the yacoubian building [alaa-al-aswany]

Alaa-Al-Aswany’s novel has a curious timelessness about it. The Egypt it depicts doesn’t seem all that far removed from Albert Cossery’s Splendid Conspiracy. The matrix of heat, poverty and power generates a torpor which suggests an unchanging world, one where none of its three defining elements will ever change. Power, above all, resides in the grasp of a select, military-protected few, whose grubby self-centredness ensures the nation remains in a state of neo-feudalism. What affects the country is not capitalism, communism or Islamism; it’s venality, dressed up as politics. In the face of this monolithic governing principle, for ordinary citizens to aspire to anything better feels hopeless. Against this backdrop, the lives of the novel’s multiple protagonists play themselves out, almost all headed towards a desultory conclusion. 

However, this isn’t the fifties. it’s the nineties, with the US and its allies, including Egypt, on the point of going to war with Iraq for a first time. As a result, this is a Cairo which is both old-hat and new-hat. The events of the past decade are prefigured. Something is stirring, something which will continue to incubate over the course of the next twenty years or so before it erupts in Tahrir Square. Literature has the power to act like a depth sounder, dropped off the side of the boat, fathoming the deep. In the lives of Taha and Busayna, above all, the currents which are dragging Egyptian society towards revolution and conflict are sounded out. The novel’s artistry lies in the way it knits its portrait of its world together, illustrating, through the present tense of its action, Egypt's past and future. 

inherent vice [thomas pynchon]

OK, so this isn’t vintage Pynchon. In amongst the laurels there were quite a few brickbats for the novel when it came out. It’s not hard to understand why. There’s a relentless frothiness to the narrative and prose, something akin to the holy surfer who is one of the dozens of barely-fleshed-out characters who pops up. Like the surfer, Pynchon seems to ride the waves of his prose, waiting for the one that will propel him onto a higher plain. This doesn’t occur all that often in what is a typically lengthy, if not meaty, tome. However, in the decision to riff off Chandler and Hammett, (with even an occasional nod to his contemporary, Elroy), Pynchon doesn’t seem too fussed with the transcendental or the parabola. This is a nostalgic, amiable text, where the hero, Doc Sportello, will not end up propelled into space, where the hero is, in fact, a hero, who tends to the meek and skirmishes with the forces of evil. It’s more Tolkien than Dostoyevsky. The novel doesn’t even have the metaphysical aspect of a similarly secondary text, Vineland. However, who’s to say that every writer should always emulate his or her peaks? If twere all peaks, the land would be flat. Inherent Vice has enough to keep the reader on their toes, trying to keep pace with the manic process of the detective novel, something Pynchon embraces with delight. This is a Maltese Falcon of a novel, ridiculous and charming at the same time. If anything, it would seem to suggest a paean to a youth the author may or may not have known, the beguiling simplicities of a pre-connected world, when personal space still existed; before we were all plugged into the mainframe. For those that remember that time, Inherent Vice is a treat; for those who, increasingly, will not, it is a pseudo-archeological record, as befuddling and vital as a Mayan codex. 

radical cities (justin mcguirk)

What does architecture have to do with politics? Why is Latin America at the vanguard of post-Fukuyama history? What might the future look like? McGuirk addresses all of these issues in a fluent analysis of contemporary architectural practice in various Latin countries. The book would appear to have been assembled from half a dozen essays, occasionally giving it a slightly homespun, bricolage effect, but this is in complete keeping with the subject matter. The beauty of Radical Cities is the way in which the issues it addresses are so much broader than its apparent brief. As the title suggests, this is a book about the structure of cities, but it's also an urgent investigation into how the urbanised human race might continue to co-exist in a far from egalitarian world. The notion that the space you inhabit affects not just your happiness but also your ethical perspective is effectively made. Furthermore, the book incorporates an implicit commentary on the fate of European architecture in the 21st century, where the profession has become an exercise in marshalling glass and steel for the benefit of wealth production. The idea that it is also an art/profession that might have a positive social impact has been marginalised by the pseudo-Egyptian megastars whose banal vision would appear to be homogenising cityscapes around the world, eradicating difference. Although it may be that this opinion is provoked to an extent by the fact that I find myself writing this in a cafe in the shade of London's Liverpool Street, rather than Ciudad Vieja, Montevideo. 

narcoland [annabel hernandez] & toro negro (d. carlos armella, pedro gonzález rubio)

Narcoland and Toro Negro

Mexico is a bewitching country which also happens to be in a state of disarray. To use British understatement. Annabel Hernandez' book is like reading an account of a messy operation. Surgical, but far from clean. She bravely deconstructs the chaos of her country, tracing links bewteen governments and drugs dealers, laying bare a cynical manipulation of power and wealth. It's a sometimes confusing read, as a blizzard of names from over thirty years are assembled to construct the patchwork quilt which is that same nation carved up by the various cartels and their government allies. The war on drugs is once again shown to be the war for drugs, with the book scratching at the surface of the ties that link events in Mexico to the politics of its Northern neighbour. For those that know about this sort of thing, there's a beguiling reference to Daniel Hopsicker, hinting at those other conspiracies which go hand in hand with the sheer volume of financial gain the drugs industry generates.

