Antwerp

Antwerp - Roberto Bolaño
"reality seems to me like a swarm of stray sentences"

I started jotting down notes towards a coherent post on Antwerp but it seemed easier more in keeping with the spirit of the novel to leave them as simply notes towards a blog post.

Antwerp is the first known novel written by Bolaño. It was written around 1980 but not published until just before his death. It is short and experimental, with atmosphere and effect more than plot and character the driving force. It is closer in spirit to poetry than prose and perhaps marks the major staging post between both poles of Bolaño's writing.

”The gun was only a word.”
Chekov, famously, said something about having to use a gun, if you introduce it. Bolaño seems to be saying that you don't.

Martin Beck 1 & 2 - Roseanna / The Man Who Went Up In Smoke

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, who have left their stamp on Scandinavian writing.

Martin Beck 1 & 2 - Roseanna & The Man Who Went Up In Smoke - Maj Sjöwall, Per Wahlöö

Here, or elsewhere I made the statement that I'd immerse myself in crime for a portion of the year. I thought that reading a ten book series would be a good way to make good on that promise. Unfortunately I still have to find book three, four and ten so for the now I'll write up some thoughts on the first two books in the Martin Beck series, often blamed for the wave of Nordic noir that has descended upon us over the last number of years.

St Patricks Day 2014

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Not to Disturb

Not to Disturb - Muriel Spark

"'Their life,' says Lister, 'a general mist of error. Their death, a hideous storm of terror - I quote from The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster, an English dramatist of old.'"

This short novella is from the early seventies and is similar in style to The Hothouse by the East River, which I read and wrote about a few years ago. It is a spectral book, with elements of a play, and of a film script, only ninety one pages long and telling a story of murder and suicide in a locked room, mostly from the outside. And not alone are we outside the room but we also seem in some way to be outside time.

Bilgewater

Bilgewater - Jane Gardam
"My mother died when I was born which makes me sound princess-like and rather quaint."

I was inspired to read something by Jane Gardam by her inclusion on the shortlist for the Folio Prize. I had picked this one up at some point in a charity shop and so decided to pull it from the shelves. It was initially published as a children's book but was subsequently published for us adults as well.

Dissident Gardens

Dissident Gardens - Jonathan Lethem

I felt strangely ambivalent about this book while reading it, initial trepidation turning into admiration but always tempered by a feeling that the book had arisen from the unholy union of a host of Sunday Magazine articles and an accessible, hip course of lectures on Critical Theory. It seems almost unbearably bourgeoise, an Upper Middle Class embrace of sexual, racial and political dissidents and sympathy for their tragic fates.

It is a book full of characteristics but without really convincing characters, full of speech but devoid of a voice. Not that I find these insurmountable problems, many books are brilliantly fake, but it feels at times like this book aims to be either realist family saga and metafictional gloss on family sagas but falls a little between the stools.  However, despite these failings there is still much to enjoy here.

Top 102 Albums Minus 13 - No Other

Top 102 Albums Minus 13
No Other - Gene Clark
"Some streets are easy
While some are cruel
Could these be reasons
Why man is Life's Greatest Fool"

Gene Clark was a founder member of The Byrds and wrote their signature song Eight Miles High. That's enough to assure a place in the Hall of Fame, I guess.

By the time he got around to recording No Other he had left the Byrds, recorded a solo album, rejoined The Byrds for three weeks, recorded more solo albums and rejoined The Byrds a second time only for the band to break up after releasing the album Byrds.

CULT CLASSIC

Today you can find me doing a guest post on my selected CULT CLASSIC over in the ever harmonious residence of

the (new) vinyl villain

Please drop over and check it out.

30 Odd Years

30 Odd Years - Vic Godard
(Gnu Inc, 2014)
"Don't want to sing rock and roll" - Don't Split It

My intention was to kick my favourite albums thread back to life but I thought that I should write about what I'm listening to at the moment and what I'm listening to is this new compilation of the work of the great Vic Godard.

The Silent Cry

The Silent Cry - Kenzaburo Õe
(Translated by John Bester)

""I seem to be surrounded by the odour of death," I said.
"If that's so, Mitsu, then shake yourself free and climb up into the world of the living again. Otherwise the odour will rub off on you.""

I'm currently reading and blogging more slowly than at any point over the last couple of years and that is why this January in Japan read is only making it here almost half way through February.  However, quality trumps quantity and to have read this one novel trumps reading four or five merely good novels as this is a great novel, one that will leave images stuck in my cerebellum until death (or it's John the Baptist like precursor, senility) wipes my synapses clean.

A Month of Sci-Fi

A Month of Sci-Fi

Roadside Picnic - Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (1971)
Childhood's End - Arthur C.Clarke (1953)
Foundation - Isaac Asimov (1951)
Hyperion - Dan Simmons (1989)
Dune - Frank Herbert (1965)

For some reason I have spent the last few weeks on a strict diet of science-fiction. Perhaps it was the aftershock of A Girl is a Half-formed Thing. I went through quite a bit of sci-fi in my teens, and return to it every now and again. Indeed a few of my Top 100 are sci-fi. (Riddley Walker, Cities of the Red Night, War with the Newts, A Scanner Darkly, the Day of the Triffids ... ) However I haven't read a lot of the classic sci-fi books and thought I might try to plug at least a few of those gaps. Recently I had found the Dune and Foundation novels in a charity shop and I have a few shelves full of sci-fi so thought I'd pick a couple from there as well.

