happiness and love (zoe dubno)

Came across Zoe Dubno via an article on her friend, Adam Tooze, which included Tooze’s sclerotic take on the Biden-era democrats whose complacency has, in his view only facilitated the rise of Trump. Tooze is one of those writer-journos, like Jäger, whose take on geo-politics or eco-politics (in both senses) is always worth reading, so was curious as to what kind of a novel a close friend of his would come up with.

Whilst reading up about her, I discovered, like Calderon, she’s a fan of Bernhard, and indeed this is made explicit through a note at the end of the book acknowledging the influence of The Woodcutters on the novel. Fans of Bernhard in the Anglo-Saxon world are a select bunch. As I began to read the novel. I realised that it could almost be seen as a homage to the Austrian. Happiness and Love is a stream of consciousness thought-piece set at a New York supper party, supposedly held in honour of a recently deceased actress friend.

Apart from this structural echo, the narrator’s tone is also decidedly Bernhard-esque. She is full of loathing for Eugene and Nicole, the pretentious pseudo-intellectual couple hosting the party. Eugene is a mediocre but well-connected artist, subsided by his wife Nicole, scion of a wealthy family. The echo with Tender is the Night is probably not accidental . (“Nicole trapped in the perfectly terrible cage of her own creation”). The novel, through the narrator’s voice and that of another actress who arrives late to the party, lays into these over-privileged mediocrities with gusto.

There is an unlikely synchronicity, a crossover, with the last novel I read, also about metropolitan socialites. At one point someone in the novel says: “I see no difference between someone reading Virginia Woolf and Twilight.” Perhaps, as in the case of Latronico’s Perfection, Dubno runs the risk of being hoisted on her own petard. (Or indeed, Fitzgerald himself.) In focusing on the objects of her scorn, Dubno could end up actually promoting them. Maybe this is why she makes the decision to switch from the narrator’s voice to the actress’ to deliver the coup de grace at the book’s conclusion - by framing this sclerotic attack in the third person Dubno intends to lend the book’s critique a sense of a greater objectivity.

Or perhaps not. Whichever, the novel is a great addition to the canon of novels about the superficiality and vainglory of the upper classes. (Although referring to my above point I note that it was listed as one of Vogue’s best books of last year…)

I also enjoyed the writer’s observations on contemporary trends in literature:

That’s why it’s such a great failing that literature these days has become so incredibly banal, so fixated on worthlessly depicting the mundane thoughts that their authors have as they drink a cup of coffee and mourn that their lives aren’t more special. They’ve given us in Hollywood a monopoly on joy and humor and wonder.

mrs dalloway (virginia woolf)

The other day we walked through Bloomsbury and saw a sign for a Dalloway court, or some other confection made up to honour Woolf’s protagonist. Even though Mrs Dalloway doesn’t live in Bloomsbury, she lives in Westminster, and she never goes there. This seems to reflect the way that Dalloway (and perhaps Woolf herself) have become signifiers which might not have that much to do with their original essence. It’s not clear to what extent the author even likes her protagonist, a woman who has chosen an easy metropolitan life above any bohemian  instinct she might once have had. Who has rejected the more dangerous Peter Walsh and married Richard, a minor member of parliament, someone who couldn’t be more establishment if he tried. The Prime Minister comes to her party. She’s a far cry from the ideal of Bloomsbury independence and self-publishing. The emotional heartbeat of the book, surely influenced by Joyce, is the tragic returning soldier and his Italian wife. The soldier suffers from shellshock, or PTSD in today’s terms, and his delirium is at odds with the addled comfort of Dalloway’s life. When news of his death infiltrates her party, she feels resentment. A resentment at the realities of politics and history intervening on her idyllic set-up. Which in reality is far from idyllic, as she has lost touch with Walsh and her friend Sara Seyton, the two real conduits for any kind of emotional or artistic life she might have lead. Dalloway has been mirrored onto Woolf, but she feels like a vacuous copy. The sort of lady who lunches that would now be found in Notting Hill and environs rather than Westminster.

