born slippy (tom lutz)

As much as I love literature for its ability to move me, for its capacity for transcendence, for its philosophical artistry, I also love literature as a means of being informed. Of knowing what’s going on in the world. Literature has the capacity to disembody history, to remove the limbs and put them back together again in a fashion which allows one to see it, history, anew. Or, to overdo the metaphor, to provide a bird’s eye view. To alert one to things that one didn’t know existed. Literature, no matter how recherché it might aspire to be, emerges from a culture, and a political-cultural perspective. I might suggest that in these feverish times, Anglo-Saxon literature seems too often to me to drift towards a neutral ground which does not exist. A means of avoiding and escaping the political realities that underpin Anglo-Saxon society. To put it simply, in order to get by in such an age of mass hypocrisy, it’s easier to look the other way, and it feels as though the publishing industry, which is a part of the socio-political culture, is far too often complicit in this. Particularly when it comes to the art of fiction. 

Which was part of the attraction for picking up Born Slippy, whose intentions appeared to be to tackle in part some of the banal hideousness of the wealth machines which make the world go round. A hideousness personified by Dmitry Heald, a Liverpudlian born trader who works for the big banks and sets up his own shadow scheme to rip off a percentage of the dark money which he manages. Names like Putin are bandied around. The story is told from the point of view of his distant friend, Frank, a North American builder whose fascination with Heald is akin to Faust’s fascination with Mephistopheles. Indeed, Frank makes his own Faustian pact, and one of the curious choices the book makes is that it allows Frank to sail off into the distance in the end, rich on the back of Heald’s depravity. The novel’s set-up is effective, flipping between timelines as it constructs the story of the two men’s friendship. But after Heald manufactures a fake death, one which Frank believes in although the reader doesn’t, the plausibility of the tale begins to wane. Frank is too much of a boludo to be a viable central character and it feels as though, for all its strong-minded intentions, the novel fails to address the issues it sets out to. Lutz has a crack at demarcating the socio-cultural hypocrisies of our times but seems reluctant to follow his own logic towards the kind of resolution it demands, one which Elroy, for example, whose praise appears on the cover, would not have shied away from. 

doña perfecta (benito pérez galdós)

Galdós is unknown in the UK I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. He’s in that bracket of being amongst Spain’s greatest modern writers, sin dudas, but in the Anglo-Saxon world I don’t remember his work ever being referenced. I was trying to think this through last night, on completing the novel. The UK is knowledgeable about French literature and Russian, perhaps the Germans get more of a look-in, but beyond those shores, there are few nineteenth century writers not writing in English who get a look-in.

It was with some trepidation that I started grappling with Galdós. What happens if the novel feels dated or irrelevant? Would a hundred years of Anglo-Saxon neglect be justified? The novel starts prosaically, with the engineer, Pepe Rey, visiting the provincial town of Orbajosa, where he is due to meet and possibly marry his cousin, Rosario, daughter of the book’s eponymous anti-heroine. It feels fairly mundane, until the narrative starts to take an unexpected and slightly gothic twist. Rey finds the whole town turning against him. Progressive Spain is confronted with the forces of regressive Catholicism. He is accused of being an atheist, thrown out of the cathedral when he visits and accosted by law suits as opportunistic town folks see him as a means of making money. Deep Spain makes a misery of his life. He would flee if it wasn’t for his newfound passion for the cousin. 

This passion is in some ways as instinctive, as primordial as the reaction of the citizens of Orbajosa to himself. As though a kernel of this superstitious, medieval way of seeing the world is boring deep into Rey’s progressive heart. In truth, Dona Perfecta is an early horror movie, which you could perhaps connect with Jordan Peele’s Get Out. We know Rey should listen to his head, but his heart is running the show. 

This makes for a sly novel which constantly takes the reader by surprise, even down to the formulation of its very final chapter. There are moments when it feels as though Galdós is veering off on a tangent, but the acuity of his representation of this cursed town is brilliantly achieved. The heartlands of Spain feel as though they could belong to another century, any time since the Moors were expelled, and Galdós steers us into these dark waters with glee. 

england’s dreaming (jon savage)

The country is going to the dogs. Young, semiotically charged, apolitical dissidents set out a campaign of national provocation. It all ends in tears.

A great “logline” for a feature. Reading Savage’s sometimes astonishing account of the rise of the Sex Pistols, it strikes one as how ignorant we are about the emergence of punk. The realities of the movement. The Sex Pistols remain one of the most famous bands on the planet. Anywhere you go in the world, you will find people of indeterminate ages who know the lines: “I am an anarchist, I am an anti-christ”. Yet, unlike the Beatles and the Stones, for example, the true story of the Pistols remains opaque. They were, indeed a shooting star. Their legacy, punk, (and it does feel on reading Savage’s book that this is the legacy of McLaren, Lydon, Jones, Cook, Matlock and Vicious), is immense. The punk (a name derived from Elizabethan slang) became as identifiable a signifier of Britishness as the Queen. The semiotics of this initial transgression subsequently transformed into marketing.  

