I found a nest of baby snakes near the creek and killed them all…
Here is something dark and sweet and heady, a little liquorice bonbon of a novel – de
I found a nest of baby snakes near the creek and killed them all…
Here is something dark and sweet and heady, a little liquorice bonbon of a novel – detached from conventional notions of genre and existing in a little world all its own. Our narrator, Mary Kate or ‘Merricat’ Blackwood, lives with her sister and uncle in a once-grand old house haunted by family tragedy; ‘everyone else,’ as she tells us in the book’s famous opening paragraph, ‘is dead.’
Merricat is said to be eighteen, but she reads a lot younger than that to me: detached, perhaps quite disturbed, she is consumed by talismans and magical thinking, and nurses a fierce sense of how to protect herself and those closest to her – a strange mix of True Grit’s Mattie Ross and Gormenghast’s Steerpike.
[image] This Folio Society edition comes with killer illustrations from Angie Hoffmeister
It’s an insular book, part character study, part hymn to agoraphobia, where we’re stranded in a single house, and within that in a single mind. The outsiders in the village are a faceless, oppressive presence, from whom the book’s real horror stems. The story seems to be framed as a kind of household mystery; but we aren’t really very surprised by any of the book’s revelations, and its underlying energy seems to have more to do with the fearfulness of crowd mentality, the cruelty of ostracisation.
By the end of the novel, even the limited world of the house has been reduced to a single room. Yet the more constrained we get here, the more scope there seems to be for fantasy and escapism, which in this book is a source of joy as well as disaster. ‘We are so happy,’ the book’s final words insist. Shirley Jackson might even believe it....more
‘I write of sex and death,’ Schnitzler once told an interviewer. ‘What else is there?’ Well, Nutella is pretty good – but I take his point. Certainly ‘I write of sex and death,’ Schnitzler once told an interviewer. ‘What else is there?’ Well, Nutella is pretty good – but I take his point. Certainly eros and thanatos are the twin poles of this slim, witty, oneiric work of fiction, which is much deeper than its size might suggest.
It begins with someone drifting off to sleep; and from then until the end, we are never entirely sure of what is real and what is fantasy, who is dreaming and who awake. Fridolin, our protagonist, spends a night in Vienna pursuing a series of strange erotic encounters, none of which quite reaches fulfilment; the next day, trying to recapture the threads of his desires, all of them turn out to end in disappointment or death. The bourgeois daughter who declared her love for him is now entirely unattractive; the sex worker who took his fancy in the street is in hospital, presumably with venereal disease; the shopgirl who made a pass at him turns out to be a common whore; and the beautiful woman he met at an orgy is now, it seems, in the morgue.
Meanwhile Fridolin’s wife, Albertine, is at home in bed, lost in elaborate sex dreams of frustrated desires and missed opportunities from her own past.
Which of the two of them is really ‘dreaming’ – and how much difference is there, really, between the visions we imagine while asleep and the tricks our brain plays on us while awake?
The story is infused with a melancholy sense of the trügerischen Scheine versäumter Möglichkeiten, the treacherous illusion of missed opportunities, but also with a sense that dream logic communicates truths that cannot be expressed in waking logic. Small wonder that Freud called Schnitzler his ‘alter ego’; they apparently developed their ideas about the importance of dreams independently, and Schnitzler – a trained doctor – presents his fictions as though they are case notes. We read as though listening to someone speaking from the analyst’s couch. We're reminded that ‘dream’ and ‘trauma’, in German, are perilously similar.
The tone is sexy and woozy and worldly-wise, with an unexpected pragmatism running through it. Schnitzler’s view of marriage seems on the one hand rather bleak – a permanent state of duplicity and denial – but on the other hand it offers the only lasting comforts available here: shared understanding, and the practicality of building a life together.
Dreams and reality are not the same; but maybe to move forward, you have to understand (as Fridolin finally understands) that kein Traum ist völlig Traum. No dream is entirely a dream – for better and for worse....more
This novel ends, as so many novels before it have ended, with a pair of lovers sitting by the fire in contended domesticity. Yet it’s an indication ofThis novel ends, as so many novels before it have ended, with a pair of lovers sitting by the fire in contended domesticity. Yet it’s an indication of how strange and perverse this novel is that the scene is felt not to be a happy ending at all, but instead a kind of failure.
Lawrence’s books are often like this – all the trappings of a Victorian novel, but with twentieth-century emotions bursting through the surface. The form can no longer hold the content, and everyone seems to be driven half mad by it.
Women in Love is a kind of sequel to The Rainbow, a book which was fascinating but also, I thought, sometimes messy to the point of incomprehensibility. Here everything is more controlled, more driven by a focussed frustration over not being able to get beyond society’s conventions. And while The Rainbow was an intensely female novel, this one is marked by its attention to masculinity. The eponymous Ursula and Gudrun, when eyeing a lover, note ‘the magic of his thighs’, are overcome by ‘a glamorous thickness of labour and maleness’, or find themselves admiring ‘the beauty of his dim and distant loins’.
These are expressions of female desire that had barely been put down in print before, or not since the eighteenth century. And it’s not only the women who are taken by male beauty: the emblematic naked fireside wrestling match between Gerald and Birkin (captured so perfectly by Ken Russell in the 1969 film) is also part of the same theme. Heterosexual Lawrence, like homosexual Proust, is working in his fiction towards a kind of fundamental bisexuality for which society, to his annoyance, is simply not yet ready.
Because what are all these mutual attractions leading to, anyway? Surely not – as for previous generations – towards marriage, an institution which almost all the characters herein regard with utter scorn.
The hot narrow intimacy between man and wife was abhorrent. The way they shut their doors, these married people, and shut themselves in to their own exclusive alliance with each other, even in love […] a whole community of mistrustful couples insulated in private houses or private rooms, always in couples, and no further life, no further immediate, no disinterested relationship admitted; a kaleidoscope of couples, disjointed, separatist, meaningless entities of married couples.
Instead there must be some other goal we can imagine – some other state that we should all be working towards. And as with sexuality, so with society: the increasing mechanisation of modern life, the automation of industry (the factories, the mines), is here felt to be a deadening presence, something stifling the life out of individuals.
For DH Lawrence this was epitomised by the ‘creeping democracy’ he so mistrusted and which gets such a bad rap in these novels. (‘How to disentangle the passion for equality from the passion of cupidity, when begins the fight for equality of possessions?’ someone worries.) Lawrence thought the working classes were completely unequipped to vote for national leaders, and wanted instead a ruling aristocracy appointed from the bourgeoisie. He himself was from a very poor working-class background, so although he was a terrible snob, he was not an uninformed one; but it perhaps explains a strange sense, when you read him, that he is saying sensible things for the wrong reasons.
His writing here has moved on a long way from the prose of The Rainbow, though it still shows many of his idiosyncrasies. Consider something like this:
The sisters happened to call in a cottage in Willey Green to buy honey. Mrs Kirk, a stout, pale, sharp-nosed woman, sly, honied, with something shrewish and cat-like beneath, asked the girls into her too-cosy, too-tidy kitchen.
