a visit from the goon squad [jennifer egan]

Goon Squad is a dazzling novel, which flips around in time like a dolphin, with a similar degree of grace and look-at-me chutzpah. After having read it, I later discovered that its reputation is already well established. It won its author the Pulitzer Prize and HBO are in talks to turn it into a mini-series.

From Egan’s point of view that’s undoubtedly a good thing. All the same, I’m glad I discovered it without the hype. (Still not all that big in Montevideo, so far as I can tell.) When it came out it was compared directly with Franzen’s Freedom, a book she says, in an interview, she has yet to read; she’ll wait until the hype has died down. Hype compels the reader into taking a standpoint not merely with regard to the novel but also the novel’s reception. (Or the film’s or the song’s etc). For anyone wary of the literary establishment, its approval is a double edged sword. In that context it’s worth knowing that Egan claims to have yomped through years of rejection, that this is no overnight success.

You can see why the book has been struck a chord. It manages to capture an urban overview of the years 1980-2010. The novel is set in New York; San Francisco; a safari in Africa, Naples. But predominantly New York. The fractured narrative (natch) leaps backwards and forwards, riffing like a jazz tune, as it follows first one character then another as they dance through time. Part of the fun of the book is never knowing where you’re going next, whose journey you’re going to be dipping into. The presence or absence of the twin towers is dealt with more effectively and elliptically than in any other work of post-911 literature I’ve come across. These New Yorkers have a frame of reference which is not so very different to a Londoner’s. The music they listen to, the dreams they carry around with them, the disappointments and satisfactions of age. The characters reminded me of people I have known, feelings I have had, none more so than when a group of young New Yorkers find themselves out all night, pushing through to the tragic dawn.

As such, Goon Squad has the feeling of being a touchstone for a generation. It has hints of Pynchon in its sometimes euphoric prose and the name of one of the lead characters, but perhaps more than anything it is reminiscent of another New York novel, albeit one which is on some levels very different, James Baldwin’s Another Country. This comparison perhaps also suggests the book’s Achilles Heel. Where Baldwin’s novel was posited within a radical discourse, Egan’s feels thematically weightless. There is no ‘political’ anchor. (Small P). The final two chapters of the book, both situated in a future where climate change appears to have become an even more dominant issue than it is now, are the first where the novel’s episodic approach starts to feel hollow. These excursions into the what-might-be feel weak in comparison to Egan’s insight into the what-has-been. The resonances of objects; of personal effect and affect as we span the years; this is where the writing feels most vital. The decisions made in adolescence which will shape the span of one’s life for decades.

the briefcase/ strange weather in tokyo [hiromi kawakami]

So, I’m going to pitch you the latest. It’s about a woman who is in her late thirties. She likes a drink. She’s not an alcoholic, but she likes a drink. She’s lonely. We don’t know much about why. She hangs out in bars. Drinks beer on her own. One day she runs into her old teacher. He’s in his sixties. They have a drink together. His wife ran off and left him. He’s lonely too. They have this friendship. And she starts seeing another guy. But then she realises she’s falling for the professor. They have this “in-sync” relationship. I know you’re thinking it’s kind of creepy. He’s almost old enough to be her granddad. I know you’re thinking all that. But it’s not like that. It’s quirky. It’s irreverent. It’s engaging. They’re engaging characters. You’re just being politically correct. And anyway. Wait for it. They’re Japanese. That makes a difference. You’re already subtly altering your cultural framework, I can see that. You’re thinking, if I decide that this narrative, this story, this mise-en-scene, is a bit creepy, then am I being, even ever so mildly, am I being racist? Is my political correctness not so politically correct? And I’m going to give you something else. This book, Strange Weather in Tokyo – yeah, they changed the title, it’s written by a woman. Not just any woman. One of the major writers in contemporary Japanese culture. So now you’re doing a swift 180. I can see that. I can understand. The original title? The Briefcase. Yeah, that is creepy. I mean, that’s a creepy title. It’s all he leaves her. There’s nothing in it. He’s not a creep. No. No way. They like beer and saki and food and it’s healthy. You need to switch that mindset. That Hoboken, Harrods Food Hall, Hanif Kureshi mindset. Stranger things have happened. Yeah the cover photo is a bit of a soft-sell. Pretty girl floating in space. No. Really. It’s a very subtle piece of writing. About interiority. I don’t know. I made it up. I don’t know if it’s a real word. It probably is in Japanese. No I don’t speak the language. Change your mindset. Get with the program. 

the gentle art of tramping [stephen graham]

This 1927 tome is a softly spoken meditation on the joys of ‘tramping’. It comes from the epoch of Chaplin and Ragged Trousered Philanphropist, as well as having rural echoes of Benjamin’s urban flaneur. Other points of reference are the Wandering Jew, the hobo, On The Road, the shwami. The tramp is a man whose material possessions, though enumerated and valued, are few. What he has he carries with him. Graham outlines the significance of the book, the coffee pot, the blanket and the other accoutrements of the road. But none of these should impede which is the tramp’s most valuable possession, his liberty.

