after (bruce greyson)

This non-fiction work is a studious account of the author’s investigation of near-death experiences (NDEs). Bruce Greyson is an academic who has studied NDE’s over the course of forty years, compiling exhaustive data. The book cross references experiences and anecdotes, seeking to get to the heart of the matter. The fact that in the end, it doesn’t seem to reveal as much as it promises to in the book’s blistering opening chapters is perhaps inevitable. This is the reality of the Meta-Physic, the thing that has happened that maybe hasn’t happened, the thing that might be beyond the body or might be a projection of the the mind, a mind which might exist outside of the body or might not. This moment in history, when death is so adjacent, could be a good time for Western culture to begin a more serious interrogation of the way we are conditioned to treat the issue of our passing, and Greyson’s book might be a good starting point to assist in this process. However, if there was one thing that disappointed slightly about the  book it was its reluctance to interrogate how many other cultures have incorporated the idea of the “after” into the present. For these cultures, there is no doubt about the existence of something beyond the grave. Perhaps this is material for another book, with Greyson’s focus here adhering rigidly to his attempt to situate the NDE within a Western medical-academic process, a focus that in the end leaves the reader as dependent on their prior assumptions as ever. 

á rebours (joris-karl huysmans)

In the literary twitter feeds I follow, the name of Huysmans pops up with a frequency which would have surprised and perhaps alarmed him. If anyone set out their stall to occupy a marginal seat, distanced from the mass of society, it was he. I read Á Rebours twenty years ago and remembered approximately nothing from that first reading. Which I take to be commendable. The book flourishes in spite of the fact it foregoes all those elements of the craft they insist a novel requires. Character, plot, action, movement. One of the finest chapters is when the book’s vapid protagonist, des Esseintes, deciding to escape his torpor with a visit to London, heads to the environs of the station in Paris. In the restaurant whilst waiting to catch his train, he observes a host of travellers, many of them English, and feels as though he has effectively visited London, without the need to actually go there. There can be few finer metaphors for the wonder of literature than this London-which-is-not-London chapter. We can scale mountains and reside in palaces using that device known as literature without ever having to leave our beds. Other chapters ramble through the margins of ecclesiastical literature, horticulture, French literature, perfume, and so on. The chapter on obscure ecclesiastical texts is essentially the author showing off his knowledge, and is utterly wonderful. Huysmans reminds us that self-indulgence has the capacity to be a grand thing in the sphere of artistic endeavour. Of course, the world of des Esseintes, the author’s protege, is astonishing in its imaginative range. And we, the readers, bask in wonder at this range, even when we query the need for its peacock display. The book is a celebration of the marginal, the forgotten, the undervalued and overlooked, reminding us with its convoluted genius that the margin may well be far closer to the centre of human endeavour and excellence than it is ever given credit for. 

east west street (phillipe sands)

We went to Krakow last year. It’s a fetching city. This was in the last days of open borders and the streets teemed with happy tourists snapping away. Sands’ book focuses on the city of Lwow, which is in neighbouring Ukraine, but as the book makes clear (and perhaps the title alludes to), the borders in this region in the first half of the twentieth century changed frequently. Krakow was the seat of government for Hans Frank, the Nazi overlord of this region, and one of four key characters in the book. Ironically Frank is the only one who loses his own life as a result of the war. The other three principle characters, Leon, the author’s uncle, Lauterpact and Lemkin are all Jewish, and all lost their families in the holocaust. Sands interweaves the stories of the four men’s lives, in the course of which he investigates various mysteries related to his family history. The author is a human rights lawyer, (there were moments when I might have liked more observations from his work, drawing out the way in which the work of Lauterpact and Lemkin has impacted our understanding of more contemporary issues), and the book builds towards the Nuremberg trial of Nazi war criminals, including Frank. Lauterpacht’s and Lemkin, though obviously driven by the same agenda, had competing views on the basis of how the trial should be prosecuted. Lempkin was a pioneer of the idea of genocide, a concept which Lauterpacht rejected, choosing to emphasise the transcendence of individual human rights. East West Street traces the way these two schools of thought emerged from the shared root of Lwow. The terrible history of this part of the world, which experienced the second world war with a psychotic ferocity, and whose history of pogroms and racial discrimination existed long before the arrival of the Nazis, is in stark contrast to the elegance of its architecture and its culture. This contradiction haunts history. The trappings of civilisation are no guarantee against the triumph of the most venal barbarism. Watching interviews this past week with young Israelis talking about the need to exterminate the Palestinians, using the very language that was used against their grandparents during the events the book documents, is a terrible reminder that the cruelty of history is endemic, that ‘civilisation’ is nothing more than a word.