If I was editing this for a friend, I would say it’s inadvisable to describe someone selling honey as ‘honied’, and that having nine adjectives in a sentence of twenty-three words is far too much. But in this book, Lawrence channels these moments of unconstrained ebullience to much better effect, unlike in the previous novel where they spiral across almost every page; one trusts the narrative voice more in Women in Love.
Still, the conclusions offered frequently seem too extreme. Birkin – the character most closely modelled on Lawrence himself – is so disgusted with society that he’s quite ready for an apocalypse to take humanity out of the picture entirely. ‘Don’t you find it a beautiful clean thought,’ he muses, ‘a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?’ This is perhaps (like many things in this novel) a sentiment whose time has come around again.
Others find their own solutions. Some disappear into the past (there is criticism of those who are ‘amusing themselves with Flaxman and Blake and Fuseli’ – who would do such a thing?); some finally accept society’s conventions; some seek new conventions abroad. The solutions Lawrence himself believed in were in some sense proto-fascist (Bertrand Russell said they ‘led straight to Auschwitz’), but it’s not difficult to look past them because the problems themselves are so familiar, so relatable, and so beautifully evoked. You read this with a thrill of recognition, and an ache to realise that every generation must go on answering the same challenging questions about how we live and how we love each other....more
In 1907, the young Swiss poet Blaise Cendrars was in a workers’ restaurant on the outskirts of Bern when he came across a strange character hunched ovIn 1907, the young Swiss poet Blaise Cendrars was in a workers’ restaurant on the outskirts of Bern when he came across a strange character hunched over a plate of roast potatoes. The man had no money and nowhere to stay; Cendrars gave him some bread and took him in for the night. He had just come out of prison after serving a long sentence for assaulting two young girls, and was full of shame.
After the man left, Cendrars could not get him out of his head. He morphed into the figure of ‘Moravagine, idiot’ – part monster, part embodiment of modernity – whose life story and thought processes Cendrars became obsessed with recreating. For years, as Cendrars travelled about the world, in the French Foreign Legion and in the trenches of the First World War, this figure took hold of his mind in a way that was almost a kind of possession. ‘He was there, settled into me like an armchair,’ Cendrars said. ‘I raised a parasite at my own expense.’
The book by which Cendrars finally rid himself of this parasite in 1926 is a baffling confection: wildly inventive, horribly misogynistic, linguistically exuberant, self-referential, surrealist, picaresque, full of heartfelt cynicism and obscurely channelled impulses. It’s often off-putting and hard to love, it’s a mess in terms of its structure, but the strength of feeling on the page is sometimes so striking that you’re enraptured despite yourself.
The novel’s narrator is a medical student at a Swiss insane asylum, where he comes across Moravagine in a special enclosure. The last descendant of a Hungarian royal lineage, the strange inmate is a crippled lunatic who was locked up after eviscerating his fiancée. Our narrator (who nurses his own grudge against the psychiatric establishment) breaks him out, and the two proceed to rampage around the world in a fairground-mirror reflection of a novel of adventures.
Moravagine – whose name sounds ominously like ‘death to vagina’ in French – represents, perhaps, all the suppressed desires and ‘locked up’ impulses of prewar Europe, and his escape from the asylum is seen as a kind of explosion into modernity, with its machinery, its speed, and its violence. The book’s misogyny is elevated to the status of a guiding philosophy. At heart, as Cendrars understands, it’s really a kind of frightened gynophobia:
La femme est sous le signe de la lune, ce reflet, cet astre mort, et c’est pourquoi plus la femme enfante, plus elle engendre la mort. Plutôt que de la génération, la mère est le symbole de la destruction, et quelle est celle qui ne préférerait tuer et dévorer ses enfants, si elle était sûre par là de s’attacher le mâle, de le garder, de s’en compénétrer, de l’absorber par en bas, de le digérer, de le faire macérer en elle, réduit à l’état de fœtus et de le porter ainsi toute sa vie dans son sein? Car c’est à ça qu’aboutit cette immense machinerie de l’amour, à l’absorption, à la résorption du mâle.
Woman is under the sign of the moon – that reflection, that dead star – which is why the more woman gives birth, the more she engenders death. The mother is the symbol of destruction rather than generation; who among them would not rather kill and eat her children, if she was sure thereby to attach herself to the male, to keep hold of him, enter into him, absorb him from beneath, digest him, keep him chewed up inside her, reduced to the state of a foetus and carried for the rest of her life inside her breast? For that is where this whole immense machinery of love leads: to absorption, the reabsorption of the male.
This strain in the novel, which seems to reflect Cendrars’s own dubious concerns, is uncomfortable to read but paradoxically also provides some of the book’s most authentic power. It sits uneasily with Moravagine’s exploration of modernity and means that the book never feels entirely successful – there’s always something awkward about it, like two or three novels are wrestling together under the same trenchcoat.
When Cendrars’s writing takes flight, however, it can be dazzling. His prose moves between medical case notes, lyrical flights of fancy, exhaustive lists and bursts of cynical philosophising, and his vocabulary is huge and inspiring. (‘Dictionaries take up a lot of space,’ he later said, ‘but I can’t live without my Petit Larousse.’) He is exhilarated by the trappings of the modern world, and scans the city like an obscure piece of text where he can read its
écriture démotique, animée du cinéma qui s’adresse à la foule impatiente des illettrés, les journaux qui ignorent la grammaire et la syntaxe pour mieux frapper l’œil avec les placards typographiques des annonces, les prix pleins de sensibilité sous une cravate dans une vitrine, les affiches multicolores et les lettres gigantesques qui étaient les architectures hybrides des villes et qui enjambent les rues, les nouvelles constellations électriques qui montent chaque soir au ciel, l’abécédaire des fumées dans le vent du matin.
demotic writing, animated by the cinema which addresses itself to the impatient crowd of illiterates, the newspapers which ignore grammar and syntax the better to catch the eye with typographic news placards, the prices full of sensitivity under a tie in a window, the multicoloured posters and gigantic letters which are the hybrid architecture of the cities and which straddle the streets, the new electric constellations which appear in the sky every evening, the abecedarium of fumes in the morning wind.
One character, who like the author is a rambling citizen of the world, is introduced thus:
Il connaissait les maisons par leur numéro, les montagnes par leur altitude, les enfants par leur date de naissance, les bateaux par leur nom, les femmes par leurs amants, les hommes par leurs défauts, les animaux par leurs qualités, les plantes par leurs vertus, les étoiles par leur influence.
He knew houses by their number, mountains by their altitude, children by their date of birth, boats by their name, women by their lovers, men by their flaws, animals by their qualities, plants by their virtues, stars by their influence.
Taken together, the book is a work that invites fascination rather than love. I was reminded at various times of Sade, Jung, Marinetti, JG Ballard, and a host of other disparate writers in varied fields; it’s particularly interesting to consider it alongside the other experimental writing appearing in Europe in the 1920s, discussions of which rarely include Cendrars.
It’s not a work that endeared me to its author, but it is one that made me want to read more from, and about, him, and one whose strange energy got under my skin. Au commencement était le rythme et le rythme s’est fait chair, Cendrars wrote, offering one possible way to think about his horrible antihero: In the beginning was the rhythm, and the rhythm was made flesh....more
Maybe it's just the childish optimist in me, but humanity can be pretty impressive when we put our minds to it.