Toro Negro is a little-known documentary which has nothing to do with the drugs trade. Instead it tells the tale of a petty bullfighter, whose kamikaze courage outtflanks his skill and whose life is bathed in poverty. His battles with his girlfriend are as fiercely contested as those with the bulls. It's a vivid, hands-on doc, so intimate that at times it seems almost voyeuristic. The director acknowledges his own presence with one revealing shadow shot; there are moments when it seems as though he cannot help but cross the line from being the passive eye to becoming an active participant in the bullfighter's personal dramas. Toro Negro prowls the breeze block houses and shanty bars where its impoverished characters live, in the process lending the documentary the detailed pathos of a novel by Zola or Dickens. It's a great film, and it's also a fine counterpoint to Hernandez' book: the micro to its macro. It documents the desperation that drives young men and women to flirt with violence and death. The bullfighter may have found another way, but his spectacular, foolhardy courage makes him a blood-brother to those who choose to take the narco-path. Many of the leading narcos detailed in Narcoland started off poor, desperate, ready to do anything to get a step up; ready to ride the horns of the bull if that is what it takes. 

hawksmoor [peter ackroyd]

It's interesting to note what Ackroyd himself has to say about Hawksmoor. (You can find it on his Wiki page.) This is a messy, half-formed novel, full of strands and ideas which barely hold together. The historical architect, Hawksmoor, is reinvented as Nicholas Dyer, whose alter-ego is Hawksmoor, a 20th Century policeman who never looks like getting close to solving his case. The book increasingly resembles a shaggy dog story, whose captivating elements will never coalesce into a coherent narrative.

Nevertheless...I read it whilst staying down the road from Hawksmoor's grand Spitalfields church. In my lifetime East London has mutated perhaps as much as it did in the gap between the book's 18th century world and the one Ackroyd was writing in, in the 1980s. When I first came to London this was still a zone which maybe belonged to murderers and alchemists. Now it belongs to bankers and ersatz artists. The warehouses are full of designer goods. The streets pine for the days they were desolate, not so long ago. Ackroyd's book helps to take you back to its former anti-glories. Walk down to the churchyard, and even though a new visitor centre is being built there, it manages to retain, in Winter, a down-at-heel feel which is in juxtaposition with the grandeur of the architect's vision. One day, the wheel will turn again and the shiny new world will start to lose its gloss. Meanwhile, Ackroyd's book, flawed as it may be, will be there to act as a bridge, linking the origins of our flawed enlightenment with the seeds of its demonic demise, which, the book suggests, is concealed within the architect's vision, hidden behind its glory.

laughable loves [milan kundera]

Kundera's early work is a collection of eight short stories. They all deal with the pleasures and pitfalls of sexual relationships. It feels like a young man's book, but a young man who has a sly understanding of the way in which the domain of the sexual encounter in the human sphere is far more complex than the mere mating instinct. Tied up in the act of seduction or desire is the will to power, the will to survival or the will to just get by. At the same time, the stories offer a sideways view of the complications of living within a totalitarian state. A portrait which is all the richer because it reveals that this state still permits the simple pleasures of flirtation and debate, but impinges at the edges, constantly marking out the limits of possibility, with a fall from grace forever on the edge of the subject's view. At times the preoccupations and worries of these cold-war Czechs don't seem that far away from those of Updike's suburban Yankees or today's harassed first-world capitalists. For all their intelligence, sexuality and charm, they are still neutered by the demands of the system they inhabit. Something which infiltrates the mechanisms of desire, which are conditioned as much by power as Eros. But no doubt it was ever thus, and it's a reflection of Kundera's nascent mastery that he succeeds in revealing how human instincts, especially of the more romantic kind, are always compromised and complex, no matter the ideological context within which they are framed.

murder city [charles bowden]

Murder City

Bowden's book charts events in and around Ciudad Juarez 2008-2009. He grapples with a violence which escalates, from his point of view, into something which is beyond rational explanation. The book is a fierce, quasi-poetic attempt to go beyond the figures and the standard explanations. In many ways, it is a sister-work to the section of 2666 About the Crimes. Like Bolaño, Bowden makes an attempt to de-render literature speechless in the face of the barbarity of the border zone. Both writers insist on documenting the remorseless appetite of the violence, which seems to become almost an entity in its own right, whilst at the same time insisting on the fact that it is something done by and affecting humans, people who in another life might have lived 'ordinary' lives. 

