the hunger angel (herta müller, tr philip boehm)

This novel of Muller’s has a very different tone to the previous one of hers I read. It’s a fragmented, poetic read, beautifully translated by Philip Boehm, which narrates the experiences of Leopold, a Romanian of German descent (as is Muller), who is sent to a Soviet Labour camp with fellow Romanians of German descent after the second world war. As such it gives voice to another marginalised chapter from that teeming cauldron of 20th Century European history. Leopold is barely an adult when he’s exiled, obliged to pay compensation for the actions of others. Muller’s text, the helpful afterword explains, was shaped by her conversations with Oskar Pastior, a poet from her home village. She takes those memories and bends them into a cratered planet of language. In Leopold’s hunger driven consciousness, words sometimes seem more concrete than objects or actions. The landscape, the hardship and above all, the hunger, are minted in Muller’s words. It’s not a read that always flows readily, anymore than the life the exile experienced was one which was lived easily. There are moments of jagged beauty, moments of nonsense, and the banality of suffering, packed into short chapters that create a mosaic which presents Leopold’s years in the labour camp with, perhaps, far more authenticity than a more ‘realistic’ documentation of events would. 

the great derangement (amitav ghosh)

Ghosh does something  breathtaking in this work of non-fiction. He turns one of the colonialists’ most sacred tools, the modern realist novel, back on itself, to question the seemingly inexorable drift of Western society towards the annihilation of the planet. In so doing both vindicating the importance of the novel (he himself is, after all, a novelist) and also suggesting that its modern realist incarnation has become a symbol or symptomatic of the decadence that is leading the world towards catastrophe. Incorporated into his argument is a slyly savage assault on that prince of the modern inconsequential, if moral, writers, John Updike. Whilst the western novel has chosen to blackball the unlikely, the catastrophic, the in-credible, the natural world is sedately going about the business of making these tropes the norm. Rather than paying heed to the existential battles which humanity is confronted with, the modern novel hides under its shell of privilege, making cute novels about (bourgeois) moral dilemmas. So, Ghosh postulates, in a hundred years time, when the sea levels have risen and the deserts are marching on, people will look back and say: where were the Cassandras? Those who might at least have raised a flag of warning, seeking to include the great peril of our time on the cultural agenda. They are sidelined on grounds of taste, (here, tangentially, Ghosh’s book reminds me of Natalie Olah’s), their narratives not being deemed relevant or even saleable. 

As a result, The great derangement, as Ghosh puts it in biblical terms, is allowed to proceed unchecked. The derangement being that we blithely ignore the suicidal contradictions at the heart of “progress”. Contradictions whose full extent will be unleashed when those countries in Asia seeking, understandably, to catch up with this progressive agenda, contribute even more to humanity’s lemming like tendencies. 

As one more inclined towards the novel than the science, I would have to say how remarkable it is to to see the shibboleths of good taste and the well constructed novel being so rightfully savaged. Ghosh’s argument is that we are trapped in the bubble of our our own perception, which refuses to allow us to see that the trappings of our comfort contain the seeds of our destruction. Because that message is a turn-off, it’s a downer, it doesn’t sell. Instead we construct genteel narratives of personal crisis, ignoring the existential crisis that threatens to engulf each and every one of our descendants. 

perfidious albion (sam byers)

The best way to summarise Byers’ entertaining state-of-the-nation novel is to suggest that it’s probably the novel Jonathan Coe would have liked to have written when he sat down to write his highly successful tome Middle England. We’re in similar territory. The provinces as the epicentre of Englishness, the place where the culture wars are really played out. The self-serving narcissists of the post-Brexit intellectual/ political world. The faultlines of race and class. Byers manages to add a convincing dose of Ballard to this mix, as he conjures up a housing estate which will be a social media experiment, with residents graded and rewarded for their participative actions. However, before that can happen, the old residents have to be cleared out, and one of these elderly residents becomes a cause celebre. Byers shows no fear of complexity. There are all sorts of elements thrown in: Semiotic performance happenings; hackers; pernicious social media enterprises. Twitter, Facebook et al, which will probably guarantee that the book feels dated sooner rather than later. The dialogue is whipsmart, effortlessly conjuring the desaturated conversational rhythms of a society which is always in a hurry to get somewhere, and rarely knows where that somewhere is. That the narrative eventually hinges on an action so stupid that the fact it is perpetrated by a sub-Farageian politician doesn’t quite justify it, is slightly disappointing in a novel that’s so on the button. Nevertheless, if you want a rapid snapshot of pre-pandemic, post-Brexit Britain, you can’t do much better than Byers’ acerbic tale. 

the posthumous memoirs of brás cubas (machado de assis, tr neil macarthur)