Savage’s book, which deals with the broader movement of punk, but revolves around the narrative of the Pistols, shows how the pieces came together. McLaren and Westwood’s odd-couple marriage, which spawned the image; Jones and Cook’s neo-cockney ingenuity, is the quasi-Dickensian strand which roots the movement in working class London values; Lydon’s neurasthenic charisma; Sid Vicious’ post-adolescent nihilism. The book traces how all of these factors stirred together in the pot, at a time of national decay, lead to the great counter-cultural movement. There’s a sense of the way in which, unlike so many British cultural movements, which tend to be insular, navel-gazing, punk embraced a cultural cosmopolitanism. A smattering of Debord and situationism coupled with a strong dosage of USA/ New York individualism, forged by the likes of Iggy and New York Dolls. Even a strong hint of mental European Dadaism. Perhaps this helps to explain how Punk evolved into something that imposed itself as a global movement, not just musically, but semiotically. 

As the logline states, it all ends in tears, but then it was the very volatility of the movement, a Molotov cocktail, which meant that it burned so bright, and was destined to bun out so quickly. Savage was there and his diary entries, allied to the extensive interviews mean it really feels as though we are getting the inside story on something that went from a few oddballs rehearsing in any old corner of London to global stardom in the space of two years. He’s also very good on the early days of McLaren and Westwood, with their chameleon shops, Sex, and Seditionaries. This is the only strand of the story which feels as though it isn’t followed through. With hindsight it seems obvious that the true victor of the punk movement, the one who reaped the most eventual success (in terms of prestige, finance etcetera) was Vivienne Westwood, who succeeded in maintaining the uneasy balance between edginess and commercial viability for decades. Her shop at World’s End was still, when I worked on the King’s Road in the early nineties, a beacon of counter-cultural chic, which you entered with heart in mouth, like an outsider intruding on a clandestine world. 

Savage’s  book should really be on the school syllabus. At a time when the notion of Englishness is once again in a state a crisis, when the need to assert a national identity seems to have overwhelmed all common sense, it dissects that curious anti-establishment strand of Englishness which can lead to the most astonishing creativity. The Sex Pistols were a product of disenchantment (Chant Chant Chant) which flowered for a day, before withering, only to be adopted by British mercantilism as it lay dying, resurrected as a stock image in the panoply of English eccentrism. We remain caught on the horns of the clash between establishment and anti-establishment, struggling to impose an identity on the conflict, trapped in bondage trousers and the discordant violence of disaffection. 

the alienist (machado de assis, tr william l grossman)

Machado de Assis’ slender tome is an effortless masterpieces that feels as though it was written in a day, to be read in an hour. It tells the simple story of the apparently cultured man of science, Simão Bacamarte, who sets up an asylum to study madness in a small Brazilian town. The scientist gradually starts locking up anyone he deems insane, including his wife, bringing about a revolution. However, the revolutionaries also believe in science, and as a result they don’t lock Bacamarte up, or even release his prisoners. Finally, Bacamarte reaches the reasonably logical conclusion that in a mad world, the sane are the truly crazy people, and starts locking people up on that basis. Neither rationality nor irrationality can be trusted. Bacamarte is a brilliant charlatan so convinced of his own genius that he has succeeded in convincing everyone else. If ever you wanted an allegory for what is occurring in present day Brazil, this could scarcely be bettered: Bolsonaro’s Brazil seems to be caught up in the spectacle of re-enacting de Assis’ thesis. In addition it goes to the heart of the issues surrounding notions of scientific rationality as a basis for claiming rights over what might be deemed sanity; an issue which is hot-wired into the Brazilian psyche. As perfect a short novel as you could hope to find, one that reveals that alternative literary strands were alive in kicking in Latin America long before the arrival of Marquez, Borges et al. 

the adventures of china iron (gabriela cabezón cámara tr fiona mackintosh and iona macintyre)

Cabezón Cámara’s novel has been nominated for the international Booker prize and you can sort of see why. It’s something of a romp with its bawdy portrayal of the titular heroine as she crosses the Pampas in the year of our lord 1872. China is the estranged wife of Martin Fierro, (Fierro meaning “iron” in spanish), the subject of the great national epic poem by José Hernández, who appears in the novel as a dissolute army captain running a fort in the wilderness. Fierro also pops up as do other characters from the poem. However, this is a feminist riff on the macho history of the evolving Argentina. China hooks up with an Englishwoman, Liz, looking to reach her husband who has inherited land in the Indian territories. China and Liz roll across the Pampas in their wagon, until they reach the fort. They have a few adventures and a great deal of vigorous sex, with Liz proving to be the model of the repressed Englishwoman who lets it all hang out as she goes native. After their sojourn in the fort, they flee into the Indian territory where they live a kind of Pantheistic idyll. It’s all quite charming and frothy, with some purple passages of beauty as the author describes the landscape they’re headed into, and their eventual assimilation into a (very free-love, hippy), native tribe.