Unlike 2666, Murder City is a work of non-fiction. Bowden seeks out characters and tells their story, from the born-again assassin to the journalist on the run. This journalistic strain goes hand-in-hand with the writer's agonising attempts to find a kind of sense in these stories. In the end he seems to suggest that he sees Ciudad Juarez as a Hobbesian vision of the future, where the daily concerns of modern capitalism are blown away by the anarchic whirlwind of survival and fear. What's the point of fretting about your future when a random act of violence could destroy it at any moment? Ciudad Juarez comes to represent a model of anti-progress, the antithesis of the American dream.  

The book also cuts to the quick about the way in which Mexico has become a narco-state; at the same time debunking the myth of the war on drugs. As Bowden points out, this isn't a war on drugs, rather, it's a war for the drugs trade and its enormous wealth. The army and the police and the state are just as much players in this war as the narcos themselves. Escalante's film Heli depicted this cruel world where the good guys just don't exist. Events in Ayotzinapa only serve to rubber stamp the depiction of Mexico Bowden's anguished book presents. Murder City should be required reading for anyone who wants to begin to get a grip on the hydra-violence which permits the combined forces of evil to not only perpetrate its grotesque crimes, but also do so with a sense of complete impunity. 

avant (d juan alvarez)

Juan Alvarez’s Avant opens with a shot of the Sodre, a purpose-built concert hall that, like many big projects in this part of the world, opened years late, over-budget, looking like a white elephant. The narrative kicks in with the arrival of Julio Boca as the Sodre Ballet’s new artistic director. Boca is the superstar of Southern Cone ballet. Which means he’s more than just a ballet dancer. In Argentina and Uruguay he is revered. An Argentinean, he agreed to take on the artistic directorship of the Uruguayan company after having retired from dancing himself.

Avant traces the development of the Sodre Ballet as Boca’s management helps to transform both ballet and the building into a flourishing success. But this is just a single strand in what is an increasingly complex and sophisticated narrative, told with a detached eye and a finely-chiselled edit. The film touches on how hard it is to produce work of artistic ambition in the third world; but it also adheres to a democratic vision where the cleaner’s importance is respected just as much as that of the prima ballerina. This is a film conscious of its context, unafraid to allude to the socio-political conditions the ballet operates within.

However, no matter where it takes place, ballet is ballet. Avant is, above all, a film about what it’s like to create ballet. The show that reaches the stage, full of clean bodies in perfect sync, belies the labour that goes into the creation of the art. Alvarez’s film traces the thousand and one elements that go into the creation of a ballet, offering along the way some kind of insight into the stress that Boca and his company contend with as they struggle for perfection. Scenes such as a ballet dancer exiting the stage in tears, or Boca himself contending with the problems of communication from the sound booth, or the simple case of a man trying to pull an office chair up a flight of stairs, offer vivid insights into the difficulties of both creating ballet as well as creating ballet in the third world, without the film ever having to resort to any kind of formal explanation or exposition.

My personal relationship with the Sodre has lead to an understanding of an art which for many years I didn’t get. In Alvarez’s backstage vision we see how ballet dancers are as much like sportsmen as artists, pushing bodies to their limits, constantly challenging themselves. Where Alvarez could have gone for the X-Factor approach, his film instead conveys the dancers’ dramas with an  understated eye, showing how their efforts are part of a greater whole. Alvarez achieves this with an almost metronomic discipline as he builds his portrayal, frame by frame. It is a cliché which, perhaps, he might not object to, to say that the film is a ballet in its own right, prioritising image and music above the spoken word, capturing the essence both of the Sodre and of ballet itself.

don't point that thing at me [kyril bonfiglioli]

This is the first of a trilogy of Mortdecai novels. Mortdecai is a decadent bon viveur who is also a dodgy art dealer trying to get rid of a stolen Goya. This makes for an elaborate, zesty plot which darts around London before nipping over the Atlantic to take in Washington and Texas (road journey incluido) before hopping back, via Eire, for a dénouement in the Lake District.