And this is, indeed, a book for the
Maybe it's just the childish optimist in me, but humanity can be pretty impressive when we put our minds to it.
And this is, indeed, a book for the childish optimist in everyone – a book that shows people working together for a common goal, using logic and accumulated knowledge to solve every problem that's thrown at them. If it sometimes feels eerily detached from the real world, that's not because it's set in the orbit of Tau Ceti, but because actual humans seem determined to fail to live up to Andy Weir's high expectations of us.
This feels like the family-friendly, all-American, hopeful sci-fi of the 1950s and '60s, when everyone thought we'd all be on Venus and heading to work in our flying cars by Christmas. Optimism feels less in tune with modern times, to put it mildly – which is not to say it isn't welcome here. The sheer chutzpah of writing a book where the US, Russia, China, India and Japan all happily work together at the behest of scientific experts – to say nothing of creating a context wherein global warming is a good thing – is certainly a choice. Perhaps it can inspire by example.
The plot of this one is very exciting. Our narrator wakes up alone in a spaceship with no memory of where he is or how he got there; fortunately, he appears to be the world's most overqualified high school science teacher, so sorting it out is basically just a matter of running the right equations. And many of the most compelling beats in here are just that – following the science. It's wonderful to see science prioritised like this, although Weir's vibe is more ‘science cheerleader’ than hard sci-fi purist in the vein of Greg Bear or Alastair Reynolds.
The prose itself is the only thing that I found a little wearing. I'm not one of those people who hates all first-person present-tense narration on principle, but when, as here, it's used as a kind of excuse (why bother having a prose style when you can just write like someone's talking at you?), it does begin to grate on me after a while. I was especially thrown by some of Weir's coinages, like ‘astrophage’, which he can't decide is singular or plural, and sometimes appears as both in successive phrases (‘Astrophage lives in space. We could study them on Earth…’).
But don't let my nit-picking get in the way of sampling this admirable and very enjoyable story. It's genuinely great to see a book which makes such a point of putting its faith in science…even if its faith in humanity feels a little more aspirational....more
HOW D.H. LAWRENCE MIGHT WRITE ABOUT MAKING SOME TEA
She switched on the kettle and watched the water bestirring itself moodily. She watched as it roileHOW D.H. LAWRENCE MIGHT WRITE ABOUT MAKING SOME TEA
She switched on the kettle and watched the water bestirring itself moodily. She watched as it roiled, moodily turning, the roiling bubbles rising, rising, rising, even to very heaven. Would it never boil? No, never, never would it come to fruition; always she would be here, waiting, never to be satisfied. She felt her roiling spirit recoil in misery. Was it so hard to satisfy her soul? Was it so much to ask? Oh, she was weary. The water roiled higher, bestirred itself, the bubbles ran together. The masculine heat seared into the water's feminine essence, and something was born out of that commingling, something terrible. Yes – yes, she saw finally, the water would boil after all, it would reach consummation. Consummation was possible after all. Tea would come. It boiled, and the steam rushed out in a great scream of attainment, rushing to the infinite godhead. The water was boiled. And her womb was glad.
THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF RATING THIS BOOK
There are some three-star books that are ‘pretty good’. This is not one of them. Instead it's an aggregate of the fascinatingly brilliant and the excruciatingly awful.
Lawrence is blowing up the Victorian tradition here, getting rid of all the stereotyped characters and neat social commentary and replacing them with a grand vision of sexualised, spiritual communion with the universe. This is a worldview of passion, of soul-searching, of intense emotion, of heartfelt (if sometimes dubious) feminism. It feels like something completely new. And I love it for these things!
But my god. The intensity is so unrelenting that it is pretty much autoparodic (my opening paragraph almost wrote itself). There is no incident so small that it can’t prompt three paragraphs of anguished self-reflection or a hormonal flight of purple prose – and don't get me wrong, when this works, it's rather wonderful. Here's his description of some farmers and their sexy fields:
They felt the rush of the sap in spring, they knew the wave which cannot halt, but every year throws forward the seed to begetting, and, falling back, leaves the young-born on the earth. They knew the intercourse between heaven and earth, sunshine drawn into the breast and bowels, the rain sucked up in the daytime, nakedness that comes under the wind in autumn, showing the birds' nests no longer worth hiding. Their life and interrelations were such; feeling the pulse and body of the soil, that opened to their furrow for the grain, and became smooth and supple after their ploughing, and clung to their feet with a weight that pulled like desire, lying hard and unresponsive when the crops were to be shorn away. The young corn waved and was silken, and the lustre slid along the limbs of the men who saw it.
Yeah, go ahead and swoon: this is great stuff. But this is also page one. Like Michael Bolton singing ‘When A Man Loves A Woman’, Lawrence comes in at 11 and never comes back down. There can be no emotional crescendo because he never drops the intensity enough to build it up again.
THE THORNS AND THE PROSE
There are whole chapters in here where you find yourself craving a brief moment of conversation, a joke, a minor disagreement over a thruppenny bit – anything to relieve the endless descriptions of people gaping at the moon and thinking about the ‘unseen threshing of the night’ upon their souls. And that's if you're lucky. Just have a guess what Lawrence might be talking about here:
up, away from the horizontal earth, through twilight and dusk and the whole range of desire, through the swerving, the declination, ah, to the ecstasy, the touch, to the meeting and the consummation, the meeting, the clasp, the close embrace, the neutrality, the perfect, swooning consummation, the timeless ecstasy.
A lovers' reunion? Perhaps a nervous bride's wedding night? No. It's a description of the architecture of Lincoln cathedral. I lived in Lincoln for years and love that cathedral dearly, but even I don't want it written up like a letter to Penthouse.
You can see there Lawrence's tendency to repeat himself, circling back over words and ideas many times. He often writes a paragraph, then another paragraph coming at the same concept from a slightly different angle but using exactly the same vocabulary. It feels almost pathological at times; there is something obsessive-compulsive about his descriptive writing.
At times he simply repeats words in quick succession (‘an ashy desolation came over her. They were ashenly miserable’; or even ‘her hand closed more closely’). At other times a word seems to catch on his brain, and he can use almost nothing else. It's not clear whether it's a heavy-handed literary technique, or something more like a compulsion. In a description of two lovers walking out at night, Lawrence has got it in his head that it was pretty dark that night. He mentions ‘the profound darkness. The profound darkness was their universe’; ‘the darkness travelled massively along’; ‘the dark flame’; ‘the dark meadows’; ‘the dark figures’; ‘the darkness was inhabited’; ‘the strange darkness’; ‘the darkness in England’; ‘they worship it, really, the darkness’; ‘a voice out of the darkness’; ‘the hot, fecund darkness’.
Throughout a chapter, this might be a nice motif. But this is all from a single page! The effect is not just repetitive, it's borderline insane. And that ‘fecund’ in the last quote introduces a new motif, which emerges in counterpoint to the darkness: so on the next page we have ‘heavy with fecundity’, ‘the relenting softness of fecundity’, ‘the warm, fecund flow’, ‘one dark fecundity’ – the motifs are coming together again – ‘one fecund nucleus of the fluid darkness’.
I think the best you can say about this is that it's overwritten. It's certainly annoying when a writer reaches for a ponderous synonym just to avoid repeating themselves (something Martin Amis liked to make fun of in his criticism), but here we are at the other extreme.
THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL
The intensity of emotion is, in a way, the clue to Lawrence’s mission. He writes about the coming of modernity, the mechanisation of society, the institutionalisation of labour and education, but it's clear that those issues aren't really the things that excite him. The politics here is mostly a matter of conversation. (‘I hate democracy,’ as Ursula famously claims.)
But the scenes that really stick out in The Rainbow are not those political moments. What you remember is Anna dancing, naked and pregnant, in her room, or Ursula and Skrebensky on the beach at night under the full moon. Lawrence isn’t really interested in men at all, which I personally find quite refreshing and congenial. His world is a kind of gynarchy, peopled by women whose characterisation is, in some ways, rather limited, but whose struggles for independence and freedom are nevertheless inspiring and represent something new in English literature.
The interiority and intense emotion make this a great book to read as a teenager, and I don’t mean that in a derogatory way. I wish I’d read it then. But I read it now instead, and found the the ideas at play too often overpowered by the (roiling, fecund) execution....more
This earlyish Wodehouse is a kind of light comic version of Gangs of New York, with our eponymous hero taking control of a Woman's Weekly-style magaziThis earlyish Wodehouse is a kind of light comic version of Gangs of New York, with our eponymous hero taking control of a Woman's Weekly-style magazine and using it to run an investigative campaign against NYC social conditions.
Because Wodehouse is dealing with America, the satire is broader than it otherwise would be (Noo Yawk accents are laboriously transcribed); and because one of the aims is social comment, you do lose that sense of timelessness which is normally such a balm in Wodehouse's fiction.
So this is not yet the mature Wodehouse, but there are still many flashes of his particular genius in here. And it's impossible not to love a writer who, when he wishes to intimate that a character tends to get up late, will write such a magisterial sentence as, ‘Larks who rose in his neighbourhood, rose alone.’...more
I was craving some science fiction, and managed to find this somewhere near the bottom of my to-be-read pile. No idea when or where I acquired it. LikI was craving some science fiction, and managed to find this somewhere near the bottom of my to-be-read pile. No idea when or where I acquired it. Like a lot of the best sci-fi, it's essentially a piece of applied philosophy – only more so, since Olaf Stapledon was actually a doctor of philosophy, and used his writing to play with speculative ideas about human development. (Later in life, he claimed never to have heard of ‘science fiction’, and seemed surprised that he was considered a giant of the genre.)
This one is often referred to as the first superman story, though the title character does not fly and, as far as we can tell, wears his underpants inside his trousers. John is, rather, just much more intellectually advanced than the humans around him, and although he does develop certain psychic abilities in the course of the book, the real issues here are moral and developmental ones. Do people, seen from the vantage point of a higher life-form, have the capacity to develop healthily? And how much can or should such a Homo superior (a neat coinage later borrowed by the Marvel writers) care about the individual well-being of ordinary humans?
John's assessments of humanity are as wearily recognisable today as ever:
‘…nearly all minds are damnably unhealthy, and so they must have something to hate. Mostly, they just hate their neighbours or their wives or husbands or parents or children. But they get a much more exalted sort of excitement by hating foreigners. A nation, after all, is just a society for hating foreigners, a sort of super-hate-club.’
And such cynicism allows him to make some pretty accurate predictions:
‘This sort of thing will spread. I'd bet my boots that in a few years there'll be a tremendous anti-lift movement all over Europe, inspired partly by fear and hate, partly by that vague, fumbling suspicion that there's something all wrong with scientific culture. It's more than an intellectual suspicion. It's a certainty of the bowels, call it a sort of brute-blind religious hunger. Didn't you feel the beginnings of it in Germany last year when we were there? A deep, still-unconscious revulsion from mechanism, and from rationality, and from democracy, and from sanity. That's it, a confused craving to be mad, possessed in some way. Just the thing for the well-to-do haters to use for their own ends. That's what's going to get Europe.’
Not, perhaps, a completely wild call in 1935 when the Nazis were already running Germany, but it's alarming to see how well it applies to the current moment, too.
Stapledon was a conscientious objector during the First World War and a lifelong pacifist. His skills here are not in the plot or story, but in the play of ideas – and, dispiritingly perhaps, there's still plenty to learn....more
Er sagte, er habe gehört, daß die Kriege der Zukunft um Wasser geführt würden. Und Cohen erwiderte, nein, die Kriege der Zukunft würden aus Langweile
Er sagte, er habe gehört, daß die Kriege der Zukunft um Wasser geführt würden. Und Cohen erwiderte, nein, die Kriege der Zukunft würden aus Langweile geführt werden.
He said he'd heard that the wars of the future would be fought over water. And Cohen replied no, the wars of the future would be fought out of boredom.
Some years ago I went to a remote part of the Norwegian coast to have a look round a gigantic datacentre that someone had built in an abandoned mine. They reckoned it was ‘Europe's greenest datacentre’, with the equipment naturally cooled by freshwater from the fjords; a mile underground, it was a sight that was nothing like anything in the surface world. Just gallery after vast, rock-hewn gallery filled with thousands of electrical cabinets, holding the world's memories, photographs, PowerPoints, status updates, Fortnite save files, unfinished novels, action plans, calendar invites, CVs and thirst traps.
There's something overwhelming about the thought. I mention it because a pivotal scene in Christian Kracht's new novel takes place somewhere similar – in a vast hall within the Green Mountain Data Center (not the same one I went to, but a real place nearby). For Kracht it's emblematic of the themes he is building up here, of some struggle between the chaos of life, and the neat ordering of it. And it's the point where the two worlds of his novel collapse into one another.
The two strands of this book are set in very different worlds, but they are both built from the same materials. One takes place in the Orkney Islands and Norway, and concerns interior design and aesthetics; the other appears to be happening in a pre-industrial fantasy realm of ice and snow. But in both cases we are working with elemental forces: water, stone, whiteness, a stripping-down of reality into something more fundamental and mythic.
The way these two narratives are cut together is a simple enough stylistic trick, but it's surprisingly effective, and I found myself very involved with this novel on the level of sheer storytelling. Paul, our protagonist, is deeply Swiss: calm, practical, undemonstrative, a stoic from a Max Frisch book. We hear about what he does and says, but almost never what he thinks or feels. And I've rarely been more taken by a fictional character than I was by Ildr, the precocious nine-year-old girl who inhabits the novel's strange plane of unreality.
Reading in a foreign language, as Jhumpa Lahiri has remarked, forces you to be a close reader. And I like that discipline; it's my favourite way to read books. With my nose to the page, the word I saw recurring again and again here was the unassuming adjective (or adverb) vorsichtig ‘careful, deliberate’. It came up so often that I found myself remembering Will Self's thought experiment about reducing every novel down to a single word. There is certainly something infinitely careful and deliberate about Kracht's writing here, in which every element and throwaway reference is recycled and mutated as it moves from one world to another.
