fathers and sons (turgenev)

Turgenev’s novel has always felt like a lacuna in my reading. In a way it is an Austen-esque novel with an Austen-esque title. A novel that examines the petit bourgeois of the nineteenth century, their dreams, and frustrations, both romantic and pragmatic. Of course there’s a seismic difference in the way in which the respective writer’s country’s histories played out. Arkady gets his pleasant romantic finale,  but the book is dominated by the would-be anarchist, his friend Bazarov. It’s Bazarov’s fate which foreshadows the history that was to come, half a century later. It’s feasible to think that Arkady and his young bride, Katya, could have lived to see the revolution. So whilst the novel, published mid nineteenth century, is on the one hand a sentimental critique of bourgeois Russia, it is also prophetic. Bazarov himself is a man out of time, deluded as to the scope of his ambition and power, and revealed to be a child when faced with the realities of love, in the shape of the queenly Madame Odintsova. Arkady, who makes peace with his father and his way of living, is the survivor, supposed inheritor of a rural Austen-esque life of diligence and tranquility. There are, of course, other echoes. Of Chekhov’s mercurial landowners, Bely’s radical anarchists and Dostoyevsky’s extremists. Turgenev’s novel seems to exist in a state of suspended animation, half-way between two worlds. To an extent the novel surprised me with its moderation, its gentle examination of the lives and loves of a younger generation which is akin to the lives and loves of any younger generation, full of missteps, embarrassment and endings that could go either way. There’s something paternalistic in the novelist’s approach, and like any parent, it exudes love for each and every one of the book’s children, its characters.

 

in diamond square (w. merce rodoreda, tr peter bush)

Rodoreda’s quietly expansive novel covers the years before the revolution in Spain, the war itself, and the aftermath. The narrator, Natalia, is a Barcelona native. Rodoreda recounts her life with simplicity and moments of lyricism. As such the novel gets under the skin of an ordinary woman, who has moments of dire struggle and moments of comfort and happiness. And lots of pigeons. Her first husband, Joe, decides he’s going to make money out of pigeons and converts their home into a pigeon sanctuary. Natalia puts up with this for as long as she can bear it. Eventually Joe is called to the Aragon front, and the pigeons leave. These are the kind of cotidian details that make up people’s lives and the author captures Natalia’s cares with precision. The novel also serves as a document registering a Barcelona that has been lost. A friend was there this month and talked of how it has been overrun by tourists. Barcelona is now a global city. Whether this is for the better or the worse of its citizens is open to debate. Rodoreda’s novel shows a level of poverty which was terrifying, and which conditions life choices Natalia feels compelled to make. At the same time, the novel reveals a communal life in the heart of the city which has doubtless been eroded by property speculation and hyper-tourism.

false war (carlos álvarez, tr natasha wimmer)

Álvarez’s exile novel is a bricolage. There are scenes from Cuba itself, but also Miami, Mexico City and Berlin. The novel adopts the fractured narrative so beloved of postmodernism (or wherever it is we have got to), skipping not just from country to country but also across timelines. The unifying thread is a deadpan discomfort, shared by many of these characters, from the first person narrator to the female psychologist. There are various strands whose juxtaposition makes for an abrasive read: no sooner does the reader begin to connect with one sequence than they are thrown into another. It’s reminiscent of Enrigue’s Hypothermia  or Luiselli’s Faces in the Crowd, other writers who appear to embrace a mosaic narrative, as they seek to portray the complexity of the modern day frontlines between first world and third.  

stalingrad (vasily grossman, tr. robert & elizabeth chandler)

It’s taken a month to read Stalingrad. Which given the thematic, seems quite rapid. Vasily Grossman’s epic text is in many ways an anti-novel. It has no central character as such. Minor characters appear and take over the book for chapters at a time, then vanish, never to be heard from again. Split into three parts, it feels in the opening part as though this will be a classic Russian novel (with an acknowledged homage to Tolstoy), following the fate of a single Stalingrad family, the Shaposhnikovs, but as the book evolves, this central thread becomes more and more tenuous. Characters of apparent significance are despatched to Kazan, or death. This is a counter-intuitive methodology, which would go against all the tenets of the courses dedicated to the art of the novel. Yet there it stands, Stalingrad, a bastion, a monument, a living embodiment of sacrifice and struggle. Day by day, it feels, both in the reading of it and in the chronology of events, Grossman draws us into the looming conflict, which finally explodes in the third book.