There’s something fascinating about the tone of Graham’s book. It has a knowing, urban air. There’s a conscious romanticism at work. His tramp is not some skin-and-bone figure desperate for his next meal. As much as this tramp might be said to hark back to a pre-industrial landscape, s/he might also be linked to the modern backpacker. Graham’s walking took him to the US, Russia, Mexico and large swathes of Europe. He was a bounty hunter searching for experience. There’s the assumption of a surplus wealth which allows the tramp to select his adventures, to dip in and out.

Graham’s book tallies with a new, contemporary interest in man’s relationship with the natural world, apparent in the writing of the likes of Macfarlane but also the ‘living-with-nature’ television of Mears or Grills. Modernity is clinging on to the very notion of nature, scared it will be swept away forever by our treasured ‘digital revolution’. We don’t seem to need nature much anymore. Yet we can’t help suspecting that we’re missing out on something through its gradual annihilation. Which could go hand in hand with a terrible revenge, caused by our neglect and disrespect. Graham’s tome prefigures this crisis, but does so in a jaunty way, at a time when melting icecaps and global warming were not even conceived. Nature is still bountiful, the fruits and berries there to be plucked. So this is a book which sings of another age, whilst hinting at our own.

the golden scales [parker bilal]

Parker Bilal's novel is a detective story, set in contemporary Egypt. The book's Sudanese hero, Makana, has been thrown out of his own country and seeks to get by in Cairo as a private detective. His Chandleresque lineage is evident. Bilal depicts Cairo as a kind of LA of the East, a nexus which drags in not merely Egyptians and Sudanese, but also Brits, Russians, Italians. Egyptian society operates on a pivot between Islamic extremism and hedonistic European capitalism, both of which compete for position and influence. Perhaps this conflict is the one balanced in the scales of the book's title. A key event is the bombing of a Red Sea resort by Jihadists. Only, Bilal astutely locates this supposed act of geo-political war within the context of personal vendetta and misplaced egos. The implication is that of history as cock-up rather than conspiracy, something the world-weary Makana adroitly understands.

The detective novel is a fine surgical tool for getting under the skin of a society. The Golden Scales takes us into the Jihadi's den and the capitalist's penthouse. Along the way we are offered an insight into Egyptian society that the media, for all the coverage the country has received in the past few years, cannot hope to emulate. In addition, in the tradition of the best detective novels, it provides a riveting read as the reader roots for Makana in his quest to discover the whereabouts of the wonderfully monickered Adil Romario, a playboy footballer who has vanished without trace. 

a month in the country [j l carr]

Carr’s book deceived me. It’s a title that lurks in a somewhat unspecified fashion as a minor classic of c20^th British literature. I came across a reference to it in an academic history of the British countryside in the 20^th Century. The book deals with the immediate aftermath of the Great War, as its protagonist, Birkin, recovering from shellshock and a marriage broken by the war, heads to North Yorkshire to work on restoring a medieval fresco in a village church.

The story is slight, at a mere 100 pages or so, and atmospheric, rather than driven by plot. In the isolated village, under an August sun, Birkin gradually recuperates. He strikes up a friendship with an archaeologist, falls for the vicar’s wife, and discovers a centuries-old mystery snared in the images the church fresco reveals. All of this is told in an understated, nostalgic prose. The events which Birkin experiences are less significant than the way in which they contribute to his recovery. The book is an artful paean, which makes reference to Houseman and Elgar. There is a pleasantly multi-cultural surprise in the revelation of the fresco’s mystery. But above all it is a homage to a lost time and place, an England where villages still had the feel of a hobbit’s shire, where it was possible to feel oneself lost in its bounty.

