Within something like 14 pages, I messaged Alan and told him to read it. Hachemi starts this thin book with some great metafiction, 76th book of 2024.
Within something like 14 pages, I messaged Alan and told him to read it. Hachemi starts this thin book with some great metafiction, ideas on fiction/short stories, on "his" hate of Hemingway, for example, among other things. I was quoting every few lines.
Bolaño, for example - reading Bolaño being one of the unwritten commandments - declared that 'a short-story writer should be brave' and drive in headfirst. Piglia claimed his lifestyle defined his literary style. Augusto Monterroso urged young writers to 'make the most of every disadvantage, whether insomnia, imprisonment or poverty; the first gave us Baudelaire, the second Silvio Pellico, and the third all your writer friends; avoid sleeping like Homer, living easily like Byron, or making as much money as Bloy.'
And further yet some advice taken from a number of writers,
I. A short-story writer should be brave. Drop everything and dive in headfirst.
II. Make the most of every disadvantage, whether insomnia, imprisonment or poverty; the first gave us Baudelaire, the second Silvio Pellico, and the third all your writer friends; avoid sleeping like Homer, living easily like Byron, or making as much money as Bloy.
III. Remember that writing isn’t for cowards, but also that being brave isn’t the same as not feeling afraid; being brave is feeling afraid and sticking it out, taking charge, going all in.
IV. Don’t start writing poetry unless you’ve opened your eyes underwater, unless you’ve screamed underwater with your eyes wide open. Also, don’t start writing poetry unless you’ve burned your fingers, unless you’ve put them under the hot water tap and said, ‘Ahhh! This is much better than not getting burned at all.’
V. Be in love with your own life.
VI. What sets a novelist apart is having a unique worldview as well as something to say about it. So try living a little first. Not just in books or in bars, but out there, in real life. Wait until you’ve been scarred by the world, until it has left its mark.
VII. Try living abroad.
VIII. You’ve got to fuck a great many women / beautiful women / […] / drink more and more beer / […] attend the racetrack at least once.
IX. You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner.
X. People in a novel, not skilfully constructed characters, must be projected from the writer’s assimilated experience, from his knowledge, from his head, from his heart and from all there is of him.
The writers behind this advice – in strict disorder – are: Javier Cercas, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Jack Kerouac, Ernest Hemingway, Paul Auster, Roberto Bolaño, Charles Bukowski, Hernán Casciari, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Augusto Monterroso. (Exercise: draw a line between each author and his advice.)
Even the chapter titles are literary. Chapter IV is called 'A Chronicle of a Death Foretold' and Chapter VII is called 'Slaughterhouse-Five'.
But after Munir starts the 'story', we realise the book is about capitalism, exploitation (namely of animals for pleasure and money), veganism, and fiction itself, of course. I adored the first half and Hachemi's voice. I liked the rest of the book but not nearly as much. That said, I'm a fan, and will be following more of his translations when they hit the UK (presumably through Fitzcarraldo again, who also supply greedy me with Agustín Fernández Mallo translations). A love-letter to Latin American lit, Bolaño, who is named dropped often, as is Borges. At 114 pages, it's hard not to recommend it for what it's worth. Spanish-written fiction is overtaking Japanese lit as some of my favourite to read....more
I've been reading this for about three weeks, which is amazing as a book under 250 pages usually takes me 2-3 days. I felt, mostly, 77th book of 2024.
I've been reading this for about three weeks, which is amazing as a book under 250 pages usually takes me 2-3 days. I felt, mostly, apathetic about every story here. I like Enríquez, but I found most of these stories fairly similar in tone. At one point a character says a character's recent experience sounds like cheap horror flick and I thought the same about a few of the stories. I've got nothing against horror, but I just found these a bit corny at times. I liked the other collection of hers I've read well enough, so maybe I've been in the wrong mood for three weeks? Fans of her will probably enjoy this as it's much the same: demon children, lots of murder, ghosts, phantoms, etc., but this time with some strange disarming references too, like Game of Thrones quotes and talk of Funko bobbleheads. As always, thanks to Granta for sending me the ARC. ...more
I went in with low expectations, because these 'lost' novels and posthumous books, you know what you're getting. It's something unfi60th book of 2024.
