the song of the earth (jonathan bate)

Bate’s examination of the links between romanticism and ecology offer up the moral that the poet is the unacknowledged connection between the soil and the mind. As such the poet, like the aborigine in the outback, can sing us out of the dystopia which we have constructed. At times beautiful and other time befuddling, the book ranges from Heidegger to Clare and gives perhaps unexpected prominence to Byron. Bate is strong on that paradox of modernity whereby an appreciation of nature is coupled with an alienation from nature. Are his conclusions in the end somewhat hippy-chic, as he discourses from this Oxonian ivory tower? There was a feeling in the reading of the book (and feelings are not to be negated according to his thesis) that the urgency of the opening chapters, or the radicalism of the opening chapters, became diluted as the book expounded its argument. However, this might also be an inevitability in the actual process of writing itself; perhaps according to Bate, the tendrils of poetry are the truest form of the word, and the more that writing seeks to investigate the roots of those tendrils, the less, ironically, it becomes possible to hear the flower’s song.

The Graeco-Roman counterpart to the story of Eden is that of the lost Golden Age. It is a story which has had an extraordinarily long and fertile history as a mythic and literary archetype. It tells of how all beasts had horizontal backbones and a gaze that looked down towards the earth, until there came Prometheus who ‘Upended man into the vertical’, and ‘tipped up his chin / So to widen his outlook on heaven’. Once man looked away from where he walked, the earth became vulnerable. The desire for transcendence, the aspiration to higher realms, was predicated upon a denial of biological origin, a departure from ground.

the adventurist: my life in dangerous places (robert young pelton)

Pelton’s book is in a breezy autobiography. The author has so many stories to tell, it’s impossible to fit them all in, but the book is ultimately anchored, somewhat awkwardly, around his life story. It feels as though the book is an attempt to wrestle with and understand why his restless soul has taken him to so many extreme locations. Is it a result of his dysfunctional parenting? His absurd schooling? Does he belong to a line that goes back to the Victorians like Burton and Baden Powell, with their need to escape the confines of a stunted, conventional society? All these questions run through the book, even if it never really gets to grips with the conflict between his more conventional stable home-life and his quest for danger. The presence of his wife and daughters is a ghostly one. They are, he acknowledges, the other side of a coin which sees him rushing towards the world’s hotspots, knowing he has their love to come home too. In this sense, in spite of the love of adventure, the story is not one of a radical, Rimbaudesque figure. Pelton always seems to have his get-out covered. He is very much a North American hero, albeit Canadian rather than US; safe in the security that this culture bestows, in terms of money, equipment and kudos.  

baudolino (umberto eco, tr. william weaver)

Eco is a curious writer. One whose work as a semiotician attracted a whole generation of philosophy students and the admiration of many of Europe’s most prestigious intellectuals, but also one whose fame is based on a rip roaring medieval detective story. It’s many years since I read Name of the Rose, and in spite of labouring somewhat through Baudolino, I hope to return to it one of these days. Baudolino, tells the tale of the eponymous protagonist, who is adopted by Frederick Barbarossa, gets involved in all kinds of scrapes and battles with the emperor, before setting off on a hapless mission to find the kingdom of Prester John, the lost Christian prophet who reportedly ended up in the Indies. The novel is divided into two parts, written through forty chapters. The first deals largely with the Middle Ages politics of central and Eastern Europe. The second, a section that is more magical allegory, deals with Baudolino’s mission to the East in search of the lost prophet, and includes centaurs and cyclops other mythical creatures. There’s the sense of a writer straining to locate the precise register to tell what might have been a fascinating story, had that register been nailed down. Eco’s interest in pre-Renaissance Europe, aka the dark ages, is attractive. What were the people of that warlike continent like? Why is their history less well known than that of the Roman Empire? To what extent were the innumerable international conflicts a reflection of what we would now describe as globalisation? Where did our received idea of Europe end and the myths begin? These and other questions are latent in the text, but it never feels as though the writer quite gets to grips with them. As such, Baudolino is a lengthy curiosity, which lacks the narrative coherence of Name of the Rose. 