2013Review/Preview2014

2013Review/Preview2014 

Looking back, I've had a pretty good hit rate with 2013's books, even if I didn't manage to read at a particularly fast rate. I always think comparing books is invidious but it is interesting to see which ones pop out from the year's reading. Goodreads allows you to print out your books read for the year which is a handy little gimmick and responsible for the image above. It is also helping me to write this review.

A Girl is a Half-formed Thing

A Girl is a Half-formed Thing - Eimear McBride
[The Vapour Trails Book of the Year 2013]

"I know. The thing wrong. It's a. It is called. Nosebleeds, head aches. Where you can't hold. Fall mugs and dinner plates she says clear up. Ah young she says give the child a break. Fall off swings. Can't or. Grip well. Slipping in the muck. Bang your. Poor head wrapped up white and the blood come through. She feel the sick of that. Little boy head. Shush."

The quote above is a full paragraph from the first page of one of my books of the year. Like a mash up of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Boy and The Country Girls written by Kathy Acker this is an intense, dark and stylistically exhilarating book.

Poems (not even a) Penyeach

Poems (not even a) Penyeach

An easy way to keep the blog ticking over as I struggle to finish any further reviews? Here's more of my verse.

This one is from a year ago and I had forgotten it completely.  I always tend to like pieces I've completely forgotten when I first find them again.

Breakfast
I rise in my cloak
of ache and my mist
of drowsiness
and mumble through
the stumble step time
washing last nights supper dishes
scraping scraps for the dogs
into a plastic box
cloudy like the winter sky
until the warmth of tea
melts my early mood
and I rise again
to a serenade in marmalade
and the sun
like a yolk haloed in albumen
spills like life
through the window
and stirs my blood

The (Grey) Blades

The (Grey) Blades

On Friday the 13th, last Friday, I attended a gig.  I hadn't seen the band in question play a gig since 1986, indeed no-one had. I hadn't been as excited about a gig for many years. At the time they were 'current' I saw them a few times, once in a small room in O'Sheas hotel in Bray and finally in the fading splendour of The Olympic Ballroom in Dublin, playing their last ever gig. I often wished I had taken more opportunities to see them - some things get taken for granted. No danger of that now. The band were The Blades, and when I wrote THIS earlier in the year I had little idea or hope of ever seeing them play again, let alone with such passion and power and to such an ecstatic reception.

Day of the Ram

Day of the Ram - William Campbell Gault

They say that you should never judge a book by its cover but this one jumped off the shelf. The design seemed somewhere between seventies independent film and classic Penguin, nods I guess to the book's fifties genesis and the reissue date in the seventies.

It seemed likely to give what it says on the can, a slice of pure genre P.I. crime. And it did. This one was short and, if not sweet, muscular and direct, both in terms of the writing and the  main character.

The Reivers

The Reivers - William Faulkner

"..Fortune is a fickle jade, who never withholds but gives, either good or bad: more of the former than you ever believe (perhaps with justice) that you deserve; more of the latter than you can handle."

A couple of years back I was thinking about authors that I hadn't read and the two names that were top of my list were Proust and Faulkner. Last year I filled the Proust sized gap and finally I have started on Faulkner.

I was, I guess primed for difficulty and was highly surprised to find myself in a romp with strong echoes of Mark Twain. This was Faulkner's last book, published a mere month before his death and it is told from the point of view of an old man. However, it is not a lament for life passed but a coming of age tale about how his eleven year old self gets caught up in a madcap adventure involving a 'borrowed' car, a stolen racehorse and sardines. And much else besides.

Brother of Sleep

Brother of Sleep - Robert Schneider
(Translated by  Shaun Whiteside)

"Come, O death, O come, sleep's brother,
Lead me where thou dost decree"

This is a brutal, poetic, fable, set in Eschberg, an Austrian mountain village. It is set in the  early nineteenth century and the dust of the dark ages hasn't been fully shaken off.  In the isolated community inbreeding has exacerbated certain tendencies and idiot children, psychopaths and one towering, mysterious case of musical genius dominate the book.

I felt elements of American Southern Gothic in these truncated, inward looking lives filled with violence and strangeness but the most telling reference point would be the fairy tales collected by The Brothers Grimm. The writing style is that of a fireside storyteller, with the fire rising on occasion to consume the village Eschberg in flames that may constitute a judgement from God.

Fund Razor for Loffa FC

Shave it Off!

Tonight I am having my hairy face returned to what constitutes 'normal' in my world.

I have been growing facial hair for the month in order to raise some funds for LOFFA FC, the sporting arm of LOFFA (Laois Offaly Families for Autism).

In LOFFA parents of autistic children get together to provide valuable support through subsidised services, information sharing, mutual support and lobbying (although that's not all they do).

Vertigo

Vertigo - W.G.Sebald

"Yes, said Lukas, there was something strange about remembering. When he lay on the sofa and thought back, it all became blurred as if he was out in a fog."

I have been meaning to reread Sebald for some time now and GermanLitMonth seemed like the perfect time to do so. I read  Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz in the year or so preceding his death, which came so shockingly soon after finding his work. The books all formed what was clearly a cohesive body of work, distinctive and original. In memory, I have found it difficult to separate them. My plan is to reread all four in order, with perhaps a year between each one.

Vertigo was just as I remembered it, an intimate voice, speculative, knowledgeable and humorous but revealing, beneath the knowledge and cosmopolitan gloss, a deep chasm floating beneath the cultural and personal history of the narrator. It is this chasm which gives rise to the feeling of vertigo which haunts the book.