I went in with low expectations, because these 'lost' novels and posthumous books, you know what you're getting. It's something unfinished or rejected; you do not find Márquez's new book has been published and believe it'll usurp One Hundred Years of Solitude (because few books do, even outside of Márquez novels). But, all things considered, I enjoyed this novella. I read it in one sitting on my morning commute to work and though I haven't necessarily thought about it since, I did get absorbed in my reading of it. It could have been much worse. Though, that said, I'm glad I didn't buy it and just borrowed it from the library....more
Mallo’s newest translation is a blend between his Nocilla Trilogy and his magnum opus, The Things We’ve Seen. This is the fifth nove29th book of 2024.
Mallo’s newest translation is a blend between his Nocilla Trilogy and his magnum opus, The Things We’ve Seen. This is the fifth novel of his I’ve read and I’ve come to agree with Chris Power who said, ‘There are certain writers whose work you turn to knowing you’ll find extraordinary things there. Borges is one of them, Bolaño another. Agustín Fernández Mallo has become one, too.’
And a lot of his power is at times imperceptible. The Book of All Loves is comprised of tiny conversation fragments (mostly abstract) and ‘types’ of love. Not your regular ideas of love, though. As the blurb says, they go ‘beyond the realm of relationships and into metaphysics, geology, linguistics, AI.’
The idea of a city empty of humans and abandoned to the elements is a long-standing feature of a wide range of mythologies. Couples build real cities — out of physical matter, out of their affection, out of singular, unrepeatable customs and rituals: a language of their own. The peculiarity of this universe they create is that it isn’t destroyed if they split up, but simply enters the condition of abandoned city, of a ruin consigned to run its course in some unspecified place. We do not know the exact mutations this city space undergoes, nor what form it ultimately takes, but what is certain is that, disconnected forever from all that is known, it is an emotional destination that nobody can ever go back to. Not even the people who built it — the former lovers — will get to walk its streets again. The city therefore becomes a literal utopia, the only true utopia there is, such is the disconnectedness but also the violence of his presence. And these things also mean that not even the present day political dispensation, which as we know yearns for utopias and yet always ends up bringing about dystopias instead, dares go anywhere near it. And it is then, in this abandoned city, that the possibility arises for those of us on the other side to imagine — to idealise — an eternal kind of love: the so-called romantic love that enthusiasts for impossible experiences have been cultivating for centuries, with no little success. But romantic love is not the only option. We can look at it in the following way: if it is true that information is neither created nor destroyed, only transformed, it is also possible to thin of this world created by the lovers, and now disconnected from our own, as a piece of lost information, a kind of information-love that we try in vain to recover on a daily basis. It is a disquieting thing to imagine this city of love, left alone, mutating, taking on new forms, adrift somewhere in the universe, but, at the same time, some gap must exist through which to introduce oneself, if only for brief seconds, to experience in real time the material and emotional information that, with nothing controlling it and as in a distorted mirror of what we once were, still reflects us in its streets. The key question, the one to undo what until now has been an unresolvable knot, would be the following: if in this city of lost love everything is information, what word will it bring? (Information love)
The Iranian poet Mohsen Emadi has written these two lines: 'Nobody remembers their birth/nobody comes back from death’—Augustine of Hippo stated that once dead we have no idea what our death was like: death is a moment after which we are no longer in death but after death, and therefore from that other side we can no longer see what was previously experienced. So, after death and as was the case when we were very small, we exist once more only in other people's memories, a personal history that is no longer personal. The strangest part being that it is in these two unknown poles of our lives that people most often tell us they love us. (Polar love)
As with his previous novels, Mallo’s occupation as a physicist as well as a writer means his narratives, his word choices and above all, his similes and metaphors, are so grounded in the cosmos, in giant universe-sized ideas. After reading through these bizarre ideas of love for 40 pages, we hit ‘Venice (I)’, where we go back before the ‘Great Blackout’ where the present day of the novel is set, and find a couple in Venice.