Carr’s deceit, I learnt upon concluding the book, is that it is a text written in the latter half of the twentieth century, by a man who was born during the course of the 1^st World War. A Month in the Country is unembroidered fiction. Any documentary pretensions are merely that. Nevertheless, it succeeds in convincing, perhaps because of its slightly ad hoc approach, that the author or narrator indeed lived during that time in that England, a time when the rupture of the future was on the cusp of being finalised, destroying a way of life which had subsisted for centuries, not quite ended yet, the past clinging on by its fingernails.

just between us (w&d rajko grlic, w ante tomic)

Just Between Us is a dry comedy which owes a lot to Schnitzler’s matchless La Ronde, as it follows the fortunes of a group of people all of whom are, according to their respective degrees of seperation, romantically involved with one another. At the script’s heart is the character of Nikola, played by the charismatic Predrag Manojlovic. He is a wealthy married man who leads a double life, with a long-term lover and child living in the same city. He visits her when he is supposed to be abroad on business trips, and their shared joke is that they are in Munich or Oslo or Dubai, or wherever it is he has claimed to be.

There’s something slightly tenuous about this and the narrative often has the feeling of having been fleshed out with the use of Venn Diagrams or an Excel Spreadsheet. Of greater interest, perhaps, is the way in which the film offers a sideways and warm-hearted look at life in the Croatian capital. The angst of the nineties is hinted at, when Nikola mentions how he had to flee to the States, but now these characters are thoroughly integrated into a modern (pre-crash) Europe. The apolitical nature of the film seems almost a declaration of intent: we too can make fuzzy romantic comedies, along the lines of Hollywood or Richard Curtis.

Manojlovic played the father in Kustirica’s When Father Was Away On Business, before the nation state of Croatia even existed. His doleful face seems to carry the wear and tear of history, but it’s all below the surface, hidden away in a locked drawer in his character’s designer apartment. Now that history is done and dusted, serious time can be dedicated to frolicking and romantic escapades; the eternal wheel of duplicitous shenanigans can resume its remorseless grind. 

the return [bolaño]

Another volume from the posthumous pen of. What to make of this collection, ripped from two volumes published in Spanish, Putas Asesinas and Llamadas Telefonicas?

I have no idea when these stories were written within the timeframe of the Bolano oeuvre. My hazard-a-guess would be they come from towards the end, rather than the beginning. The author starts to show a fascination with more colourful “characters”. Porn stars, footballers, a Parisian playboy, fashion designers. It might be that these stories, which seem dependent to a certain extent on the exoticism of their characters’ professions, do not work as effectively as those which adopt either a more neutral protagonist, or, the classical Bolanian trope, either a writer or the writer’s alter-ego. Belano or Bolaño appears in several of the stories. When he does it reminds us of what a skill it is to construct a self-referential protagonist without this seeming whimsical or self-indulgent. All too often, this device will lead (pace Amis) to something clunky and unconvincing. But when Bolaño makes an appearance in one of his own stories the voice, the turn of phrase, feels completely authentic. Of course, it is a voice from beyond the grave, but it almost feels as though the text was indeed written from that vantage point, the high peaks of death. One of the stories, The Return, is told by a dead man, but oddly the dead man’s voice here is less compelling than the dead voice of the author. Even though this is also the author’s voice and even though in the moment of writing the author was not, we imagine, actually dead.

Writing is by definition a self-indulgent process. The wife of a writer friend of mine once turned on him, telling him it was all masturbation. It’s a regular attack and, when the writer isn’t getting paid for their troubles, one that is not ungrounded. The writer plunges into the morass of their own mind, hoping to emerge with gems which, for some unknown reason, might be of interest to others. This is as much an urge as a skill, more an addiction than a virtue. What’s so beguiling about Bolaño is that the reader knows this is not a man who wrote for money  or even for fame. He wrote because he obeyed the compulsion to write, something that is detached from the industry of writing, an industry which includes the whole paraphernalia of criticism. That compulsion, shaped and honed through both practice and the act of reading, lead to the unlikely event of his books sitting in your hand, or your digital device. There might be thousands of Bolaños out there, unread, undiscovered, drowned under the weight of their unrecognised words. It is worth bearing in mind that, although his success is not entirely posthumous, it is largely so. Right up until the beginning of the end, this is someone who wrote into the void, unafraid, refusing to be silenced by the absence of an echo that might have marked the point which defined the writing’s raison d’etre.