This mirrors the way that Woolf has been appropriated as an exemplar of a certain kind of studied, pseudo-aristo, pseudo-bohemian Englishwoman. An image that lurks at the edges of brands like Marks and Spencers and Laura Ashley. She has been appropriated by the marketeers of this type of ghoulish loveliness, to be consumed by the Mrs Dalloways of her day. Walsh, whose underwhelming career has played out in India, as part of the great colonial project, feels an extreme ambivalence about this England to which he has just returned. “Lord, lord, the snobbery of the English! thought Peter Walsh, standing in the corner. How they loved dressing up in gold lace and doing homage!"

At the same time, Woolf’s prose contains the lyricism of poetry. The most vivid moments are reserved for Septimus, the shellshocked soldier, and it’s via his shellshocked voice that the writer achieves an Eliot-esque song: “Burn them! he cried. Now for his writings; how the dead sing behind rhododendron bushes; odes to Time; conversations with Shakespeare; Evans, Evans, Evans—his messages from the dead; do not cut down trees; tell the Prime Minister. Universal love: the meaning of the world. Burn them! he cried.”

+++

“It might be possible, Septimus thought, looking at England from the train window, as they left Newhaven; it might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.”

the book of blam (aleksandar tišma tr michael henry heim)

The Book of Blam was Tisma’s first novel in a trilogy. In some ways, having already read Kapo, it feels as though the author must have been building up towards the extremes of the later novel. The Book of Blam, set in Novi Sad, is a circuitous read, stitching together diverse fragments taken from the life of the book’s protagonist, Blam, tracing his ancestry, his lost love life, his failures, his escape from the pogrom, but also the fate of his family and friends, almost all of whom died during the war. As stated, this feels like a less traumatic entry point into Tišma’s writing, which, given the cruelties the book relates, seems astonishing. Tišma’s even handedness in describing events in Novi Sad during the war is extraordinary. 

martyr (kaveh akbar)

Akbar’s novel is a tremulous US-Iranian tome, featuring a maudlin poet and a cunning plot twist. It’s a novel that meanders, drifting between scenes from Indiana, Iran and New York. It might be described as a coming-of-age tale, even if Cyrus, the protagonist, is nearly thirty. But he’s a loser, baby, and this is the story of his coming to terms with being an immigrant and a slacker, as he seeks out the secrets of his family history, supposedly left behind in the unknown lands of the orient which he has never visited. The novel is punctuated by Cyrus/Akbar’s poems, and held together by a thread that pretends to deal with Martyrdom, as the title suggests, even if Cyrus’s declarations in favour of martyrdom lack credibility, and feel as though they come from the US side of his nature, rather than the Iranian. He’s too comfortable in his uncomfortable skin for us ever to really believe that he would do anything more extreme than catch a plane to New York. One remains with the lingering query of how different his journey and the novel might have been had he taken a plane to Tehran instead. 

bass instinct (two fingas)

Bass Instinct is set in nineties London. Its protagonist is a cycle courier stroke DJ stroke Ladies Man. Much of the book is couched in the terms of a black macho identity, where women are little more than bodies and the music and the weed is all that makes life worth living. As much as a novel, this feels like a document of a time and a place, that esoteric world of clubs and high rises, of men and women doing humdrum jobs by day before transforming into romantic superstars when they head out into the glory of the city’s nightlife. This encapsulates the bittersweet glamour of living in one of the world’s great cities, where your mere allegiance to that tribe appears to endow you with magical powers, in spite of having little to back up that endorphic sensation.

 

patria (homeland) (fernando aramburu, tr alfred macadam)

Patria is a phenomenon as much as a novel, the fate of books that get adapted into blockbuster TV series’. The doorstopper book relates the Basque independence conflict through the fate of two families, whose friendship is destroyed by politics and ideology. It’s a saga, which reveals the way in which ETA split the Basque world in two  and the novel reflects this, skipping backwards and forwards in time in clipped, syncopated chapters.

