious class divides, and the toffs say "Yah" for "Yeah". Here's a scene where Nick meets an old college chum for lunch who's become an investor:

It was nearly all men in the restaurant. Nick was glad he'd work his best suit and almost wished he'd worn a tie. There were sharp eyed older men, looking faintly harassed by the speed and noise, their dignity threatened by the ferocious youngsters who already had their hands on a new kind of success. Some of the young men were beautiful and exciting; a sort of ruthless sec-drive was the way Nick imagined their sense of their own power. Others were the uglies and misfits from their school playground who'd made money their best friend. It wasn't so much a public school thing. As everyone had to shout there seemed to be one great rough syllable in the air, a sort of 'wow' or 'yow'.

"It wasn't so much a public school thing" - it is now. Interestingly, I'm sure Hollinghurst chose this setting to compare it to contemporary Tory Britain (and almost-as-bad new Labour Britain) and emphasise just how bad it is. All of the scenes which are set up to satirise the vast wealth inequalities and absurd upper-class follies of the 1980s are dwarfed by what's happening under Cameron. Interesting too how he fits Thatcher into the story: literally, dancing with Nick at his surrogate father's wedding anniversary; and ideologically via her comments on buses:

Wani claimed never to have used a phone box, just as he had never been on a bus, which he said must be a ghastly experience.

Hollinghurst is good with this, and even better in other moments. Music is well documented, and I believe informed by a near-colleague of mine (whose name escapes me) who used to run Harold Moores Records. The scene at Hampstead Heath steps out of reality and into some blissful erotically charged Eden. Other scenes are explored more accurately and in much greater depth than they would in most novels, various parties for instance, Hollinghurst vividly capturing each nuance of what goes through his characters' minds in these crucial moments. This I found to be the most interesting aspect of the book.

But his characters, all uniformly reprehensible, let it down and taint the whole endeavour. The volume of coke snorted starts to numb, and there are a good couple of hundred pages which should have been scrapped. The entire holiday episode was dreary, painful even, and all too soon I just wanted to leave these awful people and this awful world well alone. This ensured I left the book unhappy, where if he’d pruned and finished sooner he’d have gotten a better result.

Osamu Dazai: No Longer Human

Bought this at a secondhand book shop on Rathdowne Street in Carlton, in between buying $2 classical records from the video shop nearby. I'd read Dazai's first novel The Setting Sun and enjoyed it, and this was better: utterly cynical, a study in misanthropy. Given the title I was concerned that it may resemble Kobo Abe's Face of Another, but fortunately it was less absurd and more... hate-filled.

Not sure whether humour was Dazai's intention, but so extreme was his hatred of Japan, humanity and existence that one can't help chuckle, particularly at passages like this:

The night I returned to Tokyo the snow was falling heavily. I drunkenly wandered along the rows of saloons behind the Ginza, singing ti myself over and over again, so softly it was only a whisper, "From here it's hundreds of miles to home... from here it's hundreds of miles to home." I walked along kicking with the point of my shoes the snow which was accumulating. Suddenly I vomited. This was the first time I had brought up blood. It formed a big rising sun flag in the snow. I squatted there for a while. Then with both hands I scooped up snow form places which were still clean and washed my face. I wept.

Weeping occurs frequently, which seems odd given the protagonist's general detachment from human emotion. Dazai's language is bare, his sentences short, meaning tersely conveyed, and his characters have a particularly abject understanding of society. This seems a particularly Japanese way of writing, and thinking, different to the "purity" of Kawabata, but present in Mishima (to a degree), Oe, Tanizaki and Keizo Hino, but none so spare and direct as Dazai here.