The last story here is an account of a dream, a dream wherein he meets the poet Enrique Lihn. The story states that the dream took place in ’99. Lihn died in ’98. Lihn is therefore a ghost, although ghosts are allowed to roam free in our dreams, whilst real life ordains they remain on the other side of the crepuscular surface of ‘reality’. The story doesn’t really go anywhere. It’s just an account of a dream. It mentions the fate of another five authors who Lihn once nominated as the future voices of Chilean literature, once upon a time, all of whom have either died or seen their stars fade. What is the point of this story, this dream? It doesn’t possess the classical virtues of a well-rounded story. Yet it marks a completely satisfying conclusion to the collection of short stories. Because this is a ghost writing about a ghost. Who was also a writer. Literature, for all its masturbatory tendencies, is a death defyer. The writer, from the cocoon of his absence, maintains a presence. The universe of literature, just like the literature of dreams, resists the supposed laws of physics. The writers egotistical I triumphs. Bolaño, one feels in his writing, had a grasp of this, much as Homer or whoever else one wants to name did. Those writers who are not so much charging over the precipice of their society, as most do, for fame or fortune, but charging over the precipice of mortality. An altogether more audacious, Quixotian endeavour.

the last cowboys at the end of the world [nick reding]

The travel book is a strange beast. Of late I’ve enjoyed Stasiuk’s poeticised wanderings around the Eastern European hinterland. However, all too often, travel writing allows for someone connected enough to the publishing industry to fly in, sample a culture, offer their opinion, however well educated, and move on. Travel writing as an extension of the Sunday supplement. This tends to lead to an account which says more about the writer’s own culture than it does about the cultures he or she have chosen to visit.

Reding’s book is nothing like this. It would be harsh to even describe it as travel writing, although it recounts his journeys to Chilean Patagonia in the nineties. It reads more like a novel. Both on account of the engrossing narrative and also for the way in which this narrative succeeds in encapsulating the arresting, harsh changes which “progress” brings in its wake. Which is another way of saying that it touches on the grand themes of history post the industrial revolution, an ongoing revolution whose reach grows ever more pervasive as the world shrinks.

The book recounts Reding’s stays with a Chilean Gaucho, Duck (or Pato) and his wife, Edith, and their three children. Pato and his family live an isolated life which is not much different to the one lead for hundreds of years by gauchos in the Southern cone of South America. It’s a harsh life which Reding does his best not to sentimentalise. For all the beauty of the relationship with nature and the dignity of an existence which does not depend on possessions, it is also a life beset by boredom, superstition and alcohol. Duck possesses the kind of cowboy charisma which Hollywood stars aspire to. He can ride a herd through mountain passes, butcher a ewe in the flash of an eye and cope with anything mother nature wants to throw at him.

Only things are not quite what they seem. Were this the standard fare of travel writing we would be given a homily to gaucho life and its nobility and the writer would move on. Reding stays. He witnesses Pato’s alcoholic binges and the slow decline of his relationship with Edith. But even more heartbreakingly, he documents the way in which both tire of their rural idyll, with dreams of moving to the nearest town, Coihaique, a town which has been transformed by the arrival of Pinochet’s road. The hardship of living on the land proves too much and they leave. Knowing, in their heart of hearts, that the town is liable to destroy them. Just as the arrival of paved roads and later the internet, (the book hints, even if it was written before the digital revolution really took off), will end up destroying the itinerant gaucho existence. The gauchos, Reding seems to suggest, have become anachronistic. Modernity will change farming methods and destroy the very isolation that has helped to preserve their way of life. A way of life that Reding seeks to document, aware that it is ebbing away.

Hence the decision of Pato and his family to move to the town mirrors the societal changes that are occurring in Southern Chile. Although Reding has noted the downsides of their rural life, there is still something desperate about seeing humans stripped of their savage independence by the onset of progress. It may be a choice that Duck and Edith make themselves, but it is also clear they cannot fight history. The last line of the book, one that is self-consciously understated, comes like a hammer blow, a terrible vengeance on the part of modernity, that devil, for anyone who seeks to stand in the way of the road it is driving through nature.

Reding does the job of a historian and a novelist. He captures the dying of a light which few cared about in the first place. It is a beautiful, terrible story, one which succeeds in telling us as much about the shape the world has chosen to take as it does about the gauchos, their myths and their fading, compromised glory. The only question the book cannot answer is to what degree his own arrival, like the bearded white men of yore,  contributed to the changes in the perspectives of Duck and Edith. There is a hint of guilt, which is only to writer’s credit. He too is part of the destructive wave of change coming to Patagonia. As the tale unwinds you can smell the melancholy that cloaks the writer’s words.

television [jean-philippe toussaint]

Television is another novel which inhabits the curious novella/ journal territory which seems increasingly popular at the edge of the latest modernist universe.

