crook manifesto (colson whitehead)

That a novel has the power to immerse you in a time and place and thoroughly lose yourself there, is one of the beauties of the form. Whitehead’s novel, in essence a sequence of three interconnected stories, featuring the same characters, does this effectively, transporting the reader to New York of the seventies, specifically the black New York of Harlem and neighbouring boroughs. It’s beautifully written, as the author’s twin protagonists, Pepper and Ray Carney, decent men moving in a murky world, get caught up in nefarious high jinks. There’s an affectionate tone to the writing, and we never suspect that anything too terrible will happen, but we’re along for the ride. There are odd hints of Pynchon in amongst the novel’s neo-classical perfection, (three sections of nine chapters each, neatly splitting the book into three parts), but the book would also seem to pay its dues to the hard-boiled simplicity of Chandler and Elroy. The final section could perhaps be read as a commentary on the NY from which someone like the future president might have evolved, as it probes the corruption in the real estate business.

"He crossed Sixth Ave. The Twin Towers still startled him when they lurched into view, freed by this or that turn around a street corner. Looming over the city like two cops trying to figure out what they can bust you for."

birth of our power (victor serge, tr richard greeman)

Serge is a neglected figure. Although flirting with autobiography, his writing lacks that spark of irony or self-reflection that the late twentieth century western literature was prey to, before it became overrun by the confessional tracts of the belligerent individual. He recounts the dreams of what we call politics. The revolution, the overthrow of the old guard, when Marxist idealism was still a recognisable thing. Having said that: what is politics, if not the actions of men and women at the coalface of history? Serge’s text here recounts his passage from Barcelona to Leningrad, 1917-1918. The war across the border rages and the radicals in Barcelona carry the hope that this might fuel their revolt. For now, they are frustrated. Serge flees to France, hoping to travel to Russia, but he is arrested and interned in a POW camp. Only when the war ends can he finally resume his journey. He arrives in a sepulchral Leningrad, another refugee seeking food, shelter and warmth. The reality of the revolution’s dreams are laid bare; glory will not be given, it will be earned.

There is something in the controlled naivety of Serge’s writing that draws the reader in, makes a friend of them. The reader becomes his belated co-conspirator, not least because Serge is clearly not seduced by the romance of revolution; rather he is wedded to it, warts and all. 

disaster nationalism: the downfall of liberal civilization (richard seymour)

How has it come to this? I vaguely remember, it must have been in 2014 or thereabouts, walking through a barrio of London, and seeing stickers for UKIP all over the place. I know, thanks to the accounts of friends, how present the National Front had always been in London and the UK, but it tended to be something clandestine, kept out of sight. A guilty secret. All of a sudden, there it was, out in the open. A fringe political cult which was being celebrated en masse. UKIP’s greatest victory, thus far, has been Brexit. But now Farage has finally become an MP, Musk is supposedly on the point of financing them and they loom larger than ever in the national consciousness. UKIP, rebranded as Reform, is a retrograde, divisive, nationalistic movement. It had no place in the Britain of yesteryear, of if it did, it was hidden away somewhere, the weasel under the cocktail cabinet.

Seymour’s book looks at the emergence of nationalist movements around the globe, many of them proto-fascist. He is well aware of the difficulties of defining someone or something as ‘fascist’ so treads the linguistic line carefully, using historical parallels to make his case. The book looks at selected aspects of the nationalist movement, from the Lone Wolf killer to genocidal regimes. His analysis looks at how power manipulates emotion, which, rather than the classic capitalist idea of self-advancement, he takes as the primary driver of human action. People will take decisions against their own better interests if they can be emotionally engaged. Hence, for example, Brexit. He also skewers the lie of the white working class as the prime mover for the nationalist movements: suggesting that the forces of nationalism have infiltrated society on a far more pervasive level. The current state of Israel being a prime example.

Most disturbingly, he shows how the logical culmination of the nationalist movement is a desire to expand borders, to create an other that needs to be conquered. Nationalism is about the “us” against the “them” and the uncontrolled barbarity of actions in Gaza, against muslims in India, in Rohingya, are evidence of how the manipulation of this idea can lead to a societal breakdown of the moral order. In an existential nationalist conflict, there are no limits: indeed the more extreme and barbaric the actions of the neurotic nationalist force, the more it satiates the bloodlust of ‘its’ peoples. 