The prologue offers a unique and enticing introduction, a first person narration describing three photographs of the protagonist, from youth to middle-age. Here he is on his childhood:

Indeed, the more carefully you examine the child's smiling face the more you feel an indescribable, unspeakable horror creeping over you. You see that it is actually not a smiling face at all. The boy has not a suggestion of a smile. Look at his tightly clenched fists if you want proof. No human being can smile with his fists doubled like that. It is a monkey. A grinning monkey-face. The smile is nothing more than a puckering of ugly wrinkles. The photograph produces an expression so freakish, and at the time so unclean and even nauseating, that your impulse is to say, "What a wizened, hideous little boy!" I have never seen a child with such an unaccountable expression.

The narrative follows the character in the photograph through his life, as he steadily grows more detached from society and normality. Childhood is marked by clowning, adulthood by bohemianism, alcohol and prostitutes, and suicide attempts. The passage in which the protagonist attempts suicide by drowning is touching, given Dazai's own suicide by drowning. Fortunately this knowledge fails to dampen the enjoyment of this original, funny, depressing novel.

Harry Matthews: Cigarettes

Not sure how the title fits in but this book was as smooth and refreshing as a packet of Laramies. Weirdly pitched between realist melodrama, postmodern sexuality deconstruction and (subtle) Oulipo construct, Matthews ingeniously ties these ideas together such that they're less independent strands than a well-stirred stew, a multi-voiced multi-layered narrative of love, loss, art and aging in America. Dedicated to Matthews' mate Georges Perec, Cigarettes contains something of Perec's desire for structural logic, not that I'm sure how it works. I never grasped what Perec was doing with Life: A User's Manual though, but enjoyed the knowledge that something overarching was at work. That same sense is present here. Here, each chapter explores a different pair of individuals, the narrative developing as these characters interact, with one another, in the art - and horse - world, and across time. The cast is incestuous, and piecing together the historical web of relationships, and following their implications, is where much of the pleasure lies.

This structure allows for a complete flattening of hierarchy, with no character or narrative element allowed to dominate. Rather, the drama is less concerned with individual character development (although this does occur within individual chapters) than with overall relationships, the picture rather than the puzzle pieces. This isn't entirely true, as those chapters involving the extreme sexual antics of Lewis and Morris naturally stand out, yet by the final pages they too have been subsumed within the larger whole. I read an old Collier edition with the eighties graphics (see top) which seeped into my reception of the book, not the less leading current Dalkey Archive version (below). I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Mathews was once assumed to be a CIA agent in Paris, due to his 'man-of-leisure' lifestyle. This swanning about Parisian high society itself attracted the attention of the CIA and was documented in Mathews' pseudo memoir My Life As CIA. He studied music at Harvard but no idea what, or whether, he composed.

I just finished Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human, a hilarious study in uniquely Japanese misanthropy, which I'll comment on, and quote, soon.

Mathias Enard:

A number of things attracted me to Mathias Enard's Zone: hyperbolically hailed as "The novel of the decade, if not the century"; flaunting its modernist trappings: A book length (500+ page) sentence - overwhelming Thomas Bernhard's book length (under 200 page) paragraphs - examining all the war, lies and carnage that have stained the countries of the Mediterranean. This region is the Zone of the title, the protagonist (Francis Servain Mirkovic)'s patch in his spying profession. Intent on ending his shady career Mirkovic has amassed a briefcase full of documents collating bloodshed of the Zone, encyclopedically revisiting these events is part of the novel's aim, and is on a train from Milan to Rome to sell the contents to the Vatican. The narrative follows the protagonist's reflections on the Zone, from his involvement as a Croatian solider in the Balkan conflict through his collation of material relating to all manner of historical bloodshed, on this train journey, with each kilometre lasting one page. So, we start in Milan on page 1 and end in Rome on page 514.

It's easy to get caught up in Mirkovic's ruminations, particularly if you've read Marias, also given the espionage connection, or Sebald, and the lack of punctuation allows you to freely roam his thoughts, like the blood flowing through his brain, and spilling across time. Stephen Burn made the following comment in the NY Times:

Removing periods, Énard leaves the reader floating free in the liquid of Mirkovic’s consciousness, where ancient and classical history interrupt more recent events. In this realm of eternal time, Mirkovic as a unitary subject dissolves, and across the solitary train journey he gains mythic dimensions, becoming Dante traveling through the rings of hell to a vita nuova; Hermes accompanying the dead across the Styx; and the harbinger of St. John of Patmos’s Last Days, carrying the names of the dead rather than the Book of Life.