the monster enters (mike davis)

Mike Davis’ book, an updated version of The Monster at our Door, written in 2005,  is about the threat of Avian Bird Flu, and the devastating effect that would have on society were it to turn into a pandemic. There is an introduction, written at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic last year, when the book was reissued. The most terrifying thing about the book isn’t what he gets right - the shortage of PPE, the governmental confusion, “Pandemic planners admitted that the  bulk of the  public… would simply have to cower in their homes” - but what hasn’t happened this time round. Because Davis, an analyst of slums, of mass production farming methods, of the way in which human demographics have become a time bomb, predicts that if the Bird Flu pandemic ends up being as bad as is feared, it won’t be millions dying, but billions. Presently, according to World of Meters, we stand at 3 million official Covid deaths, though that figure is sure to be higher and is still rising at an alarming rate, but we’re not yet in the territory that Davis predicts. For all the way in which society has felt threatened by terrorism, bio-terrorism, (Davis is very good on the way the war on terror allowed an emphasis on military spending, even in the realm of biological threats), the greatest danger to our way of lie, whatever that is, was always likely to come from a virus. Should we ever come out of this rolling Covid nightmare, one hopes that those who regulate budgets pay more heed to the Cassandras. Davis’ final observations on the way the pharmaceutical industry works only add to the sense that the free market is a long way from being the best socio-political mechanism for the future welfare of the human race.  

at night all blood is black (david diop, tr. anna moschovakis)

Diop’s novel adopts the voice of a Senegalese soldier fighting for the French in the trenches of the first world war. Alfa Ndiaye is no ordinary soldier: he’s a cold-blooded killer who curates a collection of hands of the enemy soldiers he’s killed, a collection which succeeds in freaking out his fellow soldiers, both black and white. The reason he adopts this habit is because he’s seeking revenge for the death of his great childhood friend, Mademba Diop, whose lingering death he witnessed and has appeared to tip him over the edge. After being sent away from the front line, Ndiaye reminisces about his time in Senegal. One of the most interesting chapters is one where he recounts how his father refused to accept the chief’s order to convert to a monoculture of peanuts. The chapter is fascinating but tangential. Other chapters describe the loss of his virginity in detail. I had a female friend who would say with some vehemence how much she hated the word “moist” and she would have taken some umbrage with this book where there’s a surfeit of moistness. Indeed, there’s much about this slight novel which feels awkward. Ndiaye feels a like a conveniently literary creation. Perhaps there are layers of subtlety which passed this reader by, but the depiction of the psychotic Senegalese seems to lack any real sense of conviction. Horrific events are glossed  over and feel like they are included for effect as much as any desire to truly investigate the soldier’s plight. It feels as though Alfa Ndiaye’s narrative, as told by the author, is in danger of selling him short. 

darkness at noon (arthur koestler, tr philip boehm)