“Disaster nationalism today harnesses the insecurity, humiliation and miseries of heterogeneous classes and social groups, including some of the poorest, to a revolt against liberal civilization, with its pluralist and democratic norms.”

“Historical fascism reposed its trust in myth. Disaster nationalism, coming of age in the era of the internet, trusts in the simulacrum.”

a night of knowing nothing (w&d. payal kapadia, w. himanshu prajapati)

“Eisenstein, Pudovkin ... we shall fight, we shall win”

Kapadia’s documentary opens and closes with extended scenes of people dancing, with the music they are dancing to kept offstage. It’s a neat if somewhat flashy device, an understated imprimatur. The film documents in a loose, poetic manner the resistance of the Mumbai Film School to the appointment of a BPJ choice as director of the FTII film school. It is an account of friendship and struggle, told via black and white photography and a muted voiceover, against a backdrop of Modi’s divisive politics. Kapadia invests the film with a wistful, elusive aura as it captures a lost moment in the narrator’s history. This voiceover adds a metatextual level to the doc, allowing it to float somewhere between capturing a reality and capturing time lived as a dream. 

congo inc.: bismarck's testament (koli jean bofane, tr. marjolijn de jager)

Bofane’s short novel is a knowing, ironic take on life in the DRC. At one point he writes: The women dancing showed her what to do, rubbing their rumps and pubic areas against the hard male organs, ostensibly unimpressed; you would have thought it was an Alain Mabanckou novel, and it isn’t clear if Bpfane is being ironic or not. His approach is scattergun and all-embracing. There is a central character, Isookanga, a pygmy who comes to Kinshasa from the deep jungle. He is a kind of Candide, an innocent abroad who gets mixed up in all kinds of trouble, but the novel also includes as characters a warlord and his wife, a lost Chinese immigrants, a Latvian UN peacekeeper and an exploitative preacher, among others. These characters flit through the book, some interacting with Isookanga, others not, all of them contributing to the construction of an overarching vision of a chaotic, vigorous society, at once on the edge of the modern world and at the same time at the heart of it. 

immediacy: or, the style of too late capitalism (anna kornbluh)

Kornbluh’s book is by turns devastating and impenetrable. The latter would be down to this reader’s philosophy deficit; some half-remembered fragments of Hegel and a thirty year old reading of Writing and Difference aren’t going to do the trick here. You will get lost along the way. But you will also stumble into corners of brilliant elucidation. Above all the way in which the author riffs off up to the minute references (Knausgaard, the Safdie Brothers etc) to interrogate where the fuck we are at, culturally, psycho-culturally, as a species etc. I might get this all wrong, but it feels as thought she is constructing a connection between rampant ‘late’ capitalism and its cult of the individual (pace Foucault?) and the vogue for auto-fiction in things literary and immediacy in things audiovisual. Auto-fiction is the attempt to erase the idea of the fiction within fiction, even if the act of writing and ostensibly translating reality into words is of itself an inevitably fictional process. It also encapsulates a society where the individual has become prioritised over the collective. Kornbluh is very effective in the manner she explores the negative aspects of this process and how it betrays some of what might be called the fictional project. Immediacy has to do with a quest to extract the middle man from the audio visual process, a clearly paradoxical endeavour, in keeping with a world where we expect everything, everywhere, all at once. The way in which this restricts the possibilities of depth, or reflection, are self-evident, and noted.