Around the exploration of these grand themes, Enard's depiction of Mirkovic's comparatively humdrum immediate reality is vivid and equally engaging. He reads a novel about the Palestine-Israel conflict, itself presented in the book (and the only sections involving full stops), which mirrors his own history. He studies his neighbours and imagines their thoughts (again, Marias). He goes to the bar and drinks, admiring the label on a beer bottle. He smokes in the toilet. All this is rendered with the cold precision of crime fiction. Very well done.

Now I'm reading Harry Matthews' Cigarettes. Also note that Dalkey Archive Press are having a sale until the end of May - go shopping here.

Bruce Duffy: The World As I Found It

Finished this earlier this week, Bruce Duffy's novelisation of the life of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore, and enjoyed it so much I'm now diving into the real thing, sort of. Or rather, slowly: now on Ray Monk's How to Read Wittgenstein. There's enough quotes of Wittgenstein himself in the Monk, so almost there. Next, as recommended by a friend of mine, I'll try Wittgenstein's Culture and Value, apparently aphoristic nuggets on music, literature and assorted cultural topics. Not sure how that sits with the understanding I have of his philosophy, whereby "What can be said can be said clearly; and wherefore one cannot speak thereof one must be silent", but I'm very much a novice at this stage, led - kindly and with much patience - by Monk's helpful hand.

But first to Duffy's book. Written in 1987, The World As I Found It follows the relationship between the three aforementioned philosophers, from the turn of the century through two world wars and various philosophical upheavals. The focus is mostly on Wittgenstein, whose life was certainly the oddest and most deserving of fiction, although Russell's comes a decent second. With Wittgenstein we learn of his tyrannical father and his multiple suicide brothers, the family's position in Viennese high society, his problematic relationship with his Jewish past. Duffy was particularly good at setting the scene of fin-de-siecle Vienna, surely a fascinating period, of which I'd be interested to learn more - perhaps from Allan S Janik's Wittgenstein's Vienna. Contemporary Cambridge is equally well drawn, particuarly the air of intellectual squabble taking place between Russell and Moore, and Russell and the arrogant fops that hang off Russell's mistress Ottoline.

Wittgenstein's life and career(s) remains the focus of the book however, from his academic beginnings in Cambridge through the trenches of WWI, school teaching in the backwoods of rural Austria, architecture (touched on very briefly here) and his odd later years. All of this is expertly handled by Duffy and I was hooked throughout. I'd like to learn more of the house he built for his sister Gretl in Vienna, now the Bulgarian Embassy.

This clearly corresponds to The Cone in Bernhard's Correction, and readers of that book will see many other connections between Wittgenstein and Roithamer, and I'll be reading Bernhard's Wittgenstein's Nephew too. I was disappointed that Max, Wittgenstein's savant-like friend, was not a real figure, so well is he depicted, but the conclusion gave that fact away. Knowing nothing of Wittgenstein I think was an advantage, as I might have been frustrated with Duffy's use of facts where and when it pleased him, but, as he eloquently states in the book's postscript, he ably demonstrates his decision which, given Wittgenstein's interest in such issues, seems an appropriate approach. Duffy is currently completing a similar "fictional biography" on the life of Rimbaud which I am anxious to read.

I also intend to read more of the How To Read Series. Monk is a brilliant guide, having also written the first biography of Wittgenstein, which incidentally came a year or so after Duffy's biographical novel, amazed it took so long, given his life! Anyway, this seems a better introductory series than the idiots guides and whatnot, so you look less like an idiot, while remaining sufficiently an idiot as to need help accessing the genuine article.