It may be that there are important things Kracht wishes to say with all this, but for me the pleasure was all in seeing the creative act laid bare: the raw elements of reality, and the transubstantiation into that other world, a world which (like Alan Moore's Immateria) is all at once dream, afterlife, and pure creative imagination. Somewhere in Scandinavia, a datacentre just got a little happier. ...more
It took me some time to adjust to the rhythms of this one, but when I did I found it a strange and powerful experience. We are on the South Island of It took me some time to adjust to the rhythms of this one, but when I did I found it a strange and powerful experience. We are on the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand, in a world of sparse community, spiritual undertones, and a Maori-inflected natural world: manuka, weka, pakihi, kumara, huhu, katipo. The main characters have the stark outlines of tarot cards or symbolic figures (a boy with no voice; a woman who lives alone in a ruined tower), yet they are made deeply and feelingly human.
There's a lot of pain in here, and the characters often behave badly – in one particular case, unforgivably badly, I think. But the author does not ask for forgiveness. It's a wonderfully unjudgemental narrative: she shows people who are broken, and who are destructive, and she shows that this does not preclude healing, or community, or love. There's something very unusual and beautiful in that, even if you can't accept it (and I think there are serious concerns to be had about how much we should accept it).
The central protagonist, ‘Kerewin Holmes’, I assume to be a fictionalised version of Keri Hulme, the author. She's a very distinctive character, completely unlike the ‘heroine’ of any comparable novel. A pipe-smoking, whisky-drinking aikido master, she is utterly self-reliant – strong, capable, polysyllabic, artistically prolific, ‘Hard and taut, someone of the past or future, an androgyne’. Sexuality not only plays no part in her motivations, it is completely removed from her character: indeed I would say this is the most complex and thoughtful portrayal of asexuality I know in literature.
“I spent a considerable amount of time when I was, o, adolescent, wondering why I was different, whether there were other people like me. Why, when everyone else was fascinated by their developing sexual nature, I couldn't give a damn. I've never been attracted to men. Or women. Or anything else. It's difficult to explain, and nobody has ever believed it when I have tried to explain, but while I have an apparently normal female body, I don't have any sexual urge or appetite. I think I am a neuter.”
It's fascinating to see Hulme carving out the language to describe this in 1983; she even posits a ‘neuter personal pronoun’, ‘ve/ver/vis’. And it means that any ‘happy ending’ cannot simply be a lazy lovers' reunion, but instead must be a much more complicated and interesting kind of ‘commensality’ (as Kerewin calls it in the book), where people come together in bonds of family and friendship.
Hulme's prose is dense, and at times allusive; she slips in and out of internal monologue, hops between tenses for stylistic effect, and frequently breaks out into Maori. (Hulme had only one Maori great-grandparent, but considered herself Maori.) It's a curious and worthwhile novel – the only one Hulme finished, it was published by a New Zealand feminist collective and promptly won the Booker Prize in 1985, the first Kiwi novel to do so. I'm happy I finally read it, not least because I'm pretty sure they can revoke my New Zealand passport if I haven't....more
We were in the high-society resort town of Gstaad recently for a literary festival, where I was trying to sell a book I had written. It's a pretty plaWe were in the high-society resort town of Gstaad recently for a literary festival, where I was trying to sell a book I had written. It's a pretty place, Gstaad – snow-covered chalets in a valley surrounded by Alpine peaks, yellow lights that twinkle in the evening as though it's permanently Christmas. But the cute little shops, when you get closer, turn out to be Prada boutiques and anonymous private banks.
We were staying, extravagantly, in a luxury hotel, where we'd been upgraded to the royal suite after Hannah told them that it was our twentieth wedding anniversary, which it wasn't. The rooms went on and on – big open fire, huge living room, vast balcony, a bathroom where the bath had already been drawn and filled with rose petals. Complimentary champagne. A set of very uncomplimentary top-end liqueurs on a sideboard. I checked the price of the tequila: CHF 645.
‘What the hell,’ I said, walking from room to room. ‘I feel like we should be getting a couple of girls and some cocaine, don't you?’
‘The concierge can probably organise that for us in a place like this,’ Hannah breathed.
‘True, but if the tequila is over six hundred francs…’
And one of the chalets our balcony looked out on was the one where, if this book is to be believed, Christian Kracht spent much of his childhood. It formerly belonged to the Aga Khan; Mohammed al-Fayed lived opposite. It's that kind of place. It's beautiful, but there is a sickly feeling in the back of your throat the whole time, like when you've eaten too much rich food. It's designed for superwealthy foreigners; the locals have long since cashed out.
And a peculiar kind of people had sprung up here in the last sixty years: essentially coarse, aloof mountain farmers whose minute plots of land were suddenly worth hundreds of millions of francs, and these fantastic prices depended upon which oligarchs showed up to ski in that particular season. It had become a valley of absurdities, my homeland.
My favourite part of Eurotrash, a wonderfully mean-spirited and witty piece of autofiction, is the way it addresses Kracht's dubious Swissness so directly, and with such hilariously bad grace. Despite the fact that he is probably the most important Swiss writer of his generation, he is often not really accepted in his ‘homeland’, where people prefer to think of him as at least half German. I've been to more than one bookshop which refuses to carry him on the Schweizer Literatur shelf.
Which only adds to the glee of this angry travelogue from Zurich to Geneva, in which Kracht refuses to sugarcoat his assessments: Geneva is a ‘dreadful, phony, ice-cold Protestant city, full of poseurs and braggarts and bean counters’, Zurich a ‘city of moneygrubbing middle management and depressing hustlers and reserve lieutenants’, while the Bernese are castigated for their ‘rustic deviousness’, their ‘slightly protruding lower jaws’ and their ‘ossified insistence on their own provinciality’.
The escalating fury with which he returns to this theme again and again is very funny – but, as often with Kracht, there is a seriousness behind it all. However one-sided, there is also something unanswerable and devastating about his conclusions:
And the food in Switzerland, which always tasted so much better than it did elsewhere? It was manufactured by child slaves who added drugs from the Nestlé company so that people enjoyed eating it and did as they were told and remained good Swiss. The Swiss would all eat their Soylent Green and go to work and go to sleep and wake up the following day, and absolutely nothing would happen. There was no music and no films and no literature; there was nothing whatsoever in Switzerland except that Swiss longing for more banal luxury, the desire for sushi and colorful sneakers and Porsche Cayennes and the construction of further gigantic home improvement centers in the sprawling Agglos.
Wow. In Eurotrash, the ‘very direct link between art and money’ that Kracht inherited from his family is seen as a kind of numbing pollution which, writ large, Switzerland epitomises. From his position of privileged guilt, he sees wealth as something unclean: he talks of his family's ‘filthy Swiss francs’, while his octogenarian mother in this book is associated with the two bags that are always with her, one full of hundreds of thousands of francs in banknotes, and the other a colostomy bag full of shit. Look, no one said it was subtle.
Kracht pokes fun at himself in here for his reputation of blaming everything ‘on Switzerland, the Nazis, and the Second World War’, but that is indeed the sense you get of why there is so much anger simmering under the action here, and why the descriptions of Swiss luxury are contrasted with moody ruminations on his grandfather's unrepentant Nazism. It is not just that Kracht seems to feel that Switzerland was a frivolous resort for wealthy Germans of his parents' and grandparents' generation, but more that he feels it was a kind of denial – an escapism state, one that allows people to ignore the injustices and miseries upon which their world is founded.