 

el desfile del amor/ the love parade (sergio pitol, tr. george henson)

Pitol’s rangy whodunit offers a vivid portrait of DF from both 1942 and twenty years later. The narrative is constructed around the enquiries of a historian into a murder at a house split into apartments in a fashionable barrio, during the war. The historian was a child living in the house at the time. Now married with two children, he has been living in the UK, but plans to return to his roots. The premise allows the writer to introduce a medley of colourful characters from the Mexican capital’s arts and social scene, highlighting its cosmopolitan nature. The narrative is slightly stop-start, and something of a shaggy dog story, but it gives an insight into the feverish atmosphere of wartime Mexico City.

london and the south east (david szalay)

Seeing the author awarded the Booker, and investigating his back catalogue, this seemed like a good entry point. A novel set in London in the world of telephone sales, and, as the title suggests, the South East. It’s a world I once had some knowledge of. My first “job” in London was in an institution very similar to the one where the protagonist, Paul Rainey, works, selling advertising space in spurious magazines. Unlike Paul’s world, which is white and predominantly masculine, based in Holborn, my workplace was in Cricklewood, and my most notable companions were from Ghana and Nigeria, as well as Meli Rome, an Italian former model who had a bedsit in Knightsbridge and had fallen on hard times. It was a world shadowed by the cynicism of the world Szalay depicts, but also a gateway to the more cosmopolitan universe of London, which also included IRA pubs and old colonels.

I only lasted a month, and was rubbish at it. Rainey has lasted 15 years, even if he too appears to be rubbish at sales. Something he recognises and wants to escape from. The novel follows his descent into a tepid midlife crisis. Paul, like his colleagues, his partner Heather, and anyone else he meets, is not a sympathetic figure. It feels as though we’re skirting the edges of the land knowns as Amis-country, a jaundiced trek through the sufferings of the lower middle class, men who spend their lives in pubs, women who are decidedly secondary figures. The book rolls along efficiently, and Paul’s misadventures boil up towards a comic denouement. Nevertheless, this feels like the kind of novel that the British literary establishment adores, a somewhat patronising peregrination leading to a foreseeable resolution. 

war and war (lászló krasznahorkai, tr. george szirtes)

László Krasznahorkai looks in his younger photos a bit like Thom Yorke. There’s something of the recondite, complex musicianship of Radiohead in the prose of Krasznahorkai, which drives around in circles looking for an exit that never opens up. So the driver starts talking about how he’s been driving in circles for hours, spinning plates, and how the way things are going petrol consumption is going to be the end of the world, but he can’t help it, he still needs to find a way out and if he stops the car that’s never going to happen, so he has to keep going and if he does ever find a way out he knows it’s going to lead to the great revelation of why the world is neither round nor shaped in a manner that anyone could ever possibly imagine. A secret some people have known at various times in history which keeps getting misplaced or forgotten, because the world is an amnesiac structure, but if he can ever find a way out of this circular motion, these circular structures, then he might just let us in on the secret, if the narcos don’t narcolepse us first, because they too want the secret or the money or the car or your soul. And the narcos usually get what they want, because that is the way of history.

In short, a hypnotic read. 

persuasion (austen)

I turned to Austen’s late novel in a bid to go back to a classic after wading through too many contemporary novels that seemed to be saying less than they pretended to. Austen has a sanctified status in the UK. A pioneer of the female novel, a subtle investigator of the human heart. Not to mention a fertile source of eminently commercial period drama.

The novel sets out a clear and predictable obstacle for Anne, its protagonist. Eight years after declining the proposal of her suitor, Wentworth, on the advice of friends and family, she finds herself still in love with him. When he returns to her circle after years abroad with the navy, Anne is convinced Wentworth has moved on, as well as harbouring resentment against her for having refused him. At the age of 27, she feels her best days are behind her, and has to come to terms with disappointment in love and life. Part of the problem with the novel is that Anne is so damned nice, whist the rest of her family are monsters. Austen mines this for both humour and moral judgement. Her father and two sisters are vain and selfish. Next to them, any normal individual would look good, but Anne is positively saintly. Beyond her lack of confidence, she never does anything wrong. There comes a point in the novel when we long for Anne to screw up in some way, but this never happens.