Mallo seems to build so much of his novel on images and recurring motifs, eventually colliding in strange and unpredictable ways. The recurring images here are the grooves in all things living and dead, a frozen leopard like in the Hemingway short story, a man in a blue suit, the curvature of a plane’s wing, Alexa, a ball made of vinyl records…
I was going to give it three-stars initially, because the long descriptions of metaphysical love, rarely seeming to connect to the everyday love of reality/human existence, and the strange ambling flashbacks in Venice, with the strange man, the feelings of forebodings, all came together a little jumbled. But, like with Bolaño, in the end I felt desolate, a little nervous, and unsure about what it all meant. That is the most exciting fiction to me. I love it when I finish a book and I feel unsure, unsettled, a little lost. It’s a horrible paradox: to read feeling frustrated, confused, even bored at times, and then to finish and feel all these emotions, but not know why! I was in the Palace Gardens just before going to work on my morning walk, under the trees, alive with birdsongs, when I finished and kept standing there for a moment trying to collect my thoughts. They’re still scattered....more
2.5. Cute. Felt a bit immature with all the literary namedropping, but it's about young love, so maybe that's the point. A weird b143rd book of 2023.
2.5. Cute. Felt a bit immature with all the literary namedropping, but it's about young love, so maybe that's the point. A weird book that plays with being a bit meta, intertextual, whilst also feeling contemporary and 'young'. It's fun while it lasts but it's forgettable....more
4.5. I'm giving this 5-stars because so many books have come close recently, and at this point, I'm holding them back for no real r148th book of 2023.
4.5. I'm giving this 5-stars because so many books have come close recently, and at this point, I'm holding them back for no real reason. This is a brilliant novel greatly inspired by one of my favourite writers, W.G. Sebald. And where imitators fall down, Mallo leans fully into his Sebald inspirations and even has a character dissecting The Rings of Saturn in the final part.
The book is split into three seemingly (at first) unconnected parts. In the first, a narrator very much like Mallo (as Sebald's narrators are very much like Sebald), visits an island called San Simón. Then he recounts his living in New York, meeting bizarre characters, finding a manuscript, etc. Recurring images crop up. The second book (first person again), is recounted by an American, Kurt Montana, who claims to have been the fourth astronaut on the moon. Things in his story don't add up but it becomes a further reflection on the things from the first book: WW2, 9/11, Brexit, and the strangeness of life. The final part, in full Sebald fashion, follows a woman (from the first book) doing a walking tour of the D-Day beaches in Normandy. At one point she describes being the mirror image of Sebald.
I couldn't put my finger on what the novel is 'about'. This is my fourth Mallo book after his Nocilla Trilogy. In the end, I think it's about a lot of things at once, but what struck me the most is its insistence about the dead (they never leave us), time itself (not as linear as we think), the mirrors and parallels in our lives (taking into account the light having to reach our eyes, our reflection in a mirror is delayed, though imperceptible to the human eye; with the vastness between the ocean, the final narrator is the delayed reflection of Sebald), and how interconnectedness never ends.
_________________
I've now read all of Fitzcarraldo's fiction publications from 2021. With this, the other titles that shouldn't be missed are Cohen's The Netanyahus, the final part of Fosse's Septology (meaning the septology as a whole), and Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob....more
2.5. You'll see some articles calling this a bona fide masterpiece but it isn't. One of those books reserved for the mad readers w119th book of 2023.
2.5. You'll see some articles calling this a bona fide masterpiece but it isn't. One of those books reserved for the mad readers who like to complete entire oeuvres. A sort of murder story with three first person narrators, all of whom sound too similar and just end up confusing things instead of deepening them. For newcomers to Bolano, it's worth starting somewhere later down the line....more
113th book of 2023. #19 with Alan, read a book set in South America (just about counts).
I've become a little Bolaño addicted the last few weeks, read113th book of 2023. #19 with Alan, read a book set in South America (just about counts).
I've become a little Bolaño addicted the last few weeks, reading lots of articles about him. Nazi Literature in the Americas is what sent his career flying in the Spanish-speaking world, and later, Bolaño's posthumous breakthrough into the English speaking world was called the biggest literary revelation since the discovery of W.G. Sebald. This is a strange, serious and darkly funny book (barely even a book); it is, quite simply, a catalogue of short biographies on a number of fictional writers who had direct links to the Nazis or invested interests. One writer remembers being held by Hitler as a child and that was, according to her short biography, the happiest she had ever been. Another writer has a Swastika tattooed on one of her butt-cheeks. There's no narrative arc, no connecting or reoccurring characters, it is simply a book of mini biographies of made-up writers. Why read it? It's somehow addictively readable. Some sentences are disturbing and in others, Bolaño is quite clearly having a laugh. The quote on the front of my book sums it up nicely, 'Lucid, insane, deadly serious, wildly playful, bibliomaniacal, and perversely imaginative.'