In his early career Kracht was spoken of as a kind of Germanophone Brett Easton Ellis, but I don't see it, myself – Ellis's amoral, ahistorical glossiness is completely alien to Kracht's approach. He is more like Houellebecq or, in a British context, Martin Amis (Eurotrash's ‘Christian Kracht’ narrator reminded me of the self-insert in London Fields, and they share similar historical obsessions). There is also an intriguing reference here to Graham Greene's largely forgotten Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party; Goodreads friend and podcaster Meike has recently published a book-length study of Eurotrash and its relation to another Greene novel, Travels With My Aunt.
When I was having my literary lunch in Gstaad, I was seated next to a friendly young woman with sharp cheekbones, expensive teeth and a glassy international non-accent. I asked her if she was a writer: not really, she said, she made pencils; but could I recommend some good books to read? ‘Do you know who that was?’ Hannah asked me afterwards.
‘She's called Vicky,’ I said, ‘she makes pencils or something.’
‘That's Lady Victoria, Countess von Faber-Castell. She's sponsoring the whole festival.’
‘Oh my god. I offered to lend her a fiver to get a programme.’
If only I had read Eurotrash then, it would have been the perfect recommendation....more
I touched down in Montreal in a howling snowstorm the same day that (unbeknownst to me, fortunately) another plane was crashing upside-down into ToronI touched down in Montreal in a howling snowstorm the same day that (unbeknownst to me, fortunately) another plane was crashing upside-down into Toronto Pearson. We sat on the runway for fifteen minutes while snow-plows cleared the gate, though this felt inconsequential after the delays I'd had, which had turned an eight-hour direct flight into a twenty-four-hour extravaganza involving a ten-hour layover in Brussels. It's not possible to survive on waffles and good beer for that long. I tried.
What this meant was that the slim book I had brought for the flight was exhausted almost immediately, and by the time I reached my destination I had read the in-flight emergency card thirty times. I was desperate for reading material. ‘What brings you to Canada, eh?’ they asked me at passport control. ‘I'm looking for a decent bookstore,’ I confided hopefully.
The drive to the hotel was more of a controlled skid. After checking in, I immediately ventured back out to find books. It was that or knuckle down to the inevitable hotel Book of Mormon. It was -15°C and I quickly realised that I was woefully ill-equipped for the conditions. I had brought a beanie. I had not brought crampons. The bookshop I found was only a couple of blocks away (Indigo, it's called) but it still took about twenty minutes, most of them spent getting back up again.
And the first book I laid my hands on, after sliding through this hallowed doorway on all fours, was Mortdecai Richler's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. I may have blacked out, but I think I held it aloft like Indiana Jones seizing an ancient artefact.
And perhaps this is appropriate, because in many ways this book offers a perfect artefact of Montreal's Jewish community around St Urbain Street in the 1950s. In the circumstances in which I came upon it, I suppose any book would have impressed me, but certainly this one did. It's presented as a kind of social satire, told mostly in dialogue, of the lives that came out of the Montreal ghetto; but beneath the frothy comedy and the Yiddish zingers, the book has a core that is steely-hard and cold, almost cruel.
Its central character – taciturn, clever and amoral – is an unforgettable antihero, who you root for even while being appalled by. If you're travelling to Canada yourself, this is a really good way into a particular part of the country's culture and history, and I can heartily recommend it as a book for your journey. But…maybe take a couple of others as back-up. Just in case....more
I'm always drawn to books about language and translation, and this is one of the more heartening examples, with a great hook and a lot of insights intI'm always drawn to books about language and translation, and this is one of the more heartening examples, with a great hook and a lot of insights into British-Pakistani life – even if it never quite lives up to its high-concept potential.
We follow Anisa, an Urdu translator in London who uncovers (without, it has to be said, much difficulty) the existence of a secretive ‘Centre’, where an elite few can gain complete fluency in any foreign language in just ten days…but at a sinister cost. Well, I thought to myself, it would have to be a very sinister cost. And without giving anything away, I can confirm that I would 100 percent go through with everything in this book if it would let me hobnob in Arabic or read Turgenev in the original.
And that's perhaps the biggest problem with The Centre – the revelation about what's really going on is neither surprising nor really off-putting enough to qualify as a sinister twist at all. Siddiqi presents her story in the shape of a thriller, but she seems less interested in the plot than in the underlying themes, and I don't blame her. The book's sensitivity to such things as cultural appropriation, intersectionality, classism, xenophobia, immigration and gender relations is sometimes eye-rollingly shallow, but sometimes, too, surprisingly profound: it runs through all levels of the text. Something is being said about how translation can function as a kind of chauvinism, and if it's not always clear what, precisely, Siddiqi wants to say about this, there is at least some pleasure in being given those raw ingredients and a little space to cook with them ourselves.
A flurry of references to people like Derrida and Carla Lonzi made me wonder if Siddiqi has read Edward Said, since I feel like a lot of the principles of this line of thinking have already been well worked through. But in any case, I'd much rather have this kind of pragmatic English vagueness than, say, the strident certainty of a book like RF Kuang's Babel. And the Britishness of Siddiqi's voice, the rhythms of London existence, trains to Tunbridge Wells, cross-currents back and forth between the UK and South Asia, the vocabulary clustered with goras and keema and lenghas and shaadis – all of this was very congenial to me, and made reading it a delightful exercise in homesickness....more
One of the flabbier entries in the Slough House series, this relies on what by now seems to be a formula in Herron's plotting (there are some terrorisOne of the flabbier entries in the Slough House series, this relies on what by now seems to be a formula in Herron's plotting (there are some terrorists, the slow horses flail around, they accidentally save the day, it turns out to be an inside job, there is a government cover-up, Lamb does a fart) as well as in his writing (cross-cutting exhaustingly between different viewpoints of a single brief incident).
The plots of these books are cartoonishly unrealistic, and tend to substitute blanket cynicism for any real insight into how things work. (It's fascinating to compare Herron's plots with those of Will Smith and his team for the excellent Apple TV series, which is often obliged to rearrange things extensively in order to make sense.) This is one reason why I find the comparisons with Le Carré so baffling; another is that Le Carré was a genuine prose stylist, whereas Herron can be clumsy. He seems confused by the difference between the simple past and the past participle:
…evenings had followed afternoons had followed mornings, and during none of them had she drank.
Seeing mistakes like this in a book that's already on its twenty-third edition just makes me feel depressed about publishing (not to mention literacy). Still, what Herron is very good at is character (Jackson Lamb remains a superb creation, and every page he's on is a treat) and comic writing: there are still plenty of one-liners and comebacks in here that made me smile with appreciation. On the whole, though, this one felt a bit like it was assembled to order....more
Now don't get any ideas from the title – this isn't, I'm afraid, a book examining shibari and other esoteric forms of BDSM. Though in a sense, dominatNow don't get any ideas from the title – this isn't, I'm afraid, a book examining shibari and other esoteric forms of BDSM. Though in a sense, domination and submission are exactly the point here. It's life seen as a tussle between gigantic competing forces of desire, repulsion, duty and contingency, where some wield great power and others can only obey.
