things we lost in the fire (mariana enriquez, tr megan mcdowell)

Enriquez is something of a phenomenon in the Southern Cone. Many people whose opinions I value rate her highly and one can see why, from this early collection of short stories. The writing blends horror with social realism. In so doing it hones in on two complementary but not identical themes. The legacy of the dictatorship in Argentina; and the issue of specifically urban poverty, so often connected to drug abuse and the narcos moving in on inner cities, turning them into a dangerous no-man’s land. In many of the stories, the remate, or punchline, is constructed around the disappeared. Either those who are known as Los Desaparecidos, the political prisoners who were vanished by the military dictatorship, or, more prosaically, simply people who disappear, sometimes conveniently, as in the case of the annoying husband in the story Spiderweb. As the introduction outlines, Enriquez was born at the tail-end of the Argentine junta’s rule, and the echoes of their crimes filter down the years and make themselves heard in her tales. At the same time, the focus on what might be called social concerns, has a more immediate, topical feel. Buenos Aires is city where poverty is never far away. There are barrios, such as the one the DA visits in the story Under the Black Water which are no-go areas. But as well as that, there are the walking dead, the pasta base addicts, who patrol the streets, one of whom is brilliantly brought to life in the opening story of this collection, The Dirty Kid. This intersection between the zombified underclass and the struggling lower middle class, and then the middle class itself, is a febrile pressure point in Latin American society, and Enriquez puts her finger on it and squeezes, to devastating effect. The final story Things We Lost in the Fire, has a Saramago feel as it translates her themes into a more explicit feminist context. Enriquez’ willingness to use the coarse tools of horror in order to explore social and historical psychoses is highly effective. She uses the horror as a can opener, a way of exposing her society’s guts, in a way that a more measured take might not. 

mindf*ck (christopher wylie)

Chris Wylie is only 31 years old. He’s a kind of Alexander de nos jours. He’s already been a key player in the decline and fall of the United Kingdom, he unwittingly helped to get Trump elected, he helped to militarise the use of data and not content with all that he’s also one of the first to row back and seek to arrest the tumultuous changes he has helped to instigate. It’s truly a Shakespearean journey (Coriolanus comes to mind), albeit one which has only just reached, perhaps, the third act.  Mindf*ck is another of those books that ought to be on the A-Level syllabus. At a time when the teaching of history is under debate in the UK, among other places, the value of a fly-on-the-wall account of some of the century’s key events is invaluable. From my point of view, the portrait of Nix, a kind of grinning Etonian skull, a man with a surfeit of privilege and a deficit of intellect or moral compass, feels particularly telling and indicative of how we (the UK) have got to where we are. Wylie’s observations on post-colonial colonialism are spot-on, reminding us that heritage is a very complex animal. We have entered the Pynchon era when just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you and Wylie’s first person account of the dawning of this age will be a valuable testament in the years and decades to come, if they don’t end up burning it or seeking to scrub it from the data. 

girl a (abigail dean)

glass half-full

Girl A is an engrossing, slightly mysterious read, narrated by the titular character, one of six sibling survivors of a ‘house of horrors’ in Northern England. When his dreams of being a preacher founder, their father goes quietly mad, chaining his children to their beds, refusing to let them out, turning the house into a rubbish-strewn prison. Finally Girl A escapes and frees the five surviving children. This is the hinge point of the novel, which works both backwards and forwards, narrating the history of the house in flashback as well as Girl A’s subsequent life story. The novel opens with the mother dying in prison. Girl A decides she wants to turn the house of horrors into a community centre, as a way of exorcising the evil, and has to get her siblings’ legal approval. After being released from the house, the siblings were all adopted, and contact between them is minimal, but Girl A goes on her mission which lends the novel a narrative thread. The book is fluidly written, with many a limpid turn of phrase. On one level it’s a study of post traumatic shock and survival, on another it might have been a gothic tinged investigation of religious extremism.