in the mood for love (w&d wong kar wai)

Wong Kar Wai´s classic is another one which has been stored away in the memory box, to be revisited during this Cinemateca season. The remarkable thing about the film, often cited as one of the most romantic movies of all time, is that the couple in question never actually get it together. The ache of their reluctance to copy their respective spouses and actually commit adultery, no matter who much they want to, is an ache shared by the audience. When their surface calm finally breaks into emotion, it is devastating, for them and for us. Wai introduces the devilish conceit of the rehearsal into the film, permitting moments where the two would-be lovers role-play dramatic scenarios. The most astonishing of these is when they role-play their own final separation, the moment the dam breaks, and then the lovers and the director step away, saying with an almost sadistic nerve, don’t cry, this is only a rehearsal. Hamlet would have been proud of this self-mastery. The way the film seems to fracture towards the end, the would-be lovers’ separate lives running parallel to one another’s, never to cross again, is also astonishing, because this, surely, is how life works. The greatest love stories don’t get the Hollywood treatment, they don’t even have to be consummated, they live on forever in the what-might-have-been. 

mysterious object at noon (d. apichatpong weerasethakul)

Mysterious Object at Noon would appear to be Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s first full length feature. A doc/ drama, it combines an immersive trip through rural and urban Thailand, with the narration of what appears to be a folk story about two sisters/ teachers who are the same person, or who replace each other, which is of course something of an Apichatpong trope. At one point the film shows a set of travelling players giving an open air performance of the story to a village, with the actresses wearing identical, beautiful costumes. The viewer has to do quite a bit of work to stitch the story together, and the fact that there is no definitive version is revealed by the sequence at the end, where a group of school kids offer up their differing versions of how the story should end, which all seem to feature a bewitched tiger. Many of the tropes of his later work are therefore present, like tantalising clues. It was also notable, the day after watching Memoria, how similar rural Thailand looks to rural Colombia. The film helps to determine the director’s aesthetic, taking the viewer into a sensory exploration of modern Thailand in all its languid diversity. 

super-cannes [j g ballard]

Despite not having read much Ballard, his transgressive British literary voice is so pervasive that it’s hard not to feel as though you know his work intimately. In part, one imagines, his success is down to the fact that, whilst transgressive, he’s also a consummate (and structurally conservative) storyteller. The narrative of Super-Cannes rattles along at a steady pace, even if it never really feels as though it’s close to hitting top gear. As a result, the concept behind the novel feels far more dangerous than the novel itself. 

This concept is beguiling; an exploration of a summarily twenty-first century world where corporate entities possess their own space, which they police themselves, a post-political space where you can invent your own morality. Super-Cannes is a large industrial/ residential park, near Cannes, where high-level execs get to do their thing. Which mostly involves working, but whose resident shrink has devised a novel way of letting off steam: organised petty crime. High-end execs don’t do squash or affairs; they go out into the streets and participate in some minor league brown shirt action, beating up immigrants, stealing valuables or sleeping with child prostitutes. Which in a Trumpian world doesn’t sound all that far-fetched. The narrator, a level-headed English pilot, Paul Sinclair, married to one of the site’s new doctors, gradually pieces together the truth of what is happening, before deciding to take radical action to bring down this neo-fascist enclave. The level-headed Englishman is one of the few prophetic notes that jars, but in so many other ways Ballard seems to be putting his finger on the brutal new realities of a world run by corporations. 