This is, by Maugham's own admission, a very autobiographical novel, with our hero Philip's clubfoot standing in for Maugham's own crippling stammer. It's a big book – seven hundred pages – and the first half is a fairly standard Bildungsroman, where we see Philip growing up, going to school, and trying to decide what he wants to be in life. It's just so well done here that it's completely compelling, even though you've read similar stories a hundred times before; and Philip is nothing if not a consummate reader:
Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world every day a source of bitter disappointment.
He comes back to this subject later on:
‘When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me; I've got out of the book all that's any use to me, and I can't get anything more if I read it a dozen times. You see, it seems to me, one's like a closed bud, and most of what one reads and does has no effect at all; but there are certain things that have a peculiar significance for one, and they open a petal; and the petals open one by one, and at last the flower is there.’
And there are certainly some passages in Of Human Bondage that were like this for me: the long section where Philip realises he no longer believes in god, for one. It's characteristic of Maugham's writing that even here, he does not allow Philip's sudden atheism to stand as a breakthrough, but immediately undercuts his hero:
He was surprised at himself because he ceased to believe so easily, and, not knowing that he felt as he did on account of the subtle workings of his inmost nature, he ascribed the certainty he had reached to his own cleverness.
You can see the narrative voice that Maugham is working with – a close but omniscient third-person view, of the kind that's seen by modern writers as faintly old-fashioned and earnest. But the effects that Maugham wrings from it are impressive. He can comment on the action with a full knowledge of his protagonist's naïveté, giving everything the most beautiful harmonics of irony and melancholy.
It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched, for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life.
I said that the first half of the book is a kind of Bildungsroman; what about the second half? Well, that focuses a little more closely on Philip's interactions with one person in particular, a shopgirl called Mildred with whom he has a long, degrading and ruinously obsessive relationship. I found this part of the novel slightly less gripping than the first half, mainly because I never really understood Mildred's appeal. (Which is the whole point: people in this book are slaves to emotions they don't understand and can't control.) To me Mildred felt very much like a translated version of a particular kind of gay relationship from Maugham's own life, and Mildred and Philip bear more than a passing resemblance to Albertine and Proust (Maugham's almost exact contemporary).
The word ‘philosophy’ is an overused one nowadays (‘Never have caffeine after noon, that's my philosophy’), but Of Human Bondage is a novel that genuinely sets out a philosophy of life – one which recognises life's lack of meaning, but which embraces that meaninglessness and finds real beauty and freedom in it. That goes especially for those lives which are not going according to plan.
There was one pattern, the most obvious, perfect, and beautiful, in which a man was born, grew to manhood, married, produced children, toiled for his bread, and died; but there were others, intricate and wonderful, in which happiness did not enter and in which success was not attempted; and in them might be discovered a more troubling grace.
Discovering or evoking this ‘troubling grace’ is, in a sense, the point of the book, and the reason it's so big is to allow it to emerge as organically as possible. I was very affected by it.
I have to finish on a slight rant – the number of typographical errors in this edition, from Vintage Classics, is incredible. Some are fairly apparent (‘he’ for ‘she’; misspelled words; punctuation printed on the wrong line), but others are just plausible enough to be confusing. The phrase ‘he had ready many descriptions’ almost makes sense in context; it's only on checking with other editions that you can confirm it should be ‘he had read many descriptions’. For a major publisher, working with an established text that's a hundred years old, this is inexcusable really....more
The dugai can flap their jangs as much as they like, Pretty Mary had reported him saying, but us mob got the law o
Get a load of the lingo in this one:
The dugai can flap their jangs as much as they like, Pretty Mary had reported him saying, but us mob got the law of the land, granddaughter, and that's that. We's in everything: the jagun, the trees, the animals, the bulloon. It's all us, and we's it too. And don't let the dugai tell ya different. They savages, remember.
The basic set-up here is as old as they come: someone comes back to their old hometown because of the illness and death of a parent, and reawakens a lot of buried family tensions and traumas. Every now and then, though, someone makes these well-worn plots feel fresh and interesting, and this is one of those times.
We're in Bunjalung country, around the top end of New South Wales, and the family here is full to bursting of secrets, family myths, intergenerational wrongdoing, and constant struggles around race, identity, sexuality and money. Our heroine, Kerry Salter, is a joy: a tough gay girl on a Harley-Davidson who finds herself unexpectedly feeling some new feelings for a guy – a white guy, at that – who is drawn into the orbit of their family. The message here again and again is that nothing – not sex, race, family or reputation – is simple. Everything is messy. Embrace it.
Mostly, though, I loved this because of the beautifully realised narrative voice, a flexible and often hilarious Aboriginal English full of not just Australianisms (people here are knocking back UDLs and yelling things like, ‘Don't come the raw prawn with me, cunt’) but also a lot of words lifted straight from Bundjalung which Lucashenko does not translate; some terms become clear through repetition and context, others remain appealingly opaque. This is someone else's world, and though you're invited in, no one's going to lead you round by the hand.
I thought it was a total delight, and a powerful book underneath the black humour. It's highlighting a slice of Australian life that doesn't get much attention, and doing it with such insider confidence and flair....more
If you only read one twentieth-century novel about a hotel on Lake Geneva just outside Lausanne…well, it should probably be Anita Brookner's Hotel du If you only read one twentieth-century novel about a hotel on Lake Geneva just outside Lausanne…well, it should probably be Anita Brookner's Hotel du Lac. If you read two, though! Then this is a quite a good choice as the second one.
I can't say it ever entirely grabbed me, to be honest. The focus here is on the fine social distinctions between the various inhabitants of the Hotel Swiss-Touring – the politenesses and improprieties that govern European interpersonal life in the mid-twentieth century. Unlike in Brookner's novel, the hotel here is not a luxury resort for the international jet-set, but something much more down-at-heel – a ‘fourth-class’ lodging, with residents from all points on the social scale.
Though not published until the 1970s, it is set (and the writing of it was begun) in the early '50s. Often, there is a sense that behind the conversations of the main cast, something is being said about the aftermath of the war: there are war profiteers, people trying to move their money away from collapsing empires, paperless vagabonds, nervous conversations about the rise of Communism and the imminence of a Russian invasion.
In the end, though, these are not developed enough to be more than just hints. The book's original title was Mrs Trollope and Madame Blaise, and this might have helped me understand earlier on that we were to pay special attention to these two characters; as it is, we do indeed see the focus narrow on them, but we're not sure why we should care about them in particular. Nevertheless Stead's writing is constantly intelligent, full of close observations, and laced with a dry wit....more
Emmy Hennings is one of the more mysterious figures of cultural history: a founding Dadaist, she came to Zurich during the First World War from a backEmmy Hennings is one of the more mysterious figures of cultural history: a founding Dadaist, she came to Zurich during the First World War from a background of peripatetic acting, hawking, mystical thinking, morphine use, and survival sex work. This novel, which is based on those days wandering starving around Germany, was a colossal hit when it was first published, but forgotten after the war, and not really rediscovered until feminist literary historians got hold of it in the 1990s.
Lucky they did. With no chapters and no concession to conventional ideas of plot or character development, it still feels experimental, and was much more so when it came out in 1920. Its narrator, Dagny (a pseudonym Hennings used in real life), evokes a world of hostess bars, cheap cabarets, vaudeville performances, brothels and abject poverty, where her finances allow her to give herself ‘one bed night for every two or three park nights’.