If you are desperate for some sort of narrative or connection, whatever it may be, Bolaño himself features in the final biography as the narrator. It instantly reminded me of the structure of another Chilean writer I respect, Benjamin Labatut. His novel, When We Cease to Understand the World is, in a similar fashion, a sort of collection of biographies (but this time of scientists) and in the final part, ends with him, the writer, featuring. Or at least a version of the writer. I can't help but wonder Labatut somehow launched himself from here....more
There is a word to describe someone losing their spouse, and a word for children who are left without parents. There is no word,
36th book of 2023.
There is a word to describe someone losing their spouse, and a word for children who are left without parents. There is no word, however, for a parent who loses their child. Unlike previous centuries in which child mortality was very high, it's not normal for this to occur in our time. It is something so feared, so unacceptable, that we have chosen not to name it.
3.5. I gave this four on finishing but I've dropped it to three. This is a good book that primarily explores childhood and motherhood. Of the latter, particularly difficult motherhood, that of disabled/violent children. Nettel's prose is unassuming but powerful at times. I found using the pigeons and their nest as a thematic addition to the plot a little too... obvious? The two storylines were enough for me. I think her reflecting parenthood again in the birds on her roof was a little overkill, and didn't really add much. I had heard this was probably going to make it on the longlist and planned to read it before it dropped but didn't get around to it, but hey, it did show up after all as I heard it would, as did Time Shelter. Fitzcarraldo continue to dominate.
Despite the challenging topics within, and the sad scenes, for which there are a few, I found that the book felt quite healing and cathartic on finishing, making it a softer approach than the other longlisted book on motherhood I've read, Boulder....more
3.5/4. Hard to tell, so my rating may change. I picked this up in a London bookshop, began reading out of curiosity, and before I kn35th book of 2023.
3.5/4. Hard to tell, so my rating may change. I picked this up in a London bookshop, began reading out of curiosity, and before I knew it, I had read the whole thing there. It hasn't got 2hrs reading in it. Like Still Born (which I'm currently reading and also, with this, on the Booker International longlist), this novella explores motherhood (lesbian motherhood, too) and more than that, the idea surrounding not wanting to have children. The prose is the main feature of the book. It's sometimes a little overwritten, definitely feels like a poet's novel. I wouldn't say it's a dark book, but it's certainly sly. There's a toxicity to it, a cold shoulder to children and the idea of children, even one's own. Seems to be a recurring theme of this year's longlist looking at Mother is Dead, too. Honestly I think this year's is already better than last year's and I've only read two and a half from the list....more
3.5. A strange little book, my first Zambra as I've continually failed to find a copy of Chilean Poet. Clocking in at 80 pages exac130th book of 2022.
3.5. A strange little book, my first Zambra as I've continually failed to find a copy of Chilean Poet. Clocking in at 80 pages exactly, it can be read in an afternoon, really, though my reading was staggered either side of work. The novel is framed around the narrator waiting for his stepdaughter's mother to return for the night. It is even said, something like, The novel can end when she returns. Coming to the end one does feel this like a little timid but strangely powerful wave, like the sort that bowl you over when you're sitting playfully within the first foot of seawater. At once it's forgettable in a way (I have a tricky relationship with short novels, I must admit, I'm in love with sprawlers), but also poignant. Now, even more so, my look for more Zambra continues. This is published by Fitzcarraldo in February next year and I recommend it as an afternoon's read. Thanks to Fitzcarraldo for the advance copy to review....more
131st book of 2022. Artist for this review is English painter J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851)*.
[image] "High Street, Oxford" — 1810
I’m an absolute sucker for131st book of 2022. Artist for this review is English painter J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851)*.