All of this and more is contextualised in rampant theory. Although there was much in the book with which this reader struggled, to see the way it articulated a theory in defence of the collective, against the cult of the individual, which is so clearly an apolitical cult, one with a strong capitalist vibe, was refreshing. 

the night always comes (willy vlautin)

I am not entirely sure how Vlautin’s brief novel reached my library, but it was a perfect accompaniment for the latter part of a transatlantic flight, finished shortly before landing at Heathrow. The novel tells the story of Lynette, a down-on-her-luck thirty year old resident of Portland, who learns that her dream of owning her own home has been put in jeopardy by her mother and determines to do all she can on one fateful night to call in her debts and raise funds for the deposit. Predictably things don’t according to plan. Will Lynette escape everything the night throws at her or will the rainy Portland night destroy her? Whilst the narrative and thematic are generic, there is a warmth to the writer’s portrait of his heroine and a sense of immersion in the geography which helps to keep the read moving. It comes as no surprise for see that the book is already slated to be a movie. It has all the ingredients: a heroine whose desperation drives her to action, the propulsive tension of the night, the unities of time place and action. It’s a hard fast read which is also a love letter to the author’s hometown. 

green border (w&d agnieszka holland, w. gabriela lazarkiewicz-sieczko, maciej pisuk)

Green Border is at once arresting, epic and yet strangely empty. The experience of watching it is visceral: a collection of Syrians and Afghanis are seeking to enter fortress Europe via the Belarus-Poland border, a great wooded area which offers no shelter and is soon revealed to be a trap, as the Polish and Belarus border guards take turns in forcing the immigrants back and forth across the border. They find themselves stuck in a terrible limbo, which is only alleviated by the kind actions of a bunch of activists who head into the forest and offer medical and legal assistance, in so far as they can. The film switches focus at this point, remaining with the Polish activists, as well as recounting the story of a border guard who discovers his humanity. However, this switch seems to dislocate the movie to an extent. The perils faced by the Polish activists, whilst extreme in their own way, cannot compare to what the refugees have had to face and are facing. The activists’ stories feel like a lighter touch, steering us away from the crueller realities the first half of the film has engaged with. Green Border becomes more palatable, it moves away from the obscene. The refugee characters are left half-drawn, or dead. We do not have to suffer with them anymore and we are grateful to the filmmakers for this, but at the same time, it feels as though we have been let off the hook. In many ways Green Border captures the complexities and paradoxes of seeking to make political work within the cinema market place. The demarcated limits of how much empathy is permitted are clearly on display. For all the Europeans’ noble intentions, they almost inevitably sell their own stories, and that of their supposed subjects, short. Meanwhile, those on the wrong side of the fence have to fight for funding from wealthier nations, funding which comes with its own marketplace imperatives as to what will be palatable to the wider target audience the film is supposed to reach. 

sunken lands (gareth rees)

The subtitle of Rees’ waterworld is “A Journey Through Flooded Kingdoms and Lost Worlds”. The author notes how, since his childhood, he has been fascinated by the idea of lost underwater worlds, and in this book, part historical exegesis, part travel guide, part eco-warning, he gets to explore this fascination in more depth. The author skilfully interweaves mythic lore to substantiate his theories about how previous moments in humanity’s history have been impacted by rising sea levels and tsunamis. We are, at the end of the day, the servants of Mother Nature, not her masters, as some from the techno-industrial world would like to believe. Rees ranges across Britain to Italy to the southern states of the USA to make his case and it is a fascinating one. There are times when one longs for his scope to have been less anglo-centric, but there is nevertheless a great deal of scholarship in his integration of mythic history, geological data and gut instinct. 

the memory police (yōko ogawa, tr. stephen snyder)

Several people have brought Ogawa’s novel to my attention. I had anticipated something moderately cute. An unreliable but engaging female narrator, coping with an extraordinary situation, assisted by neutral but sympathetic secondary characters. Set in a world which is removed from ours, but still recognisable and just about plausible. The Memory Police delivers all of this, but then shifts to become one of the more nihilistic texts you might come across. The Memory Police are a totalitarian body who disappear people and objects at will. People flee into hiding to escape them. This much is already reminiscent of Latin American or Arab dictatorships. (On the day of writing there are images of Syrians who have been incarcerated for years finally being released following the fall of Assad.)  The unnamed female narrator, a novelist, takes in her editor, as objects as disparate as flowers and photos are disappeared. The editor clings to his memories. At any point we anticipate that the Memory Police will be confronted, that the world will turn, that the struggle will have been worth it. But what the novel delivers is almost the opposite, in spite of a tsunami and a new ice age. The novel is as mannered as I had imagined it might be, only Ogawa then adds a layer of bleakness that is completely unexpected.