el alma de gardel (levrero)

There’s something more awkward about commenting on the work of someone from your own country. The closer they are, the more you expect, perhaps. Many people I know love Levrero’s work dearly. He has been recommended to me many a time. I read a short collection of pieces he wrote over a year for the newspaper, and enjoyed it, but found it slightly underwhelming. The same could be said for this curious short novel, about a man who believes he has been visited by Gardel’s ghost. The man is a writer, who likes the rain and spends a lot of time in the National Library. He has an undeniably lecherous attitude to women, talking at length about how he likes finding himself in close confines with them on the bus. At which point you’re not quite sure as a reader how to place this character. Is he, as he initially seems, the writer’s alter-ego, or is he some slightly seedy older man? Perhaps the latter, but in that case, to what end? Why would a reader want to engage with him? And what does Gardel have to do with any of this? These were some of the questions that arose from reading the novel and I have to be honest and say they felt like slightly frustrating questions. Perhaps I chose the wrong novel, as I believe there are many, or perhaps, as a fellow Uruguayan, I am inclined to be overly critical. 

1491 (charles c mann)

1491 is a book that ought to change the way that history is taught forever. It won’t, because the narrative it is confronting, that of European civilisation triumphing over the indigenous peoples of the americas, is so engrained that it will perhaps, never change. The book might have been sub-headed the decline and fall of the pre-Colombian empires. The multiple empires that grew, thrived, tamed the land, and then faded away, or in the case of those which were still extant upon the arrival of the Europeans, were decimated by plague and war. Mann’s theory is clear: the major factor in the European conquest of the Americas was biological. Only today, perhaps, for the first time in three generations, can we start to understand that germs are far more powerful than steel or gunpowder. However, 1491 is about far more than just the imminent pre-Colombian era. He is also exacting on the scale of both population and urban development of the americas before the arrival of the Europeans, a scale that history, written by the ‘victors’ has failed to either recognise or understand. The book exudes a range of scholarship that is impressive, going into archaeological, ethnological, seismological detail about the history of both continents, North and South, disarming the division that is so frequently drawn between them. It’s hard to say quite how impressive this book is, both in terms of its articulation and defence of its own thesis, and in terms of the radical implications of that thesis for our interpretation of the course of human history, no less. 

the old is dying and the new cannot be born (nancy fraser)

This is a short but insightful treatise on the vacuum that is opening up in political culture with the waning of neo-liberalism and the failure of either the right or the left to find a new “hegemony” which can replace it. Hegemony being, as the author explains, a Gramscian term which suggests a political/ philosophical worldview which can shape the way political society both acts and sees itself. Nancy Fraser highlights the way in which much of the liberalism in neo-liberalism has been, if you like, window dressing which has covered up the failures of a Capital/ Finance system which supposedly keeps the wheels running (and disproportionately rewards those who oil these wheels) to address key issues of inequality in society. Liberal gains are all well and good but they shouldn’t hide the fact that the working class is getting proportionately poorer, and society is becoming increasingly unjust, even if certain freedoms have been secured. She is great on how Trump manipulated this situation to stoke a culture war which was all about getting him elected and nothing to do with addressing wealth divisions and inequality. This is a short book with an appended interview with Bhaskar Sunkara, but it’s full of really valuable insights, including the complex and dangerous process of trying to find a new hegemony (or vaccine). Referring to what might emerge which will succeed in helping to create the kind of plausible society which the New Deal offered before its hegemony was eroded she says: “What we don’t know yet is whether some new, yet-to-be invented form of capitalism could satisfy those imperatives—or whether the only possible solution is a postcapitalist society, whether we want to call it socialist or something else. Maybe more important than knowing that for sure right now is knowing what the new rules of the road should be for a political economy that is both pro-working-class and globalized. Ours is a world that cannot and must not go back to distinct national economies. That way lies competing protectionisms, militarization, and world war.”

middlemarch (eliot)

Here is my earliest memory of Middlemarch. I was about 17. At boarding school. My parents owned a flat in a Georgian house which was within walking distance of the school. They didn’t live there. They lived in the Ruhr Valley. In my final year at school, I would spend a lot of time at the house. Mostly in the middle of the night, when I and a few friends would sneak out of the confines of school. We would sit around in he living room with its plush gold coloured carpet and heavy curtains. It was not a place of great partying. It was a place to escape from the school, feel independent. Hang out. I remember a boy called Frank Skelton, (his real name was Mark), an idiosyncratic individual with a curious worldview, who was always reading Middlemarch. He could never read more than five pages without it sending him to sleep. He would, I imagine, doze on the carpet, the penguin classic version open at the page he had reached. If our final school year had lasted another ten years I suppose he might have got to the end. 