The plot is ridiculous and a coat-hanger on which to hang the wit and wisdom of Mortdecai himself. He’s a deliciously British figure, second cousin to Bond, whose amoral approach to life doesn’t prevent him from having rigid codes of behaviour and a clear idea of what’s right and wrong. Although what’s wrong might be the way you pour your tea or knot your tie, rather than whether or not you’re prepared to murder or fence stolen goods. Of course, Mortdecai’s amorality is something he shares with the workings of the British state, which has no qualms about murdering or torturing if it feels the need, and in this the book, written in the early seventies, is still timely.

The London section of the book is set in a world of Mayfair art galleries and Gentleman’s clubs. It might be one of the few corners of the capital that has not changed beyond recognition. A vivid description of a visit to the East End shows the lost London of small, artisanal barrios, which reminded me of the London I knew thirty years ago.  

Bonfiglioli, hardly a household name, has been something of a connoisseur’s delight for decades. All this is about to change as, having completed the book, I learned via the interweb that a great big movie starring Johnny Depp is about to be released, based on the Mortdecai adventures. One can’t help feeling that the protagonist of the novels might have felt, or indeed be feeling (do literary characters ever really die?) somewhat dubious about the prospect. Nevertheless, Bonfiglioli deserves the larger public he’s about to get and would no doubt be sanguine about the trade-off between commerce and art which one is sometimes forced to make. 

yalo [elias khoury]

Months which are not turbulent in the Middle East are welcome. This last couple of months have been particularly lacking in this respect. When people look back in twenty years at the Summer of 2014 in Palestine, Syria and Iraq, will they remember the terrible events which have befallen them, or will it just blend into a generalised history of catastrophe and violence?

Khoury’s epic and terrible book is set in the Lebanon, in the nineties. I recently read that a new synagogue is being built in the Lebanon, a sign of its current stability. A whole generation will have grown up which will have no memory of the events in that country, events which destroyed Beirut and made the Lebanon a basket case for over a decade. Every day from my youth seemed to bring a fresh tale of woe, a tale which at the time seemed as though it would have no ending.

Khoury’s novel is set in the aftermath of that civil war. However, that war, just like the ones currently raging in the region, was part of a wider conflict. The anti-hero, Yalo, traces his roots to Aleppo, Damascus and Turkey. He can’t be sure if he’s Arab, Assyrian or Kurdish. His grandfather is a priest from the last Christian sect which speaks the language of Christ, or so he claims. He berates his grandson for not being able to speak the language himself, telling him: “To whom do you think you will talk at your second coming?” The Grandfather’s religious philosophy offers an overbearing Gnosticism, one that Yalo can never get to grips with. “’I am Mar Afram’ the grandfather answered, and he smiled because his grandson was such an idiot that he didn’t know that all the writers of the world are merely copyists and there is only one, hidden book on the face of the earth, a book not written from human inspiration, and that when people write literature or poetry, parts of this book are revealed to them and they copy them down a rearrange them.”

Yalo is born into this confusion and is a product of it. He is not particularly religious, although he believes in the miracle he thinks his mother and grandfather performed when they drank the seawater of the Mediterranean. He is pliable, unsure of his identity, gullible. He fights briefly in the war and then is easily convinced when a fellow fighter suggests they steal from the company safe and run away. That same fighter then leaves him high and dry in Paris. He is brought back by a Lebanese arms dealer as a guard. He discovers that he lives in what would now be called a notorious dogging spot, in the country, and begins a brief career as a rapist and thief, a career which comes to a halt when he falls in love with one of his victims, who will later denounce him.

Yalo has plenty in common with Mersault, Camus’ anti-hero from L’Etranger. Any sympathy we feel for him is grudging and hard-earned. Seen from the outside he’s a miserable character. However, we watch Yalo as he buckles under hideous torture and gradually his whole construction of his self, his identity, starts to fall to pieces and then reassemble itself. So much so that by the final part of the book, the narrator, who is Yalo, has come to see his former self as another man, whom he observes and talks to.

The novel narrates Yalo’s story in a circuitous flashback. Its present tense is the interrogation cell, where Yalo recollects his past and tries to assemble it in a form that will appease his interrogator. Yalo’s is a terrible journey which comes at the end of the terrible journey which has been his pitiable life. It’s the life of any young man who has the misfortune to become caught up in the internecine strife of the region. Whose world view is constructed around the myths of his family, the urges of his masculinity and the peer pressure of the militarised world he inhabits.

The book was intially published in 2002. Twelve years on, its bleak vision appears to be more apposite than ever.