Darkness at Noon was an essential text of my adolescence. One of those books that everyone had to read. A time before the fall of the iron curtain, when the cold war still wrapped the planet in an icy embrace. At the same time, we in Britain weren’t sacred of being imprisoned for out political views, unlike someone my age growing up in the country I now live in, and many others. We thought, reading the book, that we were being given an insight, allowed to eavesdrop, on a world that was ‘over there’, the land of the bogeymen. We weren’t aware of what our government had been doing in the likes of Kenya, Borneo, India, even Northern Ireland, at the same time as Stalin & co were waging their ideological wars against their own citizens, a war that Koestler examines with forensic skill. Then for a long time, I guess after the fall of the wall, all that jazz, the novel seemed out-dated, belonging to another era. In truth, its meticulous intellectual tone does sound like it emerges from another mindset, on that predates Tarantino, Baudrillard, and all the other high priests of historical relativity. However, the content seems, if anything, even more pertinent now than it did back in those adolescent Winchester days. Koestler examines a state where the personal and the political cannot be divorced. For decades we inhabited the false idea that these Siamese twins been successfully and surgically pulled apart. But it was never that simple. Sooner or later they were likely to collide once more. From China to the USA to Europe (including the UK), from Guantanamo detainees to Uyghur camps to Catalan rappers,  the liberty of political expression, and the punishment for deviating from the received status quo, is ever more in the balance. Darkness at Noon reads like a voice from the near-past bearing warnings about our near-future. 

untraceable (sergei lebedev, tr antonina w. bouis)

Untraceable has a name like an eighties pop song (by Alison Moyet or T’Pau?). It’s a novel which connects the bombast of Soviet Russia with the clinical nature of Putin’s Russia highly effectively, tracing the way in which chemical weapons were developed and used as part of a covet armoury. The results of this policy has bee seen in the UK, in those cases we know about, at Salisbury and in the murder of Litvinenko. The maguffin in the book is a lethal potion known as Neophyte, developed by a Soviet scientist who then defected to the West. Now, decades later, two Russian agents are sent to finish him off with a dose of his own medicine. The novel is short but sweeping in scope, incorporating events from the Second World War, the Chechnyan war and the present day. There’s a hint of Sorokin in the author’s occasionally forays into a more lyrical register, a poeticism which adds a garnish to the thriller-esque territory the novel adopts as a narrative mechanism. Will the defector survive or will the hapless agents get to him before he can escape? However, because the novel incorporates so much historical and poetic material, it never really feels like a thriller. It’s more a meditation on the nature of an evil that seeks to create an untraceable poison. What kind of society would require this tool? And what does it say about the connection between Putin’s Russia and Stalin’s that both seek to employ it? 

sea state (tabitha lasley)

I’m not entirely sure what to make of Lasley’s work of auto-ficción. The book tells the tale of the author’s mission to explore masculinity in the North Sea oil fields. Her London life going nowhere, she heads to Aberdeen in order to interview men who work on the rigs. At the end of the book we learn she interviewed 103 men, some of whose testimonies are inserted between the eight chapters. What’s evident is that the vast majority of this material doesn’t make it into the book. Instead, the book becomes something else, an account of female desire and frustration. She begins an affair with a married oil worker, which has a predictably short shelf life and becomes the centrepiece of the book, before he returns to his wife. It feels slightly like therapy at times, a chance for the writer to reconnect with her northern roots, to engage with a working class Britain that has been left behind. That she ends up working in a fast food joint in an undisclosed Northern city in the final chapter feels like the most authentic aspect of the book, in so far as it seems clear that the affair with the oil rig worker was always going to be a doomed mismatch. One wonders how it would have gone down if a male writer had gone into a predominantly female world for the benefit of research and ended up with a fetching partner, then writing about their sex life and the inevitable failure of the relationship. Whilst the book might be more fictional than it pretends to be, there’s still something slightly unsettling about Lasley’s project, which ends up telling us more about class than gender. 

equinox (w&d alan rudolph)

Rudolph was one of those maverick North Americans, like John Sayles, whose films attracted stars but never broke out. Fine directors who, had their careers occurred at another point in time, or perhaps in another country, might have been feted more than they ever were. I remember watching a film of his back in the eighties with Keith Carradine as a laconic outsider who had once published a volume of poetry amongst other unheralded achievements and thinking that could be me in a couple of decades. At its best there’s a romanticism to his work which offers a more mannered vision of the world than cinema’s typical social realist bent. 