Literature isn’t about character journey or narrative structure. It’s about capturing reality. So, Grossman will move from the frontline to a factory hundreds of miles away - where the weapons which permit the frontline to keep fighting are created. Or even, in one extended sequence, the coal mines from whence the power to keep the factories running is sourced. War is a chain of social interactions and commitments. To document its reality, the writer has to be prepared to dig down into the roots. Even the camels on the steppe and the fish in the rivers are affected by the hell that has been unleashed by Hitler, and the writer’s pen pays its dues to the beasts too.

The book, more than aware of its own significance, moves from scenes with peasant women to scenes with Hitler himself. The battle of Stalingrad signalled the beginning of the end of the fascist war of conquest, a war that would end in ignominious defeat. In the UK we are weaned on D-Day and Dunkirk as the great heroic events of the Second World War. Grossman explains with an almost clinical brilliance how it was at Stalingrad that the tide was turned. German soldiers idly speculate on taking India next. The riches that lie to be claimed in the Urals will continue to fuel their conquests. But a few brave soviet soldiers hold them back, fuelled, the writer argues, by a commitment to the communist cause and the sense of solidarity that the philosophy engenders, a solidarity that endows the resistance with the strength to defeat the geo-political odds. 

nada (jean-patrick manchette tr. donald nicholson-smith)

Manchette’s tale is something of a political-policier potboiler. A group of anarchists kidnap a US diplomat and encounter a predictable fate. It’s pacy, pulpy and seems very much rooted in its time. To think that in the seventies politicians and businessmen were kidnapped or assassinated on a fairly routine basis in France, Spain Germany, Italy, the UK, USA. It must have made the countries on the other side of the iron curtain seem like oases of peace. That kind of terrorism has been scotched, seemingly, to such an extent that the instinctive response to a supposed assassination attempt (cf the USA) is to dismiss it as a false flag. Manchette mentions the Tupamaros, who also kidnapped a diplomat, this time British, but whose fate differed from those of his anti-heroes. That event was part of the other Cold War, the war of idealists against the military-business consortium. It was a war that was definitively lost, as we can see from the way in which the weapons industry now exerts an outsized influence on political action, just as much if not more so than in the seventies. The tragic, unheroic deaths of almost everyone involved in the kidnapping operation feels like cynical but truthful takedown of the thwarted dreams of an alternative society to the capitalist model. 

mars in aires (alexander lernet-holenia, tr. robert dassanowsky & john s. barrett)

Lernet-Holenia’s novel, the second of this year, takes place in the days at the start of the Second World War. A veteran Viennese soldier, Count Wallmoden, has no real inkling that war is about to break out. He becomes besotted by Cuba, a mysterious woman, a femme fatale. Just before he has an assignation with her, his company begins to march into Poland. The world is on the brink of war but Wallmoden is distraught he cannot meet up with Cuba. He is certain that the military manoeuvres will end shortly and this will all blow over. The account of the march into Poland is detailed and specific. It doesn’t have the feel of the start of a world war, and Wallmoden compares what is happening with the horrors of the First World War, which he fought in, and feels that it’s quite lightweight. Until he is almost killed as the battles intensify. It’s a fascinating account of a moment when the horrors that will be shortly unleashed are only just emerging from their chrysalis. The tale is also a ghost story. Cuba, Wallmoden is later told, has died. He later meets a woman in a deserted Polish mansion who has the same name. A ghost story in times of war feels even more  understandable or plausible. (One thinks of the seances in Gravity’s Rainbow and the fascination in the First World War.) Mars in Aires is a novel which on one level feels straightforward, but contains a concealed level of complexity, even danger. 

“However, there is no doubt that we – and how often! – for moments, for days, yes, sometimes even longer than that, are in completely different realms, even though we think we’re here, and we live a life there and do things about which we know nothing. But we do live it, that life, and perhaps it’s the real one.”

the big nowhere (james elroy)

It’s so long ago since I read Elroy’s Underworld trilogy, which offered both a re-imagination and an examination of post-war US politics. One longs for either Elroy himself or another Elroy to analyse the Trumpian world with the same forensic discipline. Most history, as Marias observes, occurs in the shadows, and Elroy is a writer who is not afraid to walk in those shadows and take the reader with him. Perhaps because the trilogy felt so urgent, so necessary, I have resisted his crime novels. The Big Nowhere is the second of his LA Quartet, and whilst it doesn’t do so directly, it still flirts with politics, pulling up the skirts of the US establishment. Elroy writes with an urgency as he documents the way a crime investigation is railroaded by vested interests within the LAPD. There is no space for idealism or even honesty in this venal world. It’s a gripping, coruscating read, which gives a down-to-earth lowdown on what really makes the US tick. He is a writer blessed with a singular, scatty brilliance.