[image] "High Street, Oxford" — 1810
I’m an absolute sucker for campus novels and a sucker for Oxford/Cambridge novels, so here we are with Marías's Oxford novel, All Souls. It’s a strange and oddly wonderful little book; it is almost entirely plotless (there’s a vague plot of an affair with the narrator and a woman named Clare), but otherwise the book has a smattering of things. At once it is an ode to Oxford and academia. The narrator is a Spaniard from Madrid as a visiting professor. There are ruminations on the English, their mannerisms, their habits (interesting, sometimes humorous to read as an Englishman, example: ‘As is well known, the English never look openly at anything, or they look in such a veiled, indifferent way that one can never be sure that someone is actually looking at what they appear to be looking at, such is their ability to lend an opaque glaze to the most ordinary of glances.’**) There are long digressions about numerous topics, one is an ode to English bookshops, another to homelessness, another to the English writer John Gawsworth. The narrator at one point discusses the rubbish bins and being abroad. Marías's prose is careful, intellectually compelling, sometimes light, sometimes dense. At times I wondered why Marías had chosen to write the long digressions he had written but the novel felt personal, and because of that, very humane, so I was unbothered by the relevance or the distraction from the ‘plot’, and instead enjoyed his rambling descriptions of bookshops, Oxford cobbles, and the English professors at the university around him. Not a novel I would jump to recommend to someone, but a quiet, meditative, slightly peculiar read that tickled the academic-lover in me.
[image] "A View from the Inside of Brazen Nose College Quadrangle, Oxford" — 1803 _________________
*I miss the opportunity of looking at my favourite art pieces and artists when writing reviews, so it's likely I'll begin putting them in my reviews again when one comes to mind. I revel in the chance to connect the books I read to art I like. Who doesn't want to spend a moment looking at Turner?
**When my Canadian companion from here on Goodreads, Alan, came to England with one of his friends we actually joked about this very stereotype as we wandered through the Underground on our way to Soho. He made the observation that the English don’t seem to ever look you in the eye, and I joked that I had yet to look at them or know what they looked like. And indeed it was true, their eye-contact was far more assertive than my own, non-existent, apparently, English eye-contact....more
'What would happen if you were in your villa one day, say a Sunday, and you went out to get your post, and the wind blew the door shut, and you'd l
'What would happen if you were in your villa one day, say a Sunday, and you went out to get your post, and the wind blew the door shut, and you'd left your key inside, and you're there in your pyjamas, nothing on your feet, and you find yourself looking in at your coffee pot, the living room table with the little porcelain statue on it, the photo of the cat on the shelves, the books you left open on the floor beside your table, where your Mac is, messages flashing up on Messenger, your coffee cup on the draining board, the bin overflowing with Coke cans, and it struck you you'd been afforded a view of your life without you in it? What would happen?' 'I'd smash the glass,' I said. 'Yeah, OK, but what else?' I said nothing for a few seconds, then: 'OK, I don't know if I'd have the guts. For that kind of "return" to myself.'
3.5. The best one of the trilogy. What begins as an 80 page or so sentence in Part I then becomes a familiar Part II with short numbered chapters (but with pictures too, this time), and then at the end becomes a strange font chapter that becomes a comic book for the final ten pages or so. Mallo is now the narrator, or some form of him. Auster's A Music of Chance comes up a lot in this book (funnily at one point Mallo calls the title childish), and the second part of the book feels very Auster inspired. Think The New York Trilogy. Everything felt more focussed, at last, in this installment of the trilogy. And Mallo even addresses the previous books: 'we went to Thailand and I broke my hip and lay in a Chiang Mai hotel bed for 25 days and wrote Nocilla Dream, and then had another 5 bedridden months at home coming up with Nocilla Experience...'
Glad I read the trilogy all in one go and got it 'done with'. Mallo's The Things We've Seen looks far better, especially as it's been described as being both Sebaldian and Lynchian....more
Much of the same. In fact, it's interesting that Mallo wrote this as a trilogy and not one book. The format is the same, numbered chapters, but it's fMuch of the same. In fact, it's interesting that Mallo wrote this as a trilogy and not one book. The format is the same, numbered chapters, but it's far messier this time around. In book 1 we had the tree in the desert covered in hanging shoes, as a sort of centrepiece for everything else to orbit around. We don't get that here. This is a real confetti-mess of stuff: a few recurring characters again, lots of Julio Cortázar and references to his book Hopscotch (replacing the Borges references of the first book), snippets of interviews from musical legends, quotes from Samurai texts, a repeated quote from Apocalypse Now, etc. Mallo still exploring his own coined term, 'post-poetry'. As I'm reading it as one book, I will be running straight into the final book, Nocilla Lab now. I'm already imagining it'll be much the same, again. ...more
Mallo's trilogy has been on my list for a while, and lucky Fitzcarraldo has now published all three novels together as one. The trilogy singlehandely Mallo's trilogy has been on my list for a while, and lucky Fitzcarraldo has now published all three novels together as one. The trilogy singlehandely paved the way for a new generation of writers called the 'Nocilla Generation'. In the year 2000, Mallo coined the term 'post-poetry' and this trilogy is his attempt at theory. It is, simply, the marrying of poetry and science (Mallo is a qualified physicist).