Geoff Dyer: Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi

Finished this the other week, the first half of which I liked much more than the second, which read like a blow-by-blow exotic travelogue of first person narrator in the wilds of Varanasi. Crazy place, sure, but the cocaine-fuelled jaunts through the Venice Bienalle of the first part was much more enjoyable. Even here though it grates, Dyer clearly critiquing the lead character's lucky spree of sex, drugs and culture through the highbrow artworld, but he pulled his punches, and the refusal to resolve was irritating. Any references to Mann's book I missed, surely it was full of them, along with bridges between the two stories. Oh well, I applaud the adventurousness, but, like his earlier Paris Trance, I find his blokey style creates a feeling that you are reading a light airport yarn of the Best a Man Can Get variety.

Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway

Finished Mrs Dalloway this morning, impressed with Woolf's knack for internal monologue (what she's justly praised for) and her flight from character to character. The unstable Septimus Smith was a particular highlight.

My copy was a very well-worn paperback by Panther Books, with The Harlequin Hat , a portrait by William Strang, on the cover. The wearer of said hat bears an uncanny Woolf/Dalloway resmblance, an obvious choice for the cover then, but I've been unable to find reference to the work, or the edition, anywhere. What became of Panther Books, and this edition?

One of the great things about secondhand books, and records, is imagining their past lives. The back cover of my copy of Mrs Dalloway reveals Panther to have an impressive oevre - John Barth, Leonard Cohen, Kerouac, Vonnegut, Kingsley Amis, Lessing - selling for between 25p-60p, and their cover art is impressive. Here's their take on Barthes and Ballard, fit for the hauntologists:

Granta Book of the American Short Story Volume 1

After finishing up with the dense misanthropy of Bernhard's Correction I was after something a little... lighter, so figured the straightforward narrative simplicity of the Carver-esque short story would be just the ticket. The praise heaped upon Richard Ford and his curating efforts, and the attractive hardcover edition of his first Granta anthology sitting on the shelf, lured me in but, especially after Bernhard, these pithy tales of suburban ennui seemed flimsy and self-absorbed.

I read three stories before giving it up (for Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway) and even the best of them managed only to be mildly diverting. That was John Cheever's "O City of Broken Dreams", about a family of bumpkins lured to New York by self-serving city slickers. The story: War veteran / bus driving amateur playwright Evart promised opportunities from big apple agent passing through the boondocks, impressed with first scene of his debut play. Wife and daughter initially dazzled by urban glamour, husband sleepless with writers block, bumpkins ridiculed, return to boondocks. This arc replayed itself in varied forms in the three tales I read.

Seems I'm not the only one disappointed:

I knew what to expect when I read the title and first two paragraphs of "O City of Broken Dreams." It's a nicely constructed story but I feel like I've read it before, though I haven't. I wasn't expecting Mama Finelli to show up at the end, but she seemed almost superfluous, as Evart's story is destined to be at least somewhat tragic from the title onward. Maybe its just Cheever's tone, but it seems like he doesn't want the reader to sympathize fully with gullible ol' Evarts' plight--he seems more like a sketch than a fully realized character.

I'm not sure why I expected anything different. I'd been unable to finish Ford's The Sportswriter when I tried reading it years ago, his brand of minimalist realism offering nothing of interest, apart from an awareness that I have no interest in minimalist realism. The meticulous construction present in Ford's writing, and in the writing he champions in his anthologies, is so tight as to be constricting, didactic, leaving no room for thought outside of the scenes established. Zadie Smith eloquently critiqued the vapidity of this style of writing and championed modernist experimentalism in the NYRB.

I'm still attracted by something in Ford's Bascombe trilogy, the idea of following Everyman USA through the travails of middle-aged middle-class melancholia, the covers of the later volumes Independence Day and Lay of the Land, but doubt I'll get to them. Let me know if I'm missing something.