Which reflects the fact that, from the moment the novel moves with Anne to Bath, not a lot seems to occur at all. There’s a long chapter of exposition on the part of Anne’s friend to tie up a subplot regarding her cousin who seems intent on marrying her; a few set-piece moments where Anne and Wentworth cross before the final resolution of their story. But it all feels disarmingly pedestrian. The penultimate chapter contains Anne’s meditation on the difference between the sexes, which one imagines marries to Austen’s view, along with her wry observation that you can’t trust novels on the subject as the medium has been dominated by men. A delightfully arch observation, but this alone is insufficient to lend the novel any real sense of depth. It’s a strange experience to read a novel that has been so lauded, adapted and fetishised within British culture, only to find oneself reaching out for a branch of significance as one drifts away on its mellifluous tide. 

dengue boy (michel nieva, tr. rahul bery)

Dengue Boy belongs to that fin-de-siècle genre, the video game novel. I don’t get to read that many of them, but it reminded me of Pelevin, and I imagine William Gibson, (who I’ve never read). The virtual reality novel, where characters plug into worlds within worlds. Neva makes an explicit reference to Borges towards the end of the book, (The Aleph), suggesting a larger genealogy to the genre, and perhaps it might also be said to reference back to Huxley, Swift, More, etcetera. The invention of imaginary parallel worlds has always been the stuff of fiction. The technological gizmos of high capitalism only serve to garnish another layer of accessibility to these worlds.

Neva’s dystopian text is set in a futuristic climate-warmed hothouse world where concepts like cold are a thing of the past, only existing in expensive reproductions for obscenely wealthy tourists who travel to an ice-free Antarctica for a taste of something they have heard of in folk tales. The world is afflicted by giant mutant mosquitos which are capable of laying waste to everything in their path, spreading disease, death and destruction in their wake. These diseases are then monetised, as the bio-industry produces profitable vaccines to counter them. The reference to Covid 19 is implicit. In amongst the catastrophe porn, Neva invents a new sub-genre of mosquito splatter-gore. That the novel is Argentine is perhaps surprising, with its playful reimagining of Argentine geography post the rise in seal-levels which has liquidated Buenos Aires and the coast. Above and beyond the politics, the mash-up of ideas and excess seems to echo the trajectory of contemporary Argentina and its current Dengue Boy president. 

armand v (dag solstad, tr steven t. murray)

Solstad’s novel has the beguiling premise of being an assemblage of footnotes towards the novel he might have written. Might have written in so far as - there might be a novel which exits but will never be read to which these footnotes belong, or the novel might just have existed in his imagination (in which case could it be said to exist or not?). This playful premise would seem to open the door for non-linearity, deviations, Mornington Crescent. Which it does, to an extent, even if a surprisingly coherent narrative emerges of a man who studied the sciences, then got married, had a child, became a diplomat, separated, married again (this is less clear), had a son who as a young man chose to join the army, against type and his father’s wishes,  and then suffered an accident meaning the father has to take care of the son in spite of their distanced relationship. As this storyline suggests, there is a determined narrative running through the novel, even if it is only told partially, with gaps. The novel also cleaves to that other shibboleth, character, with Armand, the diplomat, emerging as a strong, complex protagonist. All of which left this reader hankering after more disconnect than the novel provides, perhaps. It’s a staccato read, as some sequences of footnotes arrive in a rush and other footnotes are extended over several pages, including a brilliant account of Armand perceiving the head of a US ambassador as a pig’s head, in the gents of a gilded London venue. This is worth the price of entrance alone, albeit there is the lingering sense that Solstad is sketching out an idea which might have produced a more radical book than it does. 

the children (carolina sanin, tr nick caistor)