Who is this Brás Cubas? The question keeps returning as the reader engages with his ‘posthumous memoirs’. Is it the author himself? Is this a Proustian tale? If so, it’s Proust refracted through a kaleidoscopic Brazilian lens. The novel of approximately 250 pages is divided into 160 chapters. Some no longer than half a page. Several make comments on previous chapters, or the telling of the story. The effect is one of a mosaic. Long before the arrival of Derrida, we have a shattered text, the pieces of which the author is assembling into something resembling a story, albeit a chaotic, at times incoherent story. At the same time, there are details, such as the author’s description of his affair with Virigila, the wife of a politician, which feel as psychologically precise as anything in Proust. The writing captures the mechanics of the affair, as it wheels its way through the tortured stages of passion, disinterest, guilt and despair. Brás Cubas feels like a real person, albeit one who approaches the business of storytelling in a fashion that is not normally permitted in novels, full of diversions and asides. Much like real people actually think, rather than the pseudo coherence of the normative idea of character espoused in the western novel. In this sense, we can almost hear the faint sounds of the lumbering approach of Joyce and Woolf, or perhaps the distant rumble of Sterne. Machado de Assis’ novel brims with an energy which sometimes overflows, but which propels the book forwards even when the apparent line of advancement feels utterly baffling. In the end, one could analyse the novel in purely story terms, tracing the life of the narrator as he navigates the waters of Rio’s political and social life. But this would be to ignore the thing that distinguishes the novel, which is its capacity to incorporate a shade of madness into an otherwise matter-of-fact story.  

the sympathiser (viet thanh nguyen)

This novel has drifted around the edge of my consciousness for a while, popping up on recommended lists, getting mentions. Finally, as novels do, it arrived in my library. Reading it, it felt as though the author tackled two of the great fulcrums of modern English language novel writing. On the one hand, that twentieth century relic, the great American novel; on the other the twenty first century injunction to explore the immigrant’s story, the point at which cultures collide. 

The two cultures in this case are Vietnam and the USA. The book’s narrator suffers from being a direct genetic product of this clash, his father a US missionary, his mother a teenage victim of the missionary’s seduction. As such, the anonymous narrator is already damned to be neither/ nor, and at the same time blessed, able to view both cultures from the other’s standpoint, and enjoy the best and worst of them. The story’s pivotal moment is the fall of Saigon, which sends the narrator into exile in his father’s country. He flees as the adjutant of a Vietnamese general. However, the narrator, we learn, is also a Vietcong spy. 

These highly literary paradoxes, the bastard’s paradox, as Edmund probably said, are the scaffolding on which a big beast of a novel is hung. The outsider’s viewpoint allows for some eviscerating reflections on both cultures in a prose that stings with its wit. However, for all its undoubted brilliance, I also ended up feeling as though the book missed a few targets. The great ideological divide, for which Vietnam became a military-political experiment, is something the book and the narrator dance around as much as they interrogate. The closing chapters, oddly reminiscent of Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, seem to strive to compensate for the book’s somewhat prosaic earlier treatment of politics, with a detailed account of the narrator’s political re-education through torture. The Vietcong employ methods learned from their enemy, the CIA, in a lengthy process that pushes the narrator towards mysticism. Furthermore, that tedious trope of modern literary criticism, the one that says we have to ‘care’ about the characters, feels for once as though it might have a point. As the narrator becomes more and more steeped in blood, rather than feeling for him or his victims or even those on the periphery, the reader ends up feeling as little sympathy as the narrator apparently does for those who he helps to despatch to the next world. 

All of which is not to negate the book’s scale, scope and the brilliance of the author’s language. It’s just that, as the linguistic fire and brimstone become assimilated into the reading experience, the tragedies that underpin the novel seem to drift further and further out of view, like a boat lost on the horizon, gradually slipping away. 

the 7th function of language (laurent binet, tr. sam taylor)

I’m writing this whilst on endless hold for the Iberia helpline, whilst trying to change my flight back to the UK for the fifth time. There’s a repeated word sequence on the helpline which is “All Our Lines are Busy at Present, please Hold”. Binet’s book pertains to the various uses of language as defined  by the linguist and semiotician Roman Jakobson of which there are supposedly six which he detailed and a mysterious seventh which allows the speaker to conjure his desires. Like the genie in the lamp. Giscard d’Estaing and Francois Mitterrand are in competition to obtain a copy of this supposedly discovered seventh function, which has been passed to Roland Barthes. The seventh function of language, in Binet’s hands, becomes a Maguffin, an excuse for the author to glossily incorporate key figures of post-modern thought, from Foucault to Eco, in a garish sub Dan Brown narrative which makes a lot of noise and says very little. The novel has an oddball pair of detectives, one an intellectual, the other not, who investigate the fate of the piece of paper on which the Seventh Function of Language was written, and for which Barthes was assassinated. As though aware of the flimsiness of this premise, the novelist starts to kill off figures like Derrida, who in fact had a long way to go, in a move which might or might not be perceived as irreverent. The one thing the novel does is make one want to revisit The Name of the Rose, to find out if Eco, the master semiotician, mastered the conceit of marrying high intellect to low art with more subtlety. Meanwhile the message from Iberia continues its repetitive dirge, with the clear subtext: “During the 21st century Covid dystopia, the only advisable thing to do is abandon the idea of ever flying again.” Or perhaps, I am being generous and a true semiotic interpretation would be: “Fuck off Gringo”.