You, the reader, will accompany me as I take you on a stroll through my curiously disinteresting life. Which is nevertheless full of interesting details. In this instance, I am going to tell you about the monograph on Titian for which I have received a grant which permits me to spend the Summer in Berlin whilst my wife and kids are away but which I cannot motivate myself to write so instead I write about not writing it. Whilst also detailing my solitary adventures as a nudist bather, killing my neighbours' plants and generally not doing what I know I ought to be doing.

You might find it droll. You might find my observations on the role of television in contemporary life incisive. You might not. It doesn’t matter all that much. It’s only a novel after all. I don’t know if I am either droll or incisive. I might be. Sooner or later my wife will return and life will get back to normal and the time of this novel, called television, will have expired. A bit like a television program, in fact. Although I didn’t say that. You did.

I, the writer, not of the novel but of this review of the novel, if indeed it is a review of what can only barely be called a novel, have to confess that in this instance, I did find Toussaint and his meandering prose droll. At times I would even go so far as to say that it was even very funny. However, I would also say that Toussaint could be said to have succeeded in his ambition to create a commentary on the disposable role of television within a disposable society, because when I concluded the book, when I turned it off, it vanished from my mind almost as rapidly as, in the words of Mr Jagger, yesterday’s papers. Though not quite as rapidly. So perhaps it’s not like television after all. Perhaps the additional nano seconds are what make it literature. Entertaining literature, albeit disposable literature. But wasn’t literature once the equivalent of television? Before they had television? Maybe television is only literature in disguise. Or vice versa. And what about Titian? 

pies en la tierra (w&d mario roberto pedernera)

The disability film has always been ripe for exploitation. There is little an actor likes more than to don the cloak of the handicapped. Knowing that he or she has already stolen a march on the public's emotions. All too often this results in a pornography of the disabled. The audience adopts the position of the voyeur.

So it is with trepidation that we watched the opening sequence of the Pedernera’s Pies En La Tierra, showing the mumbling, wheelchair-bound Juancho as he goes about his daily struggle. He gets by looking after a roadside shack which primarily sells fish, caught by a young acolyte. To return to the home he shares with his aged mother, he has to go cross country and then downriver by boat. The shack they share is rundown and as basic as basic gets. Juancho mumbles a lot about what a lovely day it's going to be tomorrow. Then his mother dies and he sets out on a trip, just him and his wheelchair, heading off into the unknown, in search of a distant cousin.

The moment it became clear that this was a film which might truly get under the skin of its central character, rather than exploiting him, was when the camera captures Juancho’s purely instinctual decision to leave. In the moment, once the decision has been taken, we can see there’s no turning back. Thereafter, the film is on effortlessly strong ground. Juancho, his wheelchair and a dog that decides to accompany him, are all alone in the middle of nowhere, Argentina. Anything could happen, and the film is not afraid to play on this tension, notably in a sequence where he loses his wheelchair. His progress is painstaking and perilous and utterly compelling.

This is a road movie and there are clear echoes of several similar films. The Straight Story; Las Acacias, Sorin's Camino de Dan Diego, even Sallas’ The Motorcycle Diaries. In common with Sallas’ Che tale, it is unafraid to examine the more spiritual aspects of the narrative. But where Sallas sought to create a hagiography of Che as he moved through an indigent Latin American landscape, Pedernera emphasises his protagonist’s weakness, and the strength of those he meets. When Juancho hooks up with a charismatic Christian folk singer who encourages him to come out of his shell, (a terrific performance from Carlos Belloso), the film’s spiritual element becomes even more overt. The film rises to the challenge, creating a moment of astonishing lyricism which manages to fuse Belloso’s Christian rock with an outdoor cinema screening and Juancho’s gradually perceived need to finally come to terms with his disability.

The mumbling incoherence of the beautifully acted Juancho (Francisco Cataldi) inverts the tradition of the eloquent disabled outsider, thereby placing at the heart of the film a completely believable portrait of a man who knows he has to overcome, but who isn’t sure what he has to overcome or how he’s supposed to do it.

Pies en La Tierra is now on release in Argentina. It was by pure chance that I caught the film. But one can only hope it achieves the recognition it deserves. It’s rare to stumble upon a film and find yourself captivated, but first-time director Pedernera has pulled off something remarkable.