Liam O'Flaherty - Four Books

Liam O'Flaherty - Four Books
Skerrett / Return of the Brute / Famine / Insurrection

I have long been aware of Liam O'Flaherty and a huge admirer of what short stories I have read. Indeed, when picking four short stories to write about HERE I chose one by O'Flaherty. For some reason, however, I never moved on to reading any of his novels, until this year when, having read one, I ended up reading four.

In Concert - Favourite Gigs of Ireland's Music Community - Part 3

In Concert - Favourite Gigs of Ireland's Music Community - Part 3

These posts are becoming like a trip through my memory designed by Escher. Once again I finished with the eighties only to be tripped up by further memories as I tried to make my way into the nineties...

The Fall - Sadler's Wells Theatre, September 1988

This was my first time seeing The Fall and remains possibly the strangest 'rock gig' I ever attended. This is largely because it was NOT a rock gig but a ballet, with The Fall playing live while the Michael Clarke dancers performed a ballet.
A choreographed dance representing a football match between Rangers and Celtic; Brix being wheeled around on a giant hamburger and Mark E. walking forwards and backwards declaiming as if there were no distractions.
The scene where the dancers 'played' a football match was the visual highlight and New Big Prinz and Dead Beat Descendant the remembered aural ones.
I would see more Fall gigs, some better, some worse, but none quite as memorable as this one. Perhaps you can see why in these photos - http://thefall.org/news/pics/88oct08_photos.html

In Concert - Favourite Gigs of Ireland's Music Community - Part 2

In Concert - Favourite Gigs of Ireland's Music Community - Part 2

I woke up the next morning after writing the first part of this post and realised that there were at LEAST three or four gigs from the eighties that I had omitted that really couldn't be omitted. So my plan to do the next post from the 90's onwards is being parked while I do a further return to the eighties.

In Concert - Favourite Gigs of Ireland's Music Community

In Concert - Favourite Gigs of Ireland's Music Community

This book came out last year and I've been meaning to get it ever since. I finally got around to buying it this week and am enjoying dipping into it.

I remember when I was younger there were many conversations about who would win if Ali fought Dempsey, or if Superman fought Batman... The very fact that these were unanswerable questions was what made them interesting.

Best gig is one of those questions. I can't really answer it for myself let alone hope to come to a consensus with any group of people. The other question is what gig would I go to if I could travel through time? This book asks people to name their favourite gigs and provides ample material for me to consider when I think upon these things.

I know some of the contributors and was at some of the gigs. The book is probably mostly of interest to people who have some familiarity with the Irish rock scene of the seventies, eighties and nineties. It brings up feelings of envy, nostalgia and sometimes, bafflement. Rather than try to review it in any objective way I am going to spend some time reminiscing about some of my favourite gigs. A infamous pub bore like myself doesn't do one favourite, this will be many favourites.

Books Read 2016 - Part One

Books Read 2016 - Part One

2016, despite being a bitch of a year for heroes and an ominous year for politics, has been a pretty good year for reading, even if my blogging muscles have largely withered away.  I started this post on December 31st in order to try and have one final post before the years end and to clear the decks somewhat for 2017, when I hope to get back to writing a little more regularly. However, it has since been sucked into the purgatory known as the 'draft' folder.

Rather than group my reading as many have done, or select my favourites I thought it might be interesting/easier just to list the books in the order I read them and add whatever few thoughts (if any) come to mind as I go through them.
 Perhaps when I get to the end I will highlight a few as my 'Best Books of 2017", but really I see all as part of the same book somehow, a larger sprawling multi-referential, oddly interlinked, post-modernist roman fleuve.

The Literary Conference & An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter

The Literary Conference (translated by Katherine Silver) & An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (translated by Chris Andrews) - by César Aira
"In my case nothing returns, everything races forward, savagely being pushed from behind by what keeps coming through that accursed valve. This image, brought to its peak of maturation in my vertiginous reflections, revealed to me the path of the solution, which I forcefully put into practice whenever I have time and feel like it. The solution is none other than the greatly overused (by me) "escape forward.""

Having started a long translated novel and lost interest as it seemed opaque to me (perhaps the original, perhaps the translation, perhaps just me) I decided that I would reread the César Aira novellas I had read and enjoyed last year but never made it to a blog post apart from a listing in my Books of the Year. This would allow me to contribute something further to SpanishLitMonth..