Having said which, the novel itself, which is framed as a detective story, with Sinclair investigating why his wife’s predecessor went on an insane shooting spree, feels somewhat prosaic. The twists and turns really do sometimes feel as though they’re going round in circles. The writer’s research is worn on the sleeve, and one imagines Ballard hanging out on the Cote D’Azur for months, suffering terribly as he made notes for his latest masterpiece. There’s something of a conjurer’s trick about it all: a story which claims to rent asunder the shroud of contemporary society, dressed up in the bows and ribbons of a highly consumable literary approach. 

no island is an island [carlo ginzburg]

Ginzburg’s book is a sequence of four connected essays which deal with notions of Englishness in the literature of More, early Elizabethan poets, Sterne and RL Stevenson. Each essay is a delicious treat in its own right. Ginzburg is the kind of scholar who relishes the task of uncovering connections that shed light on his subject. Stevenson and Balzac, More and Lucian, Sterne and the arcane dictionary of  the 18th c Frenchman, Pierre Bayle. The erudition on display is dazzling, but it’s always there to serve the writer’s thesis, not merely to show off. 

Ginzburg’s thesis is that literature and national identity are interwoven, something most people would accept. However, a work of literature would appear to be a rounded thing, whole in itself. Tristam Shandy might be as English as they come, but what Ginzburg does is reveal the influences that helped to shape these seemingly ready-made objects. The book beautifully explores the links between continental and European thought. Hence, perhaps the title. No matter how much the British might seek to view themselves as a self-contained literary world, Ginzburg’s essays demonstrate that this identity is contingent on a broader intellectual context. This might, in the case of the renaissance poets, involve a rejection of continental forms, but even this is part of a binary relationship which evolves out of a common heritage. 

This  is a slim volume, but each essay has the density of a small, digestible book in itself. There is no better time to explore what it means to talk of “British” anything, and British literature, that foundation stone of identity, in particular. This erudite Italians brief guide is as good as anything I’ve read on the subject. 

a splendid conspiracy [albert cossery]

A small town in Egypt. A group of disaffected young hedonists. All of them male. The suggestion that the police chief might arrest them on the basis that they are involved in a conspiracy to abduct or murder esteemed citizens. These are the ostensible ingredients of Cossery’s patchy novel, which has hints of The Secret Agent in its tone and content.

However, where Conrad pushed the absurdity towards a political/ tragic end, Cossery’s novel ends up dawdling towards nowhere in particular. Perhaps this is exactly what he sought to capture. The listlessness of youth. The self-indulgence of young males. Perpetuating the sleepy aimlessness of the country they inhabit.

Except that history has caught up with Egypt. Even, one suspects, the town of no-great-significance the novel describes. Perhaps, as much as anything religious or political, it is this very torpor which has come under attack. An impatience with a sense of pointlessness. Although one cannot help but suspect that the young men from A Splendid Conspiracy would not have been at the forefront of recent events. It’s a curious novel, which at once feels out of time, stuck in a by-way of the mid twentieth century, unaware that it’s describing a world on the brink of something else. 

the she-devil in the mirror [horacio castellanos moya]

Moya's book is a jaunty read, told from the perspective of a young woman immersed in the baroque world of El Salvadorean high society. When a friend of hers is murdered she takes it upon herself to try and discover the real killer, having no confidence in the police chief. The fact that her friend was involved in a series of vapid affairs with a selection of San Salvador's movers and shakers means that the list of potential killers is a long one. It also means that the more Laura, the narrator, mouths off about it, the more danger she places herself in. The fact that she is too blasé and privileged to realise this adds to the sense of impending doom.

The book consists of several breathy chapters, each of them a monologue by Laura to her supposed friend. One can't help suspecting that a great deal of nuance is lost in translation, as she intersperses her theories with observations about society: the malls she meets her friend in; the church; the press, etc. There's nothing sympathetic about Laura and it's clear we're not supposed to like her much. Rather the author is setting out to skewer an elite, to hoist them on their own petard. The book, published in 2000, looks at the way El Salvador, even post-dictatorship, continues to be run by a wealthy, corrupt section of society. There's a quote from Bolano on the front cover of my edition saying Mora is the only writer of his generation who "knows how to narrate the horror, the secret Vietnam that Latin America was for a long time." I'm not sure She-Devil in the Mirror quite lives up to that billing, maybe his other books do, but nevertheless it's an enjoyable, satirical, eminently readable take on a country which had a long way to go before recovering from the crimes of the late twentieth century.

allah is not obliged [ahmadou kourouma]

Child soldiers and depravity. The paradox of the image of the beguiling kid toting a machine gun or in the words of Birahima, the book's narrator, a 'kalash', is one that forms part of the iconography of post-colonial Africa. Birahima is one of them, and Kourouma's novel gives the image a voice.