glass half-empty

Probably the most intriguing figure in the novel is the children’s monstrous father. Who has a Jim Jones quality to him. Believing himself to be a charismatic preacher, when that dream is punctured he turns against his own. This is a study of power unhinged. It made me think regularly of the unfettered lunacy that has flourished in the Anglo-Saxon world over the course of the past decade, where fundamentalism allied to libertarianism has spawned monsters and terrible political damage. Having said which, the character of the father always feels slightly deific in the novel. It hints at far more than it reveals. The book swims in his slipstream, just as his children do. It feels as though the novel tiptoes to the edge of insanity and then delicately steers around it, in an eminently British fashion. Which lends the novel a slightly salubrious feel: we read on because we want to know about the horrors, the damage this has caused, and the novel titillates with Girl A’s masochistic tendencies and her fantasising, rather than delivering any real sense of shock, deviance or horror. One can’t help thinking that part of the reason for the novel’s success, apart from the fact it is eminently well-written, is that it takes the reader down a dark road, but then pulls back and leaves us with the redeemed vision of the redesigned house of horrors instead. 

cape fear (d. scorsese, w. wesley strick, james r webb)

It’s so many years since I saw Cape Fear, perhaps when it came out. In my memory it’s dominated by the denouement, which takes place in the everglades on a boat, in a sequence which I remembered as being half the film, although it turns out it’s only the last twenty minutes or so. The reason the end looms so large is because it truly is a case of Scorsese pushing the boat out. Loads of CGI and De Niro’s portrayal of Jack Cady, always pushing the envelope, goes overboard. I get why the film chose to go where it does, but it felt as though in a bid for an operatic finale, it flirted with anti-climax. There’s nothing subtle about Cape Fear, but it is tremendously well directed. The acting of Lange and Nolte and Lewis is impeccable, the score and the production design and the editing maintain rhythm and tension despite the predictability of the narrative. Meanwhile, De Niro gives the kind of grandstand performance that only he can, relishing the malevolence of his character without ever sacrificing his charisma. (One can’t help thinking that Sorsese’s subsequent use of DeCaprio as a leading man is why so many of his later films feel hollow: DeCaprio wants to be loved too much, he’s never prepared to take the film into the ambivalent Faustian waters that De Niro excelled in as an actor.) Scorsese is having fun, paying homage to the B movie and Hitchcock at the same time, the camera ever ready to zoom in, to capture every nuance of the acting. The Nolte-Lange marriage is completely plausible: two fearsome egos whose shared happiness is a delicate balancing act. The film was so much better in the viewing than it had been in the memory. However the finale, with its pretensions of showing the family stripped back to a kind of Simian primitivity, overshadows all that comes before. 

la tregua (w. mario benedetti)

Benedetti is venerated as one of the finest Uruguayan writers. He used to drink coffee in Cafe Brasileiro, one block away from where I live. At one table would be Galeano scribbling away, in another Benedetti. Many years ago I read some of his short stories and enjoyed them. Therefore La Tregua, his most famous novel, came as something of a shock, in terms of its banality, its petty sexist viewpoint, its dogged one-dimensionality. The novel is presented as a diary, kept by the narrator, Martín Santomé, as he approaches retirement, aged 50. The narrator’s wife died many years ago, he has patchy relationships with his three children, and he’s scared of growing old. Then he falls in love and begins an affair with Laura Avellaneda, a winsome underling in the office. She’s half his age, and at first he comments that he doesn’t find her terribly attractive, but gradually love finds a way and Santomé starts to dream of a contented retirement, pottering around going for coffee and the cinema, with Laura by his side. The only thing that disturbs this reverie is the occasional bout of jealousy brought on by Santomé’s awareness of the age gap, and the news the his youngest son is gay, something that fills him with disgust. One searches for moments when the voice of the narrator and the voice of the author might diverge, suggesting a sly commentary on the author’s part regarding his protagonist’s staid, questionable attitudes, but increasingly it feels as though this search is in vain. In the end it feels as though La Tregua merely captures the most mundane, grey uninspiring aspects of Uruguayan culture, a land of the prematurely aged, the quietly lascivious, the European rump ensconced in a strange unwieldy continent whose origins provoke little curiosity, whose blessings mostly revolve around coffee.

selected stories (guy de maupassant, tr. roger colet)

What a bewildering brilliant collection of stories this is. Colet’s introduction alerts us to the fact that is just a smorgasbord from the work of a prolific writer, but it’s more than enough for the reader to get to grips with a lo-fi genius. In only one of the stories, the deranged La Horla, which reads like a metaphor for the current pandemic, does the writing indulge in what the British call fights of fancy. Which might be what those on the other side of the channel tend to expect from their Gallic counterparts. La Horla embraces delirium to such an extent that it would not have surprised me if the narrator had gone off and burnt down a 5G tower, in a sudden leap into the future. 