So this is book one. Postmodern, mostly plotless. The book is comprised of numbered chapters, many of which barely make it to a page in length. As the trilogy's blurb says, 'Full of references to indie cinema, theoretical physics, conceptual art, practical architecture, the history of computers and the decadence of the novel', it is quite the array of ideas. There are several recurring 'characters', but nothing much is learnt about them. The novel is quite clearly a vehicle for Mallo's theory, post-poetry, and not much else. I enjoyed some chapters, others baffled me. The end result is difficult to grasp. The blurb also calls it 'One of the most daring literary experiments of the twenty-first century [...] takes the form of literary channel surfing'. That's the best way to describe it. It's like flicking through TV channels, catching a glimpse of some scene, some idea, and then moving onto the next. Does it work? I'm not sure, but the rest of the trilogy now waits, so on we go. ...more
Mallo's complete Nocilla trilogy, as I've said in my individual reviews, attempts to explore his own coined term, post-poetry, whic103rd book of 2022.
Mallo's complete Nocilla trilogy, as I've said in my individual reviews, attempts to explore his own coined term, post-poetry, which is a blending of science and art. He is a qualified physicist. The trilogy is, as the blurb by Fitzcarraldo reads, 'Full of references to indie cinema, theoretical physics, conceptual art, practical architecture, the history of computers and the decadence of the novel'. There are book quotes, interview quotes from musicians, maths/science equations, transcripts, and in the final book of the trilogy, photographs and a comic book.
[image]
My reviews for each book as I went along are below.
3.5. 3 for the whole collection but definitely 4 stars for certain stories. This isn't my genre, freaky, not-quite-horror, stories w46th book of 2022.
3.5. 3 for the whole collection but definitely 4 stars for certain stories. This isn't my genre, freaky, not-quite-horror, stories with ghosts, self-harm, Ouija boards, disappearances, etc. The longest story really wins a 4-star for me, "Kids Who Come Back". As the title suggests, disappeared children reappear in Buenos Aires parks no older than the day they disappeared, despite most of them being years ago. Even the children known to be dead return. Though some of the stories felt quite lacking or like they didn't quite reach whatever they were going for, I can't deny Enríquez's skill at building intrigue. Even when I wasn't fully invested in a story, I felt myself reading on simply because I wanted to know what was going to happen. It's rare for me to read on for that purpose and not because I'm in love with the prose, or the ideas in the prose. Maybe I was just in the right mood for some spirits and ghosts and murder. All the characters are on the fringe, women who are shunned for being weird, outcasts, or groups of young people all obsessed with a certain idea. At some points she reminded me of Fernanda Melchor. Technically not all brilliant, but very readable and just so different from what I usually read....more
3.5. In the same way novels by black writers are always called ‘raw’ or ‘visceral’ (something I’ve discussed before), I’m now getti36th book of 2022.
3.5. In the same way novels by black writers are always called ‘raw’ or ‘visceral’ (something I’ve discussed before), I’m now getting sick of novels by women being called ‘sly’, as if female intelligence can only manifest itself in the form of sneakiness. There are the other usual suspects too: ‘spiky’, ‘wicked’, and ‘bitter’. It occurs to me that negative words are often used to positively describe a woman’s novel. Take a look at those words and then compare them to the praise quotes on novels written by men that happen to be within reach around me: ‘Profound’, Proust; ‘Powerful’, ‘extraordinarily prescient’, Ballard; ‘Glorious’, Pynchon; ‘Important’, Rushdie. What’s that all about? Anyway, the worst quote is by Lauren Oyler who wrote the terrible book Fake Accounts, which despite being marketed well, has ended up with a fitting 2.95 average rating here on Goodreads (for once indicative of a book’s worth, usually I pay ratings no heed), who said, ‘Very funny and very fuck-you.’ Whatever that means. The best quote for this book is probably by Atlantic which says it’s like ‘Rachel Cusk’s Kudos on drugs.’