 

unfinished business (michael bracewell)

Bracewell’s novel is reminiscent of Szalay’s London and the South East. Middle aged man losing his way after a life spent in offices. After reading Souvenir, with its playful non-fiction elements, Unfinished Business feels less adventurous in its approach to a London that has been loved and lost. There’s a plethora of characters who gravitate around the hapless narrator, including his ex-wife and in-laws and daughter. Bracewell plays with time as we skip in and out of the present. At one point he writes of the narrator: “To walk through London, he always felt, was to walk through the many chapters of his unwritten autobiography.” The novel is perhaps at its sharpest when it reveals the way in which our personal histories become inscribed in the bricks and mortar of the city. 

kairos (jenny erpenbeck, tr michael hofmann)

The transition of Berlin from a city divided to a city unified is one of the more epic geopolitical tales of my lifetime. My generation grew up with the Berlin Wall and this island outpost of “the West” within the communist empire. This in itself being one of the most long-lasting and evident aftershocks of the Second World War. The wall felt intractable, as though it would be there forever. So when it went, it revealed the porousness of historical absolutes. Nothing lasts forever.

Erpenbeck’s novel tells this tale from the point of view of the East, which could be termed the point of view of the losers. It’s a love story which from the get-go seems fucked up. Hans is in his mid fifties and Katharina is nineteen when they meet. For all that the narrative is largely told from her besotted point of view, the reader knows this isn’t a happy-ever-after tale. As Hans becomes increasingly controlling and abusive, with Katharina seemingly unable to see the wood from the trees, the novel takes a darker turn. The reader is asked to buy into their unpleasant, toxic relationship. The writing itself becomes more and more uncontrolled. Characters come and go, there are sudden jumps in time. Hans and Katharina are devastatingly unhappy, then they’re cosy all over again. It’s a vortex, and the vortex spins and spins. The point of view of Ingrid, Hans’ wife, is only touched on, and Katharina seemingly has no sense of guilt or responsibility towards the unfortunate wife, unable to see Hans for what he is.

Which will finally be revealed when the novel reaches its epilogue. They have a word here, remate, which literally means ‘finish’, but is also used to mean something like ‘a sting in the tail’. Erpenbeck keeps this up her sleeve. (Perhaps a DDR public would have worked this out sooner.) Hans, a novelist and journalist, is not quite what he seems, and even Katharina, his long-term lover, is unable to work this out.

All of which is complex, even torturous. The middle of the novel is a mazy, roundabout read. The reader, blessed with historical knowledge the characters don’t have, knows where this is headed. The fate of the relationship is tied to the fate of the DDR, a country that will soon cease to exist. The last quarter of the novel documents the decline and fall of East Germany with great precision. The writer skips over the day the wall is breached, because this isn’t a novel about that moment. It’s a novel about the effects of the transition on the individuals who lived in the East, who, in one way or another, adhered to the values, flawed or not, of the East German regime. The novel suddenly becomes more political, as the looming demiurge of capitalism overtakes and invades. Erpenbeck knows that, like the relationship of her ill-crossed lovers, the project that is dying is doing so because of irredeemable flaws. But still - there was something there, wasn’t there? Another way of living, beyond callow materialism.

In this closing sequence a novel which seems at times to deliberately alienate the reader comes full circle. The sting in the tail is at most an afterthought. The dream died a long time ago. All that was left was the shadow of the dream, the missing teeth of the wall that sought to keep out Mammon. 

+++

Nb - I have recently read two non-fiction books about the DDR, Red Love and Stasiland, which help to contextualise the world of Kairos. As the world reverts towards an extreme dichotomy between ‘The West’ and all that this has come to imply, and the unknown, ‘East’, the dialectic which Berlin itself represented for nearly half a century seems more and more a representation of the different paths the world might have taken.

decline and fall (evelyn waugh)