It's a voice, steeped in slang, which is sparky, wilful and provocative. Never depressed or even world-weary, Birahima cheerfully recounts the things he's seen. In a world of never-ending savagery, the only perspective to take is one of grim irony, and, where necessary, avoidance. As Birahima wanders West Africa, from Liberia to the Ivory Coast to Sierra Leone, he confronts death on a regular basis. To offer some kind of testament to the child soldiers whose lives have been dispensed with so lightly, he offers up a sequence of 'funeral orations'. In a few paragraphs he outlines how they came to end up dying in the manner they did. But there are moments where he's clear about where to draw the line: what the reader gets is not the full horror, for there are many things that Birahima knows but refuses to disclose. What we do learn is bad enough, even if it's leavened by his Birahima's relentless optimism.

To what extent the book really captures the thoughts of a child soldier is hard to tell. Kourouma's book is also an acerbic attack on the warlords and corrupt politicians who squabble over the lands and the riches of West Africa. Doe, Taylor, Abache, among others, all make appearances, and chapter five is given over to a potted history of events in Kourouma's home country of Sierra Leone. it makes for a scathing introduction to the venal mess created in that part of the world, a writer's counterblast to the machinations of people with power. The book's narrative is episodic, as Birahima wanders around the killing fields in the company of the grigriman, Yacouba, moving from the band of one warlord to another as he searches for his aunt. It may be that it's impossible to convey the reality of the child's mind, and at times the book's central character becomes secondary to the writer's desire to let the reader know about the politics; but somehow the connections stack up and Allah is Not Obliged, in spite of or because of its haphazard narrative, is a powerful reminder of the way in which literature or art alone can offer a voice to the voiceless; can counterpoint the brutal realities of politics with the actuality of what it means to live beneath the yoke of politics.

the gate [w francois bizot]

Some people flirt with danger, some people become acquainted with it, and some have lived with it. Bizot undoubtably belongs to the latter category, as his book documents the time he was held captive by the Khmer Rouge, barely escaping with his life.

The Gate is an eye-witness account of the early days of the Cambodian genocide, written by a French Buddhist scholar whose love affair with the country turned spectacularly sour. However, his affection for the people of that country shines through, and is even discernible in his relationship with his chief captor. The young Bizot develops a complex relationship with Douch, a man who would later find his inner mass murderer. At the time Bizot knew him, the revolution had yet to take on its full genocidal scale, but the conversations documented between the prisoner and his guard go some way towards revealing how an attitude that most would describe as inhuman has its origins in a warped idealism, the by-product of a terrifying faith.

John Le Carre writes an eloquent introduction to the book, and it becomes clear that something of a myth grew up around Bizot. Much of the book feels like a somewhat regulation account of remarkable times, but on occasion there are flashes of insight into the terror that is engulfing Cambodia, a terror that is latent not to a culture, but to humanity, that add another dimension to Bizot's recollections; reminding the reader that he has known things which we, should we be lucky, should never have to confront.

bartleby & co [w. enrique vila-matas]

Bartleby & Co feels like a book that is probably not designed to be read. It is not designed to be read because it is written about the act of non-writing, and therefor non-reading. The book enumerates, in 86 brief episodes, a history of writers who have ceased to write. Whose writing, ultimately, aspires towards the one thing it can never achieve, which is invisibility. Along the way the author references Beckett, Pynchon, Kafka, Duchamps, Melville, Hawthorne, and a host of others who may or may not be real.