I started with The Literary Conference as it was the one that had left the greater trace. I had really enjoyed both books but neither had left as much of an impression as their companion in the three novella set I had purchased Ghosts. This may have a lot to do with the fact that I had posted on Ghosts. It is as if blogging has become an essential part of fully digesting a book I've read and committing it to memory.

Tres

Tres - Roberto Bolaño
Translated by Laura Healy

Tres is a collection of three poems by Bolaño, although two could just as easily be called prose fragments. Indeed the first 'poem' is called Prose from Autumn in Gerona and the third "section" is called A Stroll Through Literature, a title that might seem more at home in a middlebrow essay collection. The central poem is called The Neochileans and centers on a tour by a band of that name. It is a short book, despite it's 170 plus pages, as many pages contain just one short paragraph and the facing pages feature the original Spanish texts.

What is surprising (or not) is that the work fits seamlessly into Bolaño's oeuvre, and readers who have read a number of his works will find themselves again in that large reverberating echo chamber which all his books seem to exist in. Partly it is that the writer's life is stitched into his work and partly the language and the fascination with geometry. Bolaño often seems to see the relationships between characters and the effect they have on each other in terms of a geometric theorems, as if a formula could be derived of the forces pulling the characters together, or apart. The word features in the very first paragraph of Prose from Autumn in Gerona.
"A woman - I ought to say a stranger - who caresses you, teases you, is sweet with you and brings you to the edge of a precipice. There, the protagonist gasps or goes pale. As if he were inside a kaleidoscope and caught sight of the eye watching him. Colours arranging themselves in a geometry far from anything you're prepared to accept as okay. And so begins autumn, between the Oñar river and the hill of las Pederas."

But For the Lovers

But For the Lovers - Wilrido D. Nolledo
(Foreword by Robert Coover)
"You never actually bury a volcano. There's always a resurrection."

Last year I posed a question to Rise, meister of the wonderful in lieu of a field guide blog. What book by a Philippine author would he recommend? This was the book and you can read his better informed blog by clicking the link to his blog. it is a while since I read it and I could easily leave this patchy, unfinished post in my drafts folder but I have attempted to put some shape on it because I believe this novel deserves more attention. It deserves a better post but this, I hope, is better than nothing. I intend reading it again at some point in the future and maybe I can make a more coherent and considered case then.

Barring Rise's introduction this is not a novel or writer that I have encountered anywhere else, an obscurity that seems thoroughly undeserved and unfortunate. This is a sprawling; energetic; humourous; mysterious; sometime brutal; poetic book that brought to mind Kenzaburo Õe, Gravity's Rainbow, Juan Carlos Onetti and Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch, just for starters. And I haven't come across so much shapeshifting since reading Asturias, especially in the poetic, dreamlike opening section.

August 1914

August 1914 - Barbara Tuchman
"When at last it was over, the war had many diverse results and one single dominant one transcending all others: disillusion. 'All the great words were cancelled out' for that generation, wrote D.H. Lawrence..."

I have decided to try and finish this draft post today as #Brexit and the centenary of the Battle of the Somme attest to it's relevance in today's world. History can be misquoted to mean anything and the density of Tuchman's research and the way she manages to enter the deluded, prejudiced and overly privileged minds who led various countries and armies in the lead up to WW1 is still redolent with lessons for today.

The name Barbara Tuchman drew me to this book more than the subject matter. I read her masterful history of the fifteenth century A Distant Mirror many years ago and it is one of those books that comes to mind when I try to compile lists of favourite books. I may well read some more of her work after this for once again she makes distant history human, compelling and full of narrative drive and compelling characters.

A Weekend With Claude

A Weekend With Claude - Beryl Bainbridge
(I read the revised 1981 issue of what was her first published novel.  The dust jacket describes it as "virtually a new book". Having not read the original I can make no comment on this.)

"With each circlet of grease I rubbed away one or more layer of romantic love and sat exposed with shiny nose and oily mouth, suburban, self-tormenting, waiting to be hurt."

I have been inspired to try to put together this post by the Beryl Bainbridge Reading Week (which ended yesterday). I participated in a previous iteration of this event in 2012 and have been gradually accumulating a number of posts on novels by Bainbridge, who has become firmly ensconced in my own personal canon over the lifetime of this blog. In it's original form A Weekend With Claude was Bainbridge's first published novel, but given that the rather brilliant Harriet Said had been written before meant this didn't dampen my expectations.