I don’t remember reading the novel myself. I might have done. There was one passage, which is the passage where Ladislaw is lying on the carpet in front of the fire in Lydgate and Rosemary’s parlour, which I recognised with an absolute clarity. But it might have been that Frank had reached this page and read it to us, as we lay on the carpet, just as the Victorian Ladislaw did. The simple pleasures of life. 

“He was given to stretch himself at full length on the rug while he talked, and was apt to be discovered in this attitude by occasional callers for whom such an irregularity was likely to confirm the notions of his dangerously mixed blood and general laxity.”

I also remembered, as I made my way through Eliot’s epic during the Pandemic, that it reminded me of reading War and Peace, which I did whilst travelling across Latin America, on trains and buses in Brazil, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina, finishing it around the time of the Uruguayan election in 2004.. Great books deserve a great backdrop. Middlemarch is undoubtably a great book, although I can understand some of the critical ambivalence that it provoked before it gained the unimpeachable place in the cannon that it now enjoys. There are elements of Middlemarch that feel like a high-end telenovela. It’s quietly turbulent, with cliffhanger chapter endings. The characters are mostly middle or upper class, struggling with what we might now call “first world” problems. Broken hearts, failed marriages, frustrated dreams of glory. Yet perhaps it is the very normality of these problems which lends the novel its glory. The worthy, headstrong Dorothea is a template for a new kind of woman, a gateway to feminism. Ladislaw and Lydgate, the two principle male characters, struggle with the ethical dimension of ‘money/ status’ versus ‘honour’.

In addition to which, it’s intriguing to see that Eliot is looking back thirty years, when she wrote this, to a time of great turbulence. “In the hundred to which Middlemarch belonged railways were as exciting a topic as the Reform Bill or the imminent horrors of Cholera, and those who held the most decided views on the subject were women and landholders.” Substitute the Reform Bill for Brexit and Cholera for C-19, railways for modern tech, and you have a world which, although two hundred years away, almost seems as though it could be talking about contemporary Britain. The world of the shires has changed less than we might have imagined. Eliot’s  nuanced understanding of psychology, which feels way ahead of its time, only goes to illustrate that psychology has been doing nothing except playing catch-up. People have always been fucked up, confused, uncertain in the face of a changing world. The fact that Freud & co invented a science to study this doesn’t mean that they invented the problems they sought to address. 

Eliot creates a fictional world wherein these issues are laid bare. Coupled with passages of writing which take the breath away. Her chapters stick to a rigid formula of dialogue and description, both psychological and natural. If one of the aims of writing is to remind us that the heartbeat of a human being has not altered in thousands of years, and those things which affect that heartbeat haven’t either, Middlemarch is a wonderful example of the novel’s capacity to remind of this fact, to permit us to dwell in a society which is so very distant to our own and so very close at the same time. 

malign velocities (benjamin noys)

Has the world accelerated into an inevitable collapse? Did globalisation, the frenzy of hyper-consumerism and hyper-production contain the seeds of its own demise? These questions seemed mildly absurd even six months ago; today they seem urgent, and either utopian or dystopian. Using Nick Land’s outlandish theories about accelarationism as a starting point, this short book essentially refracts notions of progress as mapped out in the twentieth century, ranging from the machine-love ideas of the Italian futurists through Leninist revolutionary ideals to a more nuanced vision of Stalinism than you might normally expect. (Indeed it wouldn’t be hard to present this current epoch as the most Stalinist since Stalin, one which blithely accepts surplus deaths in the tens of thousands as a price that society needs to be prepared to pay for the greater good of the whole.) The book traces a path from these highly ideological worldviews through to the development of neo-liberalism and Chinese commune-capitalism. The political map is redrawn: it’s not so much a case of left against right, as a vision of technological materialist advancement measured against a more pantheistic, anti-progressive agenda, a qualified reclamation of the Luddites. It’s not an easy book to read and at times it feels to the lay reader as though it ties itself in knots as it wrestles with the jargon of post-modernist philosophy, (much as the work of Nick Land himself often verges on the impenetrable), but there’s enough in Malign Velocities to make you rethink the whole course of 20th century history if you’re so inclined, and who knows, as we witness the full, terrifying complexity of 21st history unfold, that might not be such a daft thing to be doing right now. The past has constructed a honey trap, we felt as though we were racing towards a glorious technological future when, right this very minute, it looks as though the only place we were really headed was back towards the pre-globalised future.