The only real problem with Vila-Matas' anti-text is that, besides being provocative, it is also resolutely entertaining. Both of these things force the reader to continue reading, albeit against their better judgement, and in spite of the gauntlet laid down by the author to desist. At times the novel flirts with the idea of a narrative - there are occasional references to the author's job, his solitude, his Bartlebian aimlessness, but the narrative instinct is held in check. The novel operates as a succession of nuggets, each one a story in itself, a potential book which has not been written.

What is this? Is it post modernity? Is there such a thing? Is it the book written beyond the grave of the prophesied author's death? (The notion of which is belittled in one section of the book dealing with a former love of the author who ends up living in Montevideo.) If anything it reads like writing as that rarest of things - pleasure. Vila-Matas loves his stories, he has too many to tell, they annihilate any possibility of creating the kind of novel they used to (and still do) write. So instead his pen flickers over the surface of the paper, a succession of jottings, notes, thoughts, married to the thesis of the annihilation of literature, a thesis which can only be conceived by one who loves it so much.

I didn't expect to enjoy this book. After ten pages I feared it would be no more than an idea spun into a novel. This it either refused or failed to do. It never became a novel. It remained an idea. It should be consumed in small bursts. As though these might be the last original words left to be written or read, and should be savoured as the rare, precious, disposable things that they are.

by night in chile [w. roberto bolaño]

A priest begins to speak. His tone of voice is far from confident. His words seems circular, they roll round on themselves. He claims to be dying, and speaking in order to validate himself in the face of criticisms from a never-named 'wizened youth'. As the words pour out in a stream of unparagraphed sentences, anecdotes take shape - of a meeting with Neruda; of teaching Pinochet about Marxism; of a trip to Europe where every church has its own falcon for killing pigeons. The stories bleed into one another. The priest rambles. He doesn't really make his points. He talks for 130 pages, then he runs out of breath.

This is the third Bolaño novel I've read this year, following The Savage Detectives and Amulet. I've also garnered some kind of a handle on the Bolaño myth, which is destined to grow. Not as a result of his shorter works, but the great sweep and narrative verve of The Savage Detectives, and perhaps 2666, though that has yet to be published in English.

The story goes that around the age of 40, Bolaño decided he was going to make a living from writing novels. He submitted his work for prizes, re-submitting the same peice many times, winning many times. If this is the case, and even if it isn't, the pattern of his work seems apparent. Around the two larger novels he generated several shorter ones, written in short bursts. Amulet takes a character from Detectives, the self-proclaimed Uruguayan mother of Mexican poetry, and spins a yarn from her extract in the larger novel. By Night in Chile introduces the paranoid priest, Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix, and gives him a platform to validate or damn himself, depending on your political perspective.

By Night in Chile allows Bolaño to deal with various shibboleths of his native land. In additions to Neruda and Pinochet's appearance, as book features the wife of a CIA torturer and representatives of Opus Dei. Bolaño's descriptions of the priest's Marxism lessons for the Chilean junta is an understated, savage critique. Sebastian lists the classes he gives one by one, along with the generals' attendance levels and their intellectual responses. Without in any way highlighting his role in the story, Bolaño sticks the knife into Pinochet, damning him through the priest's mouth. Bolaño spent almost all of his adult life in exile. This is politically charged writing, but the skill of it is that it's done in a way so melifluous and underhand that for a while you barely register that the pen is indeed proving to be mightier than the sword.

There's something of Bernhard in the priest's long monologue. Laced with wit and humour, it is also, significantly, poetic. Bolaño apparently resented having to make his living writing novels, never having been acclaimed for his poetry. The way in which stories come in and out of focus, governed by the implacable rhythm of Urratia's mental cogitations, gives it the feel of an extended piece of narrative verse. Perhaps By Night in Chile connects to Bolaño's longer work in much the same way that a poem, created in an abridged period of time, connects to the lengthy process of a long novel. It is a text that could be re-read and mined for the nuggets that nestle in the garrulous priest's prose.