In keeping with the style mentioned with regard to the last Colombian novel read, The Children employs a discourse which meanders as much as it flows, and is peppered with detours and dead ends. The story of Laura, a woman from Bogota who has a private rental income but nevertheless, to keep herself busy, works as an occasional cleaning woman. One day a boy appears outside her house and her life changes, as she first sends him to social services after taking him in, then seeks to locate him within the bureaucratic maze of the social services, then finds him, starts to take him out and about and ends up adopting him. However, the statement of the bald facts does no justice to the circuitous nature of the novel, which adopts a disinterested observational tone, as though the writer is a scientist looking at strange amoeba as they misshape and reform under the gaze of her microscope. 

bone ash sky (katerina cosgrove)

The shadow of Palestine hangs over Cosgrove’s novel. It connects two massacres, the Armenian genocide and the Sabra and Shatila killings in Lebanon in 1982. The novel traces the forced flight of a family from Ottoman Armenia in 1916, following three generations who eventually make Beirut their home. The key narrative hook is told from the POV of Anoush, the third generation, whose grandparents were Armenian and whose father was a falangist allied to the Israeli invaders who participated in the 1982 massacre. There might be said to be a twin thesis to the book. On the one hand, with echoes of Elias Khoury, there is the logic of generational angst meaning that violence is hard-wired into people’s DNA, and history will continue to throw up more and more instances of inhuman brutality. On the other hand, the novel reaches for an optimistic, multi-faith final act, as Anoush succeeds in transcending religious difference in a cosmopolitan city which has, for now, achieved the same thing. The events of the past two years, (and I write these words on the 7th of October), would sadly seem to lend more credence to Cosgrove’s first thesis. 

the devil of the provinces (juan cárdenas, tr. lizzie davis)

There is a certain style of Latin American novel which Cárdenas’ book maps onto. An elliptical narrative with a semi-alienated protagonist. A sense of quest, to discover something which the reader realises by the midpoint of the book will never be found. A distancing device, perhaps, hinting at a post-political vacio. In this case the protagonist, a biologist, returns to a small Colombian town after fifteen years abroad. He hooks up with old friends and an ex and his former dealer. He has a job in a girls’ school which is mysterious and possibly nefarious.  His brother was a gay politician who was murdered. The novel also incorporates observations on biology, palm weevils and avocados. There’s no shortage of thought-provoking material, but as noted everything is processed through the deadpan attitude of the biologist, for whom nothing seems to matter an enormous amount. 

set my heart on fire (w. izumi suzuki, tr helen o’horan)

The protagonist of the novel goes by the same name as the author. Izumi is a model who hangs out with rock stars and makes no bones about the fact she likes getting laid. Then, half way through the book, she meets the darkly controlling Jun, a jazz guitarist. Jun is a manipulative controlling personality. Izumi is a drifter, a wil-o-the-wisp, who gets caught in his slipstream. He is abusive and ends up going insane. The first half of the novel feels as though it takes place in a limited timeframe: the second half unfolds rapidly over the course of a decade. Izumi’s descent, tied to Jun’s lunacy, is vertiginous.

It’s not hard to see why Izumi Suzuki’s writing struck a chord in the Japanese psyche. She writes with a candour that pierces the codified society. Sex, violence, drugs: nothing is held back. It’s particularly surprising to see Izumi’s wilful licentiousness and the detail the author provides, without ever seeming salacious. This is how this young woman, representative of a certain zeitgeist, lives. Japan’s social codes have perhaps always concealed a more sexualised undercurrent, the world of geishas and arrangements. Suzuki smashes through any kind of hypocrisy, offering a convincing vision of an alternative slacker society. 

los divinos (laura restrepo, tr. carolina de robertis)

It’s 17 years since I read Delirium by Restrepo, although it feels like yesterday. Our relationship to the books we read is atemporal. They function on a different plane. It’s nearly forty years since I first read Foucault, but my relationship with him hasn’t aged in the slightest. Almost everyone I knew from that era has gone, save family. But he sticks around, with his bald head and his laconic questions. Restrepo’s Delirium has always stuck in my mind as a window into Colombian culture. It’s a country I have never visited, but it forms part of the Latino universe and I have come across many Colombians in Montevideo. Post civil war, post the era of the edge-lords, Colombia might have appeared to settle down. Los Divinos offers a sclerotic take on the social divides which exist in the country, and indeed across the Latino world, where those who belong to or associate with the wealthy elite act as though they only have a passing relationship with the law. Los Divinos - the divine ones - are five over-privileged friends who are due a dose of hubris. Narrated by one of them, with not so much as a single sympathetic character, the novel has a harsh, acerbic flavour. We don’t want any of these characters to emerge unscathed and perhaps for this reason it’s a less engaging read than Delirium.

