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