The other stories are rooted in a steadfast humanism. They embrace themes of love, desire, war, revenge. The writing is direct, to the point. Ordinary people find themselves doing extraordinary things. An old woman burns down her own house, knowing it will lead to her death. Two fisherman risk everything to indulge a simple hobby. A prostitute displays more nobility than her high-class travelling companions. There is an economy of action which allows the writer to deliver story after story in the space of a dozen pages or less, each and every one of them teaching or reminding us of something integral to the human condition. 

time (w&d kim ki duk)

Another offering from the late South Korean director, one with the fascinating premise of people recreating themselves through plastic surgery. If the face changes, is the soul still the same? A woman, See-Hee, believing her lover, Ji-woo, to be bored of her, decides to recreate herself, taking on a new appearance, then returning to haunt him. He falls in love with this new woman, who then finds herself questioning him: has he ditched her former self? In loving her new identity, is he betraying his love for the woman she used to be? There’s a lot of twists and turns to be negotiated, far too many in fact. Time ends up feeling like an obscure Marivaux play or a Shakespeare identity drama which got left on the shelf. For all the fascinating material, the script starts to run away from the characters, who desperately try to catch up. The scenes become more and more absurd, and the film is a soufflé which, for all its great ideas, eventually falls flat. Duk’s themes and concerns are evident, and have echoes of Address Unknown, (when Eunok places a cut-out of an eye from a magazine over her blind eye), but he can’t sustain the conceit. All the same, the early instance of technology in the film (Ji-woo is editing with final cut) suggests that perhaps there is a connection to a film like Face Off. Themes of appearance and identity which the internet increasingly puts in doubt, beginning to surface at the turn of the last century, when the soul you believed you were communicating with on-line is nothing like the soul you meet in the flesh. As Shakespeare also noted: “There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.”

address unknown (w&d kim ki duk)

At one point in the film, Eunok the one-eyed beauty, takes an LSD pill which her GI suitor has hidden in her bag. She starts to trip, staggering forwards, the world turned wavy. Duk doesn’t develop the trip, the effects are over before they’ve begun and in a later scene, when the GI forces her to take another pill, the action cuts before we get to see what effect it has on her. You can see why, having introduced the trope of the trip, Duk then backs off from it. Because the reality is that the whole film is a trip, one that becomes increasingly and dangerously delirious. 

Address Unknown is set on the edge of a US military base (Camp Eagle) in South Korea. Planes roar overhead and soldiers in full camo gear practice their excercises in the fields whilst the locals go about their business. The presence of the Americans distorts reality and facilitates a latent violence which becomes more and more overt as the film progresses. One of the key characters is Chang-guk, a mixed race, Korean-Black American. His mother still writes letters to the GI who has long since disappeared from their lives, whilst Chang-guk suffers from racial discrimination. They are just two characters whose interaction with the US forces has lead to tragedy. Eunok and her admirer, Jihum, will be two more, as the rogue GI turns on Eunok. Stamping on the ground, Jihum realises it’s hollow. He stamps again, and falls through into a makeshift hidden graveyard, a hidden relic of the Korean war his father fought in. The skeletons are very near the surface, wanting to get out.

The violence is embodied by Jae-hyeon Jo, the dog catcher, who brutally kills dogs before selling them to a local restaurant by the kilo. This violence finally overflows, consuming everyone in an increasingly gothic denouement. At times the film, with its vivid editing and extended cast reminded me of early Kustirica, his near contemporary. A portrait of a society which is out there, subject to the forces of a foreign military, on the edge of madness. Like Kustirica’s early films, there’s also something affectionate about this portrayal of everyday people trying to get along in a world that doesn’t seem to want to give them a chance.  

the volunteer (salvatore scibona)

The Volunteer is a big American novel. Why the North Americans seem so much more adept at writing on a grander scale than the British over the course of the past century or so is a great topic for a PhD. Suffice it to say that a host of writers from that continent seem prepared and permitted to write on a scale that encompasses and investigates the sweep of history. The comparison that most readily springs to mind with Scibona’s novel is DeLillo. There’s a willingness to both make surprising narrative shifts and build towards a grandstand scene which echoes a novel like Underworld. Having said that, the voice is distinctly his own, a voice that seems to hunt the unrevealed truths of history in corners where no-one else has previously thought to look. 