Signs Preceding The End of The World

Signs Preceding The End of The World
Yuri Herrera
(Translated by Lisa Dillman)

"The place was like a sleepwalker's bedroom: specific yet inexact, somehow unreal and yet vivid.."

The first two words of Signs are "I'm Dead" followed by a comma and qualifications that indicate that life is still present, as Makina, our heroine "flailed her feet frantically backward, each step mere inches from the sinkhole, until the precipice settled into a perfect circle and Makina was saved."

"Slippery bitch of a city, she said to herself. Always about to sink back into the cellar."

Makina will prove herself adept at keeping the ground under her feet and as tough as her imprecation to the city indicates. The city, and the world surrounding it, demands toughness to survive. It is not a cosy or trustworthy place.

Woodcutters

Woodcutters - Thomas Bernhard
(translated by David McLintock)

"For twenty years I had not wanted to know anything about the Augsbergers; for twenty years I had not seen the Augsbergers, and in these twenty years the very mention of the name Augsberger had brought on third degree nausea, I thought, sitting in the wing chair."

Finally I have got around to Thomas Bernhard, and although late to the party, the cake still tastes fresh, or should that be refreshingly stale and crusty. Woodcutters is an internal monologue blasting away in the mind of the narrator who sits in a wing chair at a party to which he wishes he had never been invited.

It took me a while to get into the rhythm of this book but now that I have found Bernhard's voice I've a feeling I'll be returning soon. If only more people would discard their Bernhard's in Charity Shops. Maybe I just don't frequent Charity Shops in the right areas. Perhaps I need to return to the capital, perhaps frequent again the bars in the cultural quarters, the openings, the awards nights, the love-ins of the loveless narcissistic creatives desperately building charlatans into paper maché colossi so they can rub shoulders with giants.

Memory of Fire: Faces and Masks & Century of the Wind

Faces and Masks; Century of the Wind - Eduardo Galeano
(Part 2 & 3 of the Memory of Fire trilogy.)

"History, the pink-veiled lady offering her lips to those who win, will have much to hide. She will feign absent-mindedness or sicken with fake amnesia; she will lie that the black slaves of Brazil were meek and resigned, even happy."

It took me quite a while to get around to the second and third books in Galeano's trilogy after finishing Genesis last year. Not because of quality but perhaps a reflection of the fact that I have been reading less and having difficulty getting through longer books. Mind you, that's nothing to the slow pace of my blogging. But I am making a last attempt to finish this for Richard's annual Literature of Doom over at Caravana De Recuerdos. And to take the chance to wish Richard good health for 2016. (It is months since I wrote this introduction. This time I am just going to post this as an idea toward a blog on books 2 & 3 in Galeano's trilogy without trying to 'finish' it...)

The trilogy as a whole is a towering achievement, poetic, revelatory and both harrowing and life affirming. Somehow the human sprit is what shines through all these examples of man's inhumanity. The strength to resist long after resistance has been proved to be less than futile, the re-emergence of traditions and cultures that had apparently long been eradicated and the very existence of this trilogy, the work in itself a testament to the human spirit and to Galeano's love of his subject and willingness to rummage in the dusty entrails of history to illustrate his thesis. "They were not wrong he said, in reading destinies in the entrails of the animals they sacrificed. In the entrails, he said. In the entrails, not the heads, because a prophet who loves is better than one who can reason."

Books of the Year 2015

Books of the Year 2015

As  I have lapsed somewhat into inactivity on the book blogging front I hope to use this post to quell those pangs of conscience that niggle in the back of my mind when I think of all the books I meant to post about but never have.
I have also been reading less, even with the extra time I should have had due to the lapse in blogging. However I took up running and managed to lose three stone in the first few months of the year and have not put much back on since. Also my band has risen from the ashes, at least briefly. I guess I have a tendency towards single-mindedness and that means that when one thing comes to the fore, another slips back into its wake.
Another possible reason was the revelatory re-read of Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts, which rather than having it's edge blunted by the passage of time had the same impact as when it ravished me a few decades ago. It is my book of the year and re-calibrated my sense of the excitement a book should stir if it is to become a true favourite.

Perfidia

Perfidia - James Ellroy

"The looming apocalypse is not of our doing. We have been good citizens and did not know it was coming."