Mona wastes time somehow despite being shy of 200 pages but is a rewarding read. It’s full of witty lines like, ‘Mona had grown up in an environment where all the straight boys were devotees of Norman Mailer, committed to the belief that “tough guys don’t dance”’ and has a number of literary references throughout. Mona, drugged-up (mostly Valium), is attending a Swedish village where she awaits the verdict of ‘the most important literary award in Europe’ with a number of other writers on the shortlist. There are long speeches, descriptions of light hitting the fjords, lots of sex, a fair few pills, it is Cuskian in many ways. All the while she has bruises all over her body and she can’t remember why; as per usual, the theme of repression runs high: I’ve mentioned this countless times but there really aren’t many contemporary novels that don’t seem to deal with repression. Anyway, despite every popular book these days written by a woman (though this was originally published in Spanish in 2019), being ‘sly’ and ‘ruthless’, Mona lived up a little to the overused adjectives. I’d urge others to read it just for the absolutely wild, out of nowhere, off-kilter ending which, frankly, just left me a little flabbergasted.
Here are two quotes I highlighted for whatever reason to finish. There’s more I just can’t find them.
“The whole Thomas Bernhard thing fits them pretty well, for one: long paragraphs that hammer away at the same thing over and over. Anyone who reads too much of it in one go starts to lose their mind, I think. That’s why it’s funny that Thomas Bernhard has so many iimitators in Latin America—unbelievable, really. Whenever somebody gets depressed, you know, it’s like they have an interna sensor that tells them: ‘Do your Thomas Bernhard imitation. It’ll be great: you’ll see. It’ll be “literary” and give everyone the impression you’re actually saying something important.’”
After all, Beckett, like Heidegger, was basically a self-help writer for the intellectual class—and today’s intellectuals seemed ready to ingest mountains of far more solid and pernicious excrement. The idea that the Author was well and truly dead, that there could be no more valid interpretation of texts, that everything must mean something different depending on who’s doing the reading—it was the intellectual justification for the present crisis of meaning in the #fakenews media and in democracy more generally. Pretending that the nonsense intellectuals discussed among themselves remained limited to their caste, a rarefied discourse that would never spill over into the rest of the world—it was complete bullshit. The ivory tower was constantly being looted.
Not published till the 23rd of March but already on the Man Booker International longlist. Technically, Hurricane Season is probably26th book of 2022.
Not published till the 23rd of March but already on the Man Booker International longlist. Technically, Hurricane Season is probably the 'better'(?) novel, but I enjoyed this one way more. It's dark, suffocating, sad. It's a novel that before its violent conclusion, circles around the universal feeling of being young, 20-something and wanting to be free of the place you were born/live, if only you had money. It reminded me of the feeling I get in the local pubs around here (back in the hometown I was born in post-university) and seeing the faces of boys I once shared classrooms with ten plus years ago. In fact, not so long ago I was drinking in a pub with some friends and spoke to J.G. who had never been my friend but we had both been drinking and recognised each other, so were friendly. I asked him what he was doing now and he said he was a cleaner of sorts: he got a call when somewhere was COVID contaminated and he went and cleaned it. That's how he explained it though I don't really understand if that's what he meant or if he was just a cleaner without the phone calls. And talking to him I had the same feeling of desperation as Polo in Paradais, that I want to get out, want to be free of it all, the same old roads, the same old faces. Melchor captures it really well, on top of drink and porn addiction with the revolting character of Franco. The tone and style is really quite similar to Hurricane Season though I found it tamer and because of that, actually more realistic and grittier. A short read but a great one with a terrifying Capote-reminding ending. Good stuff. It probably won't win, but nice to see it on the longlist all the same....more
4.5. A real masterful piece of work this is. Sublime, stunning, and so intelligent. It's a shame this is his only book translated i16th book of 2022.
4.5. A real masterful piece of work this is. Sublime, stunning, and so intelligent. It's a shame this is his only book translated into English, he's brilliant (and looks almost too cool to be a writer [1]). The book is comprised of five parts which in a way read like separate pieces. The first, "Prussian Blue" is the most interesting piece of writing I've read in a long time, all circling the creation and use of cyanide. The next three parts ("Schwarzschild's Singularity", "The Heart of the Heart" and the titular "When We Cease to Understand the World") are about numerous mathematicians and scientists from Einstein, Schrödinger, Schwarzschild, and others. The final part, "The Night Gardener", of the novel suddenly shifts, a very short auto-fiction chapter, of just 10 or so pages, about Labatut's hometown in Chile. This, as all other chapters do, links back into the narrative, about madness, cyanide, war and genius. This honestly is one of the most fascinating and impressive books I've read recently.