There is, it might be said, an exception to this, which is when the volunteer of the title, Volie Frade, participates in the Vietnam war, in a bravura piece of writing. However, even Scibona’s Vietnam is covert, as Frade is captured whilst on unofficial duty in Cambodia, during a military action which officially doesn’t exist. Frade, whose name is changed as he reinvents himself, is one of three orphans in the novel. This sense of an absence of roots appears to contribute to the perpetration of a national violence, a violence whose rationale has more to do with genetic discord than political need. A violence which is born of a sense of being dislocated. Scibona follows a thread which leads from the Second World War through to Vietnam, through to the imperial Middle Eastern adventures of the twentieth century and could perhaps lead, as in the literature of Saunders, to a form of militaristic despair which turns back in on itself, something which was threatened during the rump reign of Trump.  

The author explores these themes, which also take in the idea of destiny, the failure of sixties counter culture and the shimmering persistence of Christianity as a factor in modern society, in pages of sometimes dense, sinuous prose. He’s never scared of heading off into a digression which might cast light on his story that even he is unclear about (the German refugee, the Dutch divorcee). At times one wonders where this is all headed, and as a writer he seems enamoured of the non-connections, a resistance to the insistent logic of story, as characters refuse to meet, or remain in the dark, or simply forget about things that once upon a time seemed of transcendental importance. This is what a novel of this scale can afford to do; to recognise that life is as many blind alleys as it is roman roads. That the other lives characters (such as ourselves) might have lived are always around the corner, a corner not taken. 

orinooko (aphra behn)

Behn’s Orinooko is one of the more extraordinary texts from the canon of English literature. In part because of its evident contemporary ordinariness. Just another story about a tragic hero. The fact that the eponymous tragic hero is a slave in a British colony in the Americas only appears, retrospectively, remarkable. At the time, for all its exotic context, it belonged to a recognisable literary trope. Now we can read it and think: ‘How could a female author in the late seventeenth century be writing about globalisation and slavery, with a black African protagonist?’ 

The novel occurs in both West Africa and Suriname, which was a British colony before it was ceded to the Dutch in exchange for New Amsterdam. According to Janet Todd’s excellent introduction, Behn had travelled to Suriname. The novel employs the authorial voice as the narrator, although clearly it’s not known to what extent Behn was recounting actual events or inventing them. The section in West Africa, which she hadn’t visited, certainly feels more sketchy, less rigorous in the writing, as it sets up the background for Orinooko falling in love with Imoinda and his subsequent betrayal and capture by an English slaver who ships him to Suriname to be sold.

The issue of slavery is central to the book, but dealt with in a complicated fashion. Firstly, Behn seems to suggest that slavery was endemic to West African culture before it became part of European culture. Next, the moral argument against slavery appears to be not so much that it enslaved individuals, but that it enslaved particular noble individuals who were put on this earth for greater things. A kind of Nietzschean variation. Whilst the fate of the other slaves, both in Suriname and Africa doesn’t appear to bother Behn particular, the fate of Orinooko and Imoinda is what grants them their tragic destiny, elevating Orinooko onto another moral sphere altogether, where the murder of his beloved becomes an honourable act. Which could be a twist on Othello, a sly reading of alternative models of morality to the rigid Judeo-Chrisitan one. Lastly, there is the issue of the actual physical state of slavery itself. Behn’s description of Orinooko’s life in Suriname feels more like a depiction of someone in an open jail than in the state of slavery as it has been depicted. The narrator herself becomes friends with Orinooko, who hunts and swims and generally hangs out with his oppressors as though he’s not only one of the gang, but the most valued member of that gang. 

What this depiction does is it elevates the concept of freedom and individual liberty. Looking at the ravages of war, plague and fire that 17th century England had endured, the description of Orinooko’s existence in Suriname seems almost idyllic. (Todd notes that Behn has been criticised for painting an idealised, Edenic vision of Suriname which ignored mosquitos, disease, humidity, etcetera). However, rather than enjoy this idyllic life and the princely privileges he is granted. Orinooko insists on rebelling. Hence we have the first depiction that I know of in British fiction of a slave revolt and the subsequent punitive reaction taken by the capitalists/ slave owners towards the revolt’s leader, Orinooko. Orinooko is brought down precisely because of his princely demeanour which values an elevated notion of liberty above and beyond anything else. As such, Orinooko feels like the forerunner of an increasingly individualistic trend in Western culture. One which it could be argued leads towards the existentialists or even the diverse cultural reactions to the current crisis around the globe, (where some countries have chosen to prioritise liberty/ freedom and others have engaged in a more draconian battle against the plague), a globe whose actual shape and geography was only just coming to be defined at the time Behn was writing.