Thomas Bernhard: Correction

I finshed reading Thomas Bernhard's excellent Correction last night. It was the second Bernhard novel I'd read, after The Loser which is probably a better place to start, particularly those interested in music. The Loser follows its unnamed narrator's recollections of of his time studying under Vladimir Horowitz at the Mozarteum in Salzburg in 1953 with two pianist friends: one named Wertheimer, the other named Glenn Gould. Dismayed by Gould's brilliance and aware of the futility of continuing their piano studies, Wertheimer commits suicide while the narrator ponders this suicide and questions the useless course his life has taken.

Correction, widely considered Bernhard's masterpiece, is certainly a more difficult book. It employs the same structure as The Loser (and from what I hear all his post-Frost books): a continuous first person interior monologue, unbroken by paragraph indentations, full of run-on sentences, obsessive repetitions, random use of italics, and alienating leaps (without transition) from verb tense to verb tense. The central premise is that 'correction' is a process without end, and that all corrections lead to destruction.

The central character Roithamer, based loosely on Wittgenstein (who Bernhard befriended), has committed suicide (much like Wertheimer in The Loser), leaving the narrator to review his manuscripts in the garret of a third friend Hoeller. Roithamer's writings chiefly concern his final completed project, the building of the Cone, a habitation for his beloved sister situated in the centre of the Kobernausser forest. The long, repetitive sentences present in The Loser are here further extended and convuluted, prompting frequent re-reading, but also creating a more frenzied, artfully frustrating, and frequently hilarious text. Here is one such passage:

From my window up in the garret I kept watching Hoeller down there in his workshop stuffing that huge black bird, how he kept cramming it with more and more stuffing, I thought I'll watch him from this excellent vantage point until he's finished stuffing that bird, and so I stood there motionless for a good half hour until I saw that Hoeller had finished stuffing the bird. Suddenly Hoeller had thrown the stuffed bird down to the floor, he'd jumped up and run off into the backroom where I couldn't see him anymore, but I waited, looking into the workshop, until I could see Hoeller again, he came back to stuffing the bird, now I noticed a huge heap of polyurethane on the floor beside Hoeller's chair and I thought this huge heap of polyurethane is now going to be crammed into this bird which I supposed had already been crammed long since. By stuffing this bird he is making the night bearable for himself, I thought... with what incredible energy Hoeller was now stuffing that bird with polyurethane, I couldn't imagine that so much polyurethane could be crammed inside that bird, yet Hoeller kept stuffing more and more of the polyurethane into the bird, suddenly I felt repelled by the process of stuffing polyurethane into the huge black bird, I turned around, looked at the door, but found it impossible to look at the door for more than a second or so because even looking at the door I kept seeing the huge bird Hoeller was stuffing with polyurethane, so I turned back again and looked out the window and into Hoeller's workshop, if I must see Hoeller stuffing this huge black, really horrible bird, then I might as well see it in reality and not in my imagination, clearly I could not possibly expect to get any sleep now, full as I was of my impression of Hoeller stuffing that huge black bird with polyurethane, constantly accelerating the speed with which he was doing this job, it was nauseating, still I had to keep looking out the window and into the workshop as if hypnotised...

And on he goes. There's some equally amusing passages concerning Roithamer's family in the second section. Indeed, I was surprised to find that this book had two parts, meaning the uninterrupted paragraph rant was broken midway. Still, waiting for a paragraph break was never an option; I even found myself putting it down for the night mid-sentence, so long were the sentences. I think the opening sentence goes on for some pages. Nonetheless, Bernhard's crazed and obsessive style is uniquely intoxicating, getting under your skin like few contemporary writers.

People seem divided over whether Bernhard's ceaseless pessimism is for real or a joke. In all the photographs I've seen he seems to be smirking, a cheeky grin rising the corners of his mouth. And he's more savoury - and far more pleasing to read - than that other literary misanthrope Celine.

Some interesting reviews of Bernhard have appeared recently in the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books (unfortunately the NYRB is subscriber only):

LRB - Michael Hofmann Reger Said

NYRB: Adam Kirsch The Darkest Comedian