I am sad to say that this book was a disappointment. I have been reading Ellroy with excitement since the late eighties, working backwards and looking forward to each new book but this is the first new book to disappoint me.

I'm not sure why. I will have to return to a favourite some time to see if it is just this book or if some spell cast by Ellroy's manic distillation of paranoia and gift for creating voices that carry the whiff of a genuinely authentic desperation has lifted.

I imagine the first, and as a reader all you can do is trust your own instincts.

While the Women Are Sleeping

While the Women Are Sleeping - Javier Marías

This collection of Marias' short stories spans his writing career from his teenage years in 1968 through to 1998. Quite a stretch of time. While not essential, perhaps, this collection hangs together better than might be suspected and includes much to  savour.

Gruts

Gruts - Ivor Cutler

Although Ivor Cutler has long been a favourite of mine it has been of his recordings rather than the written versions of his work. When I saw this in the children's section of a local Oxfam store for €1.50 I had to have it. The pieces within it are the scripts for radio broadcasts from 1959 to 1963.

And I was not disappointed. These pieces work just as well, if not better, on the page. Cutler's quirky, sinister, humourous flights of fancy beguile in both formats.

No matter how strange these stories get, whether it is the cold potato man throwing his goods to a woman at a window on the twelfth floor or a man leading another to the top of a hill to show him the way, waving his arms and taking off, the stories all have a conspiratorial tone that seems to say "They won't believe it was like this, will they? But you and I know better."

Dublinesque

Dublinesque - Enrique Vila-Matas
(Translated by Rosalind Harvey & Anne McLean)
"'Dublin?' she asks, surprised. 'And what are you going to do there? Start drinking again.'"

When #SpanishLitMonth was brought to my attention it was Bloomsday so this was an obvious choice, concerning, as it does, a visit to Dublin for June 16th to hold a funeral for "the Gutenburg Galaxy" - the world of the printed book. I was also eager to read more from Vila-Matas as I had enjoyed Bartleby & Co so much. This was also sitting on my shelves in three-dimensional, ink on paper form...

The central character is Samuel Riba, retired publisher, sober alcoholic. He "has published many of the great writers of his time" but, we learn, is not great with figures and his company went under. Drink almost pulled him under with the company and threatened to bring his marriage to a painful end. With little to fill his time Riba has developed an unhealthily close relationship with his computer screen and feels that he is becoming like the "hikikiomori, young Japanese people who suffer from IT autism, and who in order to avoid outside pressure react by withdrawing completely from society." I felt a certain fellow feeling...

The Mulatta & Mister Fly

The Mulatta & Mister Fly - Miguel Angel Asturias

As August has been united with July under the umbrella of #SpanishLitMonth (at Caravana De Recuerdos, WinstonsDad's Blog & on Twitter) it means that this post is not my usual #SpanishLateMonth. Although, as I'm now reading my fourth book there is plenty of time to be late yet...

This is the first novel I have read from the Nobel prize winner Asturias, and I have to say that it was not quite what I expected. The book is less a narrative than an incantation: an amalgam of myth, history, sex and politics that seems more closely related to the Joyce of Finnegans Wake, or William Burroughs, than to other South American writers I have read.

This isn't the whole picture, though. The book is soaked in the myth-story of South America and clearly draws on the same sources as Galeano's Memory of Fire. Indeed the author note in my copy says that Asturias "studied the philosophy and religion of the Mayan civilisation at the Sorbonne." This clearly gave Asturias the foundation upon which to build this strange world. At times the book heads into very weird terrain, as is shown this quote I scanned and posted on Twitter as I read.

The Conformist

The Conformist - Alberto Moravia
Translated by Angus Davidson
"I shall flare up and then die down again without reason and without result . . . just a little piece of destruction hanging in the blackness of night."

A few years ago I wrote a piece about the film version of The Conformist and recently, (*It was recently when I started writing this but ain't so recent now) seeing as Richard at Caravana de Recuerdos was having a bit of a Moraviafest I decided to join in and finally read the novel. And I'm glad I did. The Conformist is a stylish book written in a terse style with great clarity and powerful use of imagery. Bertolucci's use of contrasting light and dark stripes in the film was something I felt the director may have added to the mix but it is almost a defining aspect of the novel. Moravia seems to revel in dialectics, setting up contrasts at every opportunity and exploring how each action leads by often subterranean routes to the next.