"Prussian Blue" blew me away, in 24 pages. It opens with the medical examination of Hermann Göring on the eve of the Nuremburg Trials, describing his fingers and toes stained a 'furious red'. Labatut then describes the Pervitin that all of the Wehrmacht were borderline addicted to, receiving it in their rations, so that the troopers 'used to stay awake for weeks on end, fighting in a deranged state, alternating between manic furore and nightmarish stupor'. He then reports that in April 1945 alone 'three thousand eight hundred people killed themselves in Berlin', and talks of the suicides that rocked Germany rather than facing their defeat. We then read about Hitler's beloved German shepherd, Blondi, who was given cyanide first on Hitler's orders because he was 'so convinced that his dosage had been tampered with'. Next we hear about the Indian goldsmith, M.P. Prasad, who is the only person to write about cyanide's flavour, writing three lines before he died. The liquid form smells slightly of almonds, 'which not everyone can distinguish as doing so requires a gene absent in forty per cent of humanity', and Labatut comments, that a significant number of Jews murdered in the concentration camps would smell nothing at all as the cyanide filled the gas chambers, 'while others died smelling the same fragrance inhaled by the men who had organised their extermination as they bit down on their suicide capsules.' Then suddenly we zoom out, and Labatut explains that certain bricks in Auschwitz were stained a 'beautiful blue', this is because of 'cyanide's authentic origins as a by-product isolated in 1782 from the first modern synthetic pigment, Prussian Blue.' Thus begins the history of the colour and its creation, which later oscillates into describing silkworms (for those who have read Sebald, how Sebald [2]) and the Nazis planting millions of mulberry trees, into a short biography of Johann Conrad Dippel, who, without, Prussian Blue would never have existed, into, then, Carl Wilhelm Sheele, who first realised the danger when he 'stirred a pot of Prussian Blue with a spoon coated in traces of sulphuric acid and created the most potent poison of the modern era'. This moves into another colour, a green, which Napaloeon loved, so Labatut's narrative takes us there to the Emperor and his bedroom, and his final days where his skin took on a 'cadaverous grey tone', and then we follow the narrative onto Rasputin and the failure to kill him, then onto Alan Turing, and Labatut describes what he was like as a man, and how he died by cyanide, which then leads us to reading about the children during the war and their gas masks, then into Ypres, where the 'first gas attack in history overwhelmed the French troops', and Labatut quotes a first-hand account of the gas and its effects which killed everything, all men, horses, birds in the trees, insects, mice, everything came from their holes to die, which leads us to Fritz Haber, who first obtained nitrogen 'from the air', as before, Labatut tells us, Englishmen would 'despoil the tombs of the ancient pharaohs, in search not of gold, jewels or antiquities, but of the nitrogen contained in the bones of the thousands of slaves buried', and how they did the same, unearthing bodies from the battles of Austerlitz, Leipzig and Waterloo, which then gets us to Adi, or Adolf Hitler, with a two page biography on how we went from aspiring artist to hateful war survivor, and finally the chapter ends with Haber's death and the letter written to his wife. This is 24 pages, the first part of the novel.
And though Labatut says in the Acknowledgements that the 'quantity of fiction grows throughout the book' because "Prussian Blue" contains 'only one fictional paragraph' (he doesn't say which), it's clear that the man knows his science and his scientists. I didn't understand much of the quantum mechanics and whatever else but what prevailed wasn't the science at all, it was the genius and the madness. All the scientists in this book go pretty much 'insane' at certain points in their life, with recurring near-starvation and sleep deprivation (mostly due to obsessiveness of work), self-exile, talking to themselves, not washing, shaving, the usual. They were tormented souls and Labatut gives us full portraits of all of their madness (and genius). Somehow they all link too, scientists appearing in one another's chapters, ideas strung together ('standing on the shoulders of giants' . . .), and themes recurring and recurring. Of course as well as the madness and the genius, Labatut shows us that above all, maths and science are the most dangerous things to humanity; and, did these great men foresee that their inventions and ideas would be used for mass destruction, genocide? So it's also a reflection on the cost of genius.
How the novel is only 188 pages is utterly beyond me. I'll say again, masterful.
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[1] [image]
[2] The Rings of Saturn is placed comfortably within the acknowledgements....more
Matthew Ted
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