cadejo blanco. (w&d justin lerner)

Cadejo Blanco, the notes advise, is a local Guatemalan name for a mysterious beast. Towards the end of the film, the protagonist, Sarita finds herself alone in the jungle and hears a strange animal cry, which might be the Cadejo. On the other hand, the real malevolent beast is clearly the gangster who runs the local crew in the sleepy seaside town of Puerto Barrios. Sarita has come there looking for her sister who has gone missing from the home they share in a poor corner of Guatemala City. Before she leaves for the coast, she visits her rich boyfriend in the house he inhabits in the private gated community, indicative of the two tier world, reminiscent of Melchor’s Paradais. Things go much as one might expect when Sarita reaches the coast. From bad to worse. She survives on her wits, as the narrative makes her face one challenge after another. The film on the one hand does an effective job of getting under the skin of this marginal community, and on the other perhaps soft-soaps a tad, particularly with regard to the problem of sexual violence. One worries that, no matter how testing Sarita’s journey will be, what the director shows is just the tip of the iceberg of what really goes on. The film is held together by Karen Martinez’s fearsome performance, an actress exuding complete commitment to the role. In an interview, the director noted that he worked on the whole with local kids/ actors, but for the lead he recognised the need to cast a more experienced actress and Karen Martinez delivers with real verve. 

the hatred of poetry (ben lerner)

Lerner’s slimline elegant dissection of the problematics of both writing and reading poetry can be devoured in one sitting. Essentially, of course, The Hatred of Poetry is a love letter to poetry. Lerner’s neo-Platonic thesis is that all poetry is measured against an archetypal and fictional idea of ‘poetry’ to which the poet can aspire but never reach. “Hating on actual poems, then, is often an ironic if sometimes unwitting way of expressing the persistence of the utopian ideal of Poetry…” As someone who struggles with the act of reading poetry for altogether different reasons, reasons wrapped up in the relentlessness of modern life, the presence of so much else that needs reading, the lack of space for poetry, (utopian or otherwise), I felt as though there were many aspects of the poetry debate, and the decline of poetry (If such a thing exists) that Lerner skirts around.  Even if the universal Whitmanesque poet appeared (a possibility he challenges), would anyone actually read him/her? How universal can a marginal sport be? The sense of academics shouting at each other in empty rooms perhaps permeates the text; nevertheless it is an engaging, nimble-footed read. Even if it left me wondering whether I shouldn’t have dedicated the time I spent reading the book in reading some actual bloody poetry…

10:04 [ben lerner]

Who is Ben Lerner? This isn’t a challenge or a call-out, more, it seems to me, a logical reaction to his prose-poem of a second novel. The novel is about a writer who lives in NY who has recently been commissioned to write his second novel after the unexpected success of his first. This first novel is never named as Leaving Atocha Station, but that’s about as ambiguous as it gets. The writer makes no bones about the autobiographical mandate of the novel which shall be written, (which we are reading), detailing his relationships, his work, his low-fi Brooklyn lifestyle which, like the novel, seems to carry with it an air of vague if undesired hipsterdomness. A trip to the New Mexico desert which leads to a ketamine blow-out ends up being more Whitman than Jay McInerney. Lerner appears to be a reluctant new literary god, but at the same time there’s an unavoidable self-mythologising at work here. Which leads us back to the question I opened with: who exactly is he? Is the author we read about in the novel anything like the man who writes the novel? Does the novel’s apparent bid for a kind of transcendent authenticity, (again pace Whitman) have any authenticity? 

Lerner is hardly alone in going down this path. Of contemporary novelists one can think of Toussaint, Amis (at a pinch), Chefjec and presumably a host of others who I haven’t come across. Further down the line are the likes of Celine, Bataille or Proust. The play between a lived actuality, a fictional actuality and a fictional reality is fertile territory, not least for the poet, whose work is so often made out of the stuff of personal feeling. (Not always, Keats v Tennyson being a reasonable counterpoint, for example.) In his first novel, Lerner’s alter-ego persona seemed quite self-consciously manipulated for comic effect, using the trope of the American abroad as much as his own lived experiences in Spain, suggesting a wilful discord between the writer’s ego and that of the character who represents him in the novel. 10:04 blurs the lines far more effectively. The urge to try to extract ironic capital from the situations presented is restrained (even in the ketamine episode). As a result this novel is less funny, harder going, but feels more heartfelt. The narrator’s concerns remain heavily poeticised but are firmly felt. As he muses on both life and death, (there’s a lot of cancer in the book and he’s also seeking to help his best friend get pregnant), and the fragility of modern existence. Two storms threaten his NY sanctuary, hinting at the impact of global warming; his girlfriend creates art out of art which has succeeded in losing its value, leading us to question the value of value of itself. He helps a friend’s child create a book about the dinosaurs. The final sequence of the novel (which reminded me of the closing speech in Stephens’ Harper Regan) has him and his now-pregnant friend walking the streets of a storm-stuck Manhattan, in what might have been a post-apocalyptic landscape. This feels like a serious novel dressed up as a light-hearted one; a novel which instinctively rejects narrative, although finally finds itself unable to escape it. (In the end the friend is, after all, pregnant.) 

All of which gives the novel an evasive feel, as though the author wants to hide the truth of what is ‘really’ happening (or perhaps he’s incapable of ‘really’ recounting it); just as the writer himself remains something of a crepuscular figure. Apparently revealing so much, about his philosophy, cooking habits, sex life, etc, but in practice leading the reader to question what exactly has been said, and, more importantly, what hasn’t been said. 10:04 is a dense novel which resists any notion of ‘flow’;. stopping and starting with a deliberate awkwardness, full of moments which appear to reveal something but are then discarded (like the other novel which the novelist was going to write but in the end decided to delete). Like any fine poem, it’s a piece of writing which would merit multiple readings and exegesis, but sadly this must be left to the grad students who will pore over it in decades to come, as an example, alongside Franzen (although I say this never having read him) or Rippi of the new-neurotic American novel, which emerged in the wake of those brash, confident figures from the late decades of the twentieth century. 

leaving atocha station [ben lerner]

It might be hard to explain how much pleasure this book has given me during the course of various frenetic, pre-departure days, punctuated by alcohol, hospitals and multiple viewings of The Tempest.  

Lerner's mendacious anti-hero poet is something of a blood brother to Alan Pauls' anti-hero in The Past. Both are addicts, both are unhinged. Lerner's narrator is perhaps funnier. His self awareness is lacerating. He lies with all the panache of a dromedary, if indeed dromedaries lie.

Amongst its many brilliances, this is a brilliant book about the pleasures and pains of inhabiting a second language. The way in which a foreign language acts as a cloak, behind which the stranger can allow him or herself to be reinvented as an enigmatic, fascinating character. Even though the enigma represents nothing more than ignorance and insecurity. 

The counterpoint to all this is that Lerner's narrator, feckless though he is, is also given by the author language which reveals a mind of unfettered brilliance. Out of the soup of words, he conjures those phrases which great writing nails, the ones that make you go: Exactly! That's exactly right!

This is of course Lerner's brilliance on show, rather than his narrator's. It is Lerner who instructs the reader in how to read John Ashbery, how to misread a woman's words, or even your own, how to meditate on the relationship between politics and poetry. It's quite a skill. You don't have to have been to Atocha station with its unmentioned jungle to appreciate all this. Or even Madrid. If you have, it's an added bonus.