 

the fraud (zadie smith)

Hard to know how to place The Fraud. It’s a novel about London, about Victorian England, about being a writer, about slavery, about being black in a white world. It’s also about being a Scottish spinster who has a kinky relationship with her cousin and is in a menage a trois with the cousin’s wife. That’s before we get to the narrative spine of the novel, which is the recounting of the factual scandal of the Tichbourne Claimant which shook up Victorian Britain. There’s a lot going as the novel jumps around 40 years of history, looking to land punches left, right and centre. Sometimes they land, but at other times it feels as though the novel’s most urgent themes run the risk of getting lost in the wood of highbrow entertainment, as Smith wrestles with a sickening heritage whilst keeping the reader amused. 

faraway the southern sky (joseph andras, tr. simon leser)

Curiously, Faraway the Southern Sky is billed as a novel. It tells the tale of a narrator who is researching the years that Ho Chi Minh, who at that stage went by various alias’, spent in Paris. The novel recounts the narrator’s wandering through Paris as he seeks out the sites where Ho lived, and digs into the archives to find documentation of his time in the French capital, from 1918 to 1924. It is full of observations from the time of the author’s writing, about the gilets jaunes, about the changes to the geo-dynamics of Paris since Ho’s day. It doesn’t feel like a novel. It feels like the account of a flaneur with an interest in Marxism, the colonial struggle and the workings of power. It is a slight book, but anchored around the search for Ho Chi Minh, it is captivating. The level of espionage and state security around Ho, at that point no more than a dreamer, an anti-colonial wannabe, is striking. The police state was not invented by the Nazis or the Chinese or Trump. It has been around forever. Ho comes across as an elusive, idealistic soul, almost a flaneur in his own right. 

a weekend in new york (benjamin markovits)

Almost a decade ago I read You Don’t Have to Live Like This by Markovits, which I remember as a wistfully astute dissection of Obama era USA. Ten years on any US idealism that might have existed has been subsumed by the geriatric administrations of Biden and Trump. A Weekend in New York sees the writer focusing on a family weekend in up market New York, as a B-List tennis player competes at the US Open and his intellectual powerhouse family come to watch. The book, as the title would suggest, is set over a single weekend, before the tennis player’s opening match on the Monday. Markovits takes us in painstaking detail through the hours, switching his attention from one family member to the next. The family bickers and their vulnerabilities are put on show. Markovits isn’t interested in conclusions, there is no real narrative (we never learn the result of the tennis match), rather his is a snapshot of a world, perhaps Knausgaard-esque (not having read the big K) or Woolfian. It’s faintly addictive, perhaps like watching a tennis match, as the reader’s head turns from side to side, but these are not easy characters to engage with, with their lightly-taken sense of privilege, their views of Central Park and expensive brunches. These people are on the fringes of the rulers of the western world, nabobs in an imperial system, but the writer seems to shy away from casting any kind of judgement, as if he were another family member, unwilling to rock the boat. The most intriguing strand in the book is the one around the elder bother, Nathan, who is investigating the legal framework for the state’s right to unilaterally assassinate via drone strike. It feels as though, in this era of para-legal playstation killing, Markovits is touching a nerve that is both fascinating and urgent, but he pulls his punches, and the novel leaves us little the wiser with regard to the issue or the state of the nation under discusion. 

Ps - publishing this at the time of the US Open happening, it does feel as though Markovits might have delved more into the world of tennis, the hook upon which the novel is hung. The excesses of the tennis circuit, the unbridled arrogance of globalisation, the egos… it all feels as though it would be ripe for the author’s analytical intelligence.