Waugh’s first novel may be a minor piece of literature, but it still has the feel of a writer who knew how to capture the zeitgeist. Which is half the battle. The title itself is instructive. The decline and fall is not of the Roman Empire, but the British. However, Waugh is writing during the empire’s swansong, when Britain was still arguably the most powerful nation on earth and the map was still covered in pink. The world my grandparents grew up in, which would come to a terminal halt with the outbreak of the Second World War. Waugh namechecks Bauhaus and Le Corbusier. The Honourable Margot Beste-Chetwynde’s Elizabethan Manor House is rebuilt as a modernist masterpiece/ horrorshow. The protagonist, Paul Pennyfeather, is sent Virginia Woolf’s latest novel to read in prison. Waugh might be a young fogey, but he’s a fogey who knows which way the wind is blowing. The novel is a satire, but this is a gentle rather than Swiftian satire, with a commercial bent. Waugh came to my attention then other day when Peter Hitchens posted an interview with him, saying that the way he spoke English took him back to his youth. HIs lack of intellectual ambition feels like the product of high-englishness. As though to say, why in the world did this little island come to be so important? A historical fluke and a mercantile instinct, which had unforeseen and unnecessary consequences, whose demise was always imminent, even if it took a hundred years to fulfil. The United Kingdom today is not so far removed from Waugh’s world, with its archaic traditions and social divisions intact, but the full effect of the decline and fall has now kicked in, and it has become a country gradually slipping further and further into irrelevance, an archipelago of historical resonance. 

the monroe girls (antoine volodine, tr. alyson waters)

A strange post-civilisation world. A world where the dead and living live side-by-side. Mysterious squad of female assassins, who may or may not be coming back from the dead. A narrator who is two people, first person and third person. Discursive scenes followed by staccato moments of violence. Volodine’s text has something of Burroughs about it, with added humour and a post-apocalyptic slant. 

count luna (alexander lernet-holenia, tr. jane b. greene)

Reading Lernet-Holenia’s curious text which is something of a shaggy dog story, I was myself haunted by the shadow of a Viennese count.

Count Luna tells the story of Jessiersky, a wealthy Austrian citizen descended from a mittel-european family with roots in Poland, Ruthenia and other parts of the Austro-Hungarian empire. When the Second World War breaks out, Jessiersky is tasked with buying some land from Count Luna, which he doesn’t want to sell. The end result of this mismanaged transaction is that Luna ends up in a concentration camp, and Jessiersky feels a cloying guilt which then transforms into a vengeful psychosis, as he tries to locate the mysterious Luna, who he believes is taking revenge on him. It’s a novel about psychosis and delirium, which fittingly starts and ends in the catacombs of Rome, the deep substrata of catholic Europe. The ideas don’t go as far as they might, but it’s an entertaining and quietly disturbing read.

My haunting came from realising the Viennese world which Luna, Jessiersky and the author belonged to was also a world my lost grandfather would have shared. He died in the Second World War, my father never knew him, and that whole strand of the family only slightly reconnected in the 21st century. Yet, the shadow of the Viennese count has always lurked in the background. Perhaps acting as a distancing mechanism from the actual world, as Luna does for Jessiersky. 

uncle anghel (panaït istrati, tr. maude valérie white)

Uncle Anghel is a novel of two halves. The first is told from the point of view of Adrian, a young villager whose uncle, Anghel, a formerly prosperous innkeeper, has gone to ruin. Adrian returns from travelling just in time to attend the death throes of Anghel, a formidable, cursed soul, who has no regrets. The second half of the book is narrated by Adrian’s cousin, Jeremy, who is present at the deathbed. Jeremy tells the story of his rumbustious childhood living with the famous bandit, Cosma. These adventures have less of a Schopenhaurian feel than the first half of the book. It has the flavour of a Jack London adventure story, as the author returns to the tales of his youth. 

souvenir (michael bracewell)

This slight half-fiction, populated by pop stars and flaneurs, does what it says on the tin. It remembers. In a succession of vignettes, Bracewell traces an unofficial history of the capital from ’78 to ’85. This is the land of music and fashion, of the unheralded and the heralded. People who went to parties in council blocks or art galleries, people who walked the streets wondering at the dazzle, clocking the passers-by, living outside thoughts of the future. It’s a small, beautiful book which captures the city in the years before I knew it, albeit the traces of that time were still around when I arrived in 88, the last gasp of the pre-digital era. If you really want to know what London was like in those days, you can do much worse than spend an afternoon with Bracewell’s Memoir. 

These Polaroid photographs, by contrast, were deeply English, neo-Romantic in spirit: Paul Nash, John Minton, Derek Jarman; the lane in deep green evening light, abstraction on the beach, the personality of inanimate objects (a jar on a windowsill, a dirty windowpane, a stricken tree, moss on blackened brick); the stilled or violent atmosphere of time and place thickening to numinosity.

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.