Equinox is a tale of twins separated at birth, yin to each other’s yan, destined to meet one day, which they do. The film is set in a futuristic city beset by social upheaval and petty crime, offering hints of Blade Runner without the design bravura. It feels as though its striving for a kind of transcendence it never quite achieves and in truth, it’s not Rudolph’s greatest film, rather one that suggests where he might have gone had he had the budgets to indulge his imagination further. Which perhaps might not have been for the best, as it’s his low-key, intimate films which allow him to dwell on his oddball characters that felt most distinctive. (Interesting to note that Rudolph was another one of those directors who built up his own stable of actors.)

On another note, this was seen on the Monday and by Wednesday, Cinemateca had once again shut its doors, for a third time, due to the pandemic. This time, in Montevideo, it feels as though the threat is far closer than it ever has been before. The great war of Cinema vs Plague continues. (Not to mention theatre, dance, art and so on.) On the streets of Ciudad Vieja, hundreds of film crews jockey for position, sent from all over South America, but the net is closing in. Maybe the vaccines will save us. Maybe the equinox has passed. The question then remains: which equinox?

vanity fair (william makepeace thackeray)

Say what you like about Vanity Fair, but it cannot be denied that this is a big beast.  It instructed me to remember there are other ways of reading. The long haul read. We do indeed lived in a disposable society, where there is always something new to consume. The list of novels to be read is as long, not as your arm, but your unimpeded view towards an undisclosed horizon. Consumption is all, and it starts to feel like an obligation of the novel to recognise this and to ensure that what it lacks in brevity it makes up for in efficiency. Vanity Fair belongs to a different epoch and was written with a different reading regimen in mind. For a start, it was serialised over the course of twenty months. Something which allows for a myriad of fluvial meanderings and overflows. There are chapters which feel almost entirely superfluous, but which are not, because they too are telling us something. Indeed, one of the most telling chapters for a modern reader, is one which is so laden with description that it feels like a detour through a botanical garden. Vanity Fair reminded me of the value of the novel as a backdrop to one’s life, as a persistent authorial chirping, like a season of newborn birds in a nest under the eaves of your stately mansion. They will chatter and sometimes sing and at times they will charm and at others grate and one day they will fly away and you will miss them without realising it. This is another form of reading, one we are on the point of discarding, or one that has been supplanted by the two dimensions of soap opera, which lacks the dimension of author, the glue that holds the book, if not the narrative together. 

Given all this, a few comments of a more discursive nature.

Thackeray’s cruelty towards Miss Rebecca Sharp. In many ways, Becky Sharp feels like a predecessor to another character traduced by her author, Emma Bovary. Becky comes from a bohemian part of the world, her father a Soho painter. (If there was any regret in the reading of this novel it was that the author never ventured into Soho and its Bohemia, these places exist on the fringes of the book.) She is a resourceful young woman who does everything in her power to rise through the social ranks, with mixed results. At times she flares like a Catherine Wheel, at others she hurtles towards social disgrace. By a long chalk the most modern of the novel’s characters, by which one means, the one least accepting of the anti-diluvian social structures she finds herself born into, Becky has energy, wit and oodles of charm, for which she ends up being castigated by her author, but without which his book would be a damp squib. She is another in the line, along with Lady Macbeth and Bovary, and surely many more, of great female characters who challenge their authors. Thackeray clearly adores Becky, just like so many do, but he’s wary of the way in which his adoration or libido threatens the social order, and as a result feels the need to constantly pull the rug from under her feet. 

Colonialism. It’s so long since I read Said that I don’t remember if he wrote about Vanity Fair, and as I wouldn’t have read the novel at that stage, perhaps it would have passed me by if he did. But the novel is a great guide as to the way in which the colonies were so ingrained in British society by the early 1800s. India and the West Indies both play key roles in the novel, with several Dobbin chapters set there. All the younger masculine characters find themselves abroad at some time or another. The dramatic playlets in which Rebecca stars, dragging her unfortunate husband into the spotlight with her, are a wonderful testament to the impact of what we might nowadays call Orientalism on British society as one could hope to find (even though these do nothing to forward the plot). A warped fascination with ‘the other’, which involves both caricature and wonder is at large and Thackeray captures this brilliantly. There is a similar relationship with Europe, which is primarily a playground for more military adventures. Two hundred years after publication, the same themes are still playing themselves out.