Compared to more modern treatments of this sort, what's especially notable here is Hennings's tone: she's not painting herself as cynical, edgy, a worldly-wise outsider. Instead she comes across as perennially open, hopeful, a spiritually questing naïf. Her close descriptions of how an encounter in a café can lead to something transactional, or how working as a waitress can shade organically into prostitution, are fascinating purely on a sociohistorical level; some of her comments on sex work sound like the sort of things said more recently by people like Virginie Despentes:
If I satisfy some passing fellow for two marks fifty, I have the same right to speak about love as the wife who longingly expects her husband for lunch. I need that fellow as much as she needs hers. Long for him just as much. Or more. More.
Her relationship with this work is fascinatingly nuanced. At times – though rarely – she feels desire of her own (‘I felt something like arousal ripple down my hips and loins, and had to lower my eyes’); but mostly, she is assiduous in pointing out how the one-sidedness of such relationships (naturally enough) militates against her sharing in the emotions of it all.
I protest and insist I did not invent lust. Its inventor, so ingenious and perfidious, can't have been female. By her nature, woman is no inventor. I've had to endure the most acute pain for lust's sake. Lust that I don't share means pain and suffering. Strictly speaking, the fact that I despise that accursed lust, that I deep down despise it – that is, I believe, the reason I am despised.
This is quite incisive. There is also an unexpected fluidity in sex and gender here that feels modern: ‘You're like a boy, but you're a girl,’ someone says to her, and Dagny herself claims, ‘I am and will always be both male and female.’ ‘Passions can move in almost any direction,’ she says reassuringly to a woman who makes a pass at her.
The dada-ness of Branded is open to discussion. It is more superficially coherent than more ‘central’ works of dada writing, but let's not gatekeep it too much: its ethos, of a world succumbing to machinery, evil impulses and spiritual emptiness, is pure dada projected backwards into the pre-War world. Dream sequences, fantasies, visions and moments of magic realism show an impatience with the constraints of naturalistic prose. At times, indeed, it reads almost like a dada manifesto, especially in her comments on the crassness of popular art:
Why is it always the shallowest stuff that makes the most money? It should be withheld from audiences, who instead should be offered something really good. Appetite comes with eating, does it not?
It's extremely welcome to have this English edition from Katharina Rout, whose translation is solid enough, if sometimes bouncing around a bit too much in register. She comes into her own, though, in a very well researched introduction, which gives a great précis of Hennings's life, as well as in the book's ‘contextual materials’, which include extracts from other contemporary ‘prostitution novels’, religious texts, works of social research, and some fantastic photos.
Hopefully this will help bring Hennings back to the centre of discussions about the history of rebel art and the counterculture, where she belongs. ‘If the world wants to burn, I will drop, a small burst of fire, into a sea of flames,’ she writes, like an early punk-bodhisattva. ‘Can't help but burn myself up.’...more
This one was sent to me by the publisher, with the comment that they thought it might appeal to me. It's an illustrated erotic fairytale loosel[image]
This one was sent to me by the publisher, with the comment that they thought it might appeal to me. It's an illustrated erotic fairytale loosely based on Pinocchio, which does make me wonder what kind of impression I'm putting out into the world. I liked it though, so I guess they nailed it.
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In this version of the story, the puppet is a doll called Querida, whom the puppeteer puts into a variety of erotic poses and situations before she develops her own consciousness and autonomy and starts to take control of her existence. Familiar elements – the blue-haired fairy, the snail, the tricksy fox and cat – reappear here in strange (and generally horny) new guises, in the service of a fable about women's sexual empowerment, very loosely interpreted.
The writing is sensuous and dreamlike, even a little coy, although it's hard to make it out sometimes. It was originally written in Spanish by Carlos Atanes, then translated into German by the publishers, and apparently re-translated into English (by a nameless translator) for the edition I was sent. The English is not always the most fluent.
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The dreamy fairytale episodes are perfectly fine for this kind of project, but the real draw is the mannered, angular artwork of Jan van Rijn, which is excellent. The book seems to exist in multiple versions: a smaller one in black-and-white, and a larger coffee-table hardback in full colour. You lose a lot by shrinking the pictures down and desaturating them, although some of the art in the colour version seems to be censored (with strategically placed flowers) where the black-and-white versions are not, so it's a bit of a strange situation.
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I was reminded of a few comparable things; one is Nicole Claveloux's brilliant Contes de la fève et du gland, where again the illustrations are the main selling-point; the other, from the point of view of the prose, is Aline Reyes's adult choose-your-own-adventure book, Derrière la porte. (I guess the French are the masters of this kind of thing.) For me this didn't quite live up to those examples, but it's nevertheless a fascinating project that has made me very curious about the little publishing house that put it out.
An incredible portrait of rural Orkney life in the mid-twentieth century, which somehow – in the way of all great art – turns its hyper-specificity inAn incredible portrait of rural Orkney life in the mid-twentieth century, which somehow – in the way of all great art – turns its hyper-specificity into something universal.
A poet's first novel, this reminded me quite a lot of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood. It is, similarly, first and foremost a loving sketch of a community, of which over the course of the novel we get to know almost every member. The cast list can seem bit daunting at first, but the pay-off is considerable.
And like Thomas, Brown takes a poet's care over word-choice, metaphor, imagery. The book is very beautifully written and free from any cliché – a refined form, perhaps, of the islanders' own speech, which is said to be ‘slow and wondering, like water lapping among stones’. Brown is equally adept at economic precision (‘cadences of piercing melancholy and valour: a bagpipe’) as at long, dreamy passages of descriptive colour:
In the endless bestiary of the weather the unicorns of cloud are littered far west in the Atlantic; the sun their sire, the sea their dame. Swiftly they hatch and flourish. They travel eastwards, a grey silent stampeding herd. Their shining hooves beat over the Orkneys and on out into the North Sea. Sometimes it takes days for that migration to pass. But many are torn on the crags and hills, and spill their precious ichor on the farm-lands. Crofters wake to cornfields and pastures extravagantly jewelled.
The ‘sinister military-industrial project’ which is misleadingly mentioned on the back cover does not actually impose until the final chapter, whereupon the novel takes on a slightly different tone (somewhat reminiscent of Halldór Laxness's The Atom Station). But for Brown this is used to make a specific point – not just about the destructiveness of modern life, but about its ultimate transience.
The setting of Hellya is a fictional island, which Brown had used in his poetry before he came to write this novel – and the village of Greenvoe itself borrows elements of his native Stromness, but is smaller and more rural. It is deliberately abstracted and symbolic. The Neolithic stone circles and cairns that must once have crowded the British Isles are still a very prominent part of the modern Orkney landscape, and so the past is much more present in these little islands than it is elsewhere. One character recites Orkney history aloud to drinkers in the local pub; the local ferryman reads the Orkneyinga Saga. Brown describes is as ‘a haunted island’.
For this writer, one feels, ‘traditional’ community life is valuable not for the sake of conservatism, but because of its connections with the past – and, indeed, with the future, for as the ending of the book makes clear, while the modern world can be stupid and destructive, it too is also a temporary thing. You're left with a sense of circularity and healing, and of pleasure at being in such good company....more