BUKOWSKI: novels

Bukowski was a jerk…

Nick Cave, “We Call Upon The Author”

Reading Charles Bukowski is like eating, drinking, smoking, having sex, watching TV, sleeping, brushing teeth, cutting fingernails. Charles Bukowski is what you read when you don’t want to read. I didn’t. This was just the noise of the underground and two long months of traveling to and from work. Six of his novels, reviewed here in order of their publication. 

His poetry was good. His short stories were hit and miss.

Post Office (1971)

8/10

This was my first Bukowski novel, so if there is any sentimental feeling in my heart reserved for this writer, it goes to Post Office. Initially, his writing seems refreshing and even mildly intriguing. Henry Chinaski, Bukowski’s alter-ego, is working at the post office. That’s all you need to know. Customers, women, booze. No epithets, no metaphors, just his no-nonsense style – note that I use the term ‘style’ very loosely. You almost won’t get bored: it all ends on page 208.

Factotum (1975)

7/10

This was my last Bukowski novel, so it felt especially expendable. Of course they are more or less the same, his books, but this time I just didn’t care. Still enjoyable in its mindless, catatonic way, and contains what might be the ultimate line of his: “A man with a hangover should never lay flat on his back looking up at the roof of a warehouse”.

Women (1978)

7/10

Drinking and fucking.

Ham On Rye (1982)

9/10

Of course: if you are going to read just one book by Charles Bukowski (wise move), it should be Ham On Rye. This is not so much essential in the grand scheme of things as the perfect distillation of the man’s concise, hard-boiled poetry (“summer was insolent and bitching”). From childhood onwards. Ham On Rye is grossly well-written. If you accept his terms, that is.

Hollywood (1989)

8/10

At his funniest. As ever, the scenes float by and you forget. If anything, Hollywood is Bukowski’s book on writing. Hollywood, too, hypocrisy and money, but essentially we get a close look at the way he wrote and approached writing. Drinking, horse-betting, yes, but this is Chinaski the writer. Or non-writer, whichever way you prefer. The book is about Bukowski being commissioned to write a screenplay for a movie (Barfly) and what it takes to do it in Hollywood. Again, autobiographical. Again, very brief: just 248 pages.

Pulp (1994)

6/10

His last work, published months before his death. If you thought Bukowski was a good writer (he wasn’t), you will have to admit Pulp is a very poorly written book. If you thought Bukowski was a bad writer (again, he wasn’t), you will just be bored. This reads like a not particularly inspired Hammett/Chandler pastiche for people with short attention span. Fucked-up private detective working for Lady Death, looking for Red Sparrow. That sort of stuff. A few funny moments (buying beer in a bar) and a few unlikely philosophical paragraphs (I guess he meant it), but overall this is for the fans dying to get more. Be warned, however: there’s no Henry Chinaski here. 

Chinaski died when Bukowski realised his own mortality. The whole world, remember, revolves around two things: sex and death. Bukowski/Chinaski swapped the latter for drinking. Or writing. Or whatever it was.

Book review: E. LOCKHART - We Were Liars (2014)

8/10

I want to be described by Cadence Sinclair. I want her to put me into two words, maybe three. ‘Mirren, she is sugar, curiosity, and rain’. Who wouldn’t want to be distilled like that?..

We Were Liars is a novel with a twist. That’s an extremely vapid sentence if you consider the fact that most of modern-day fiction comes with a gimmick-sized twist. Style and the rest of it might come in useful, but twist is the selling point. This time, however, it’s a twist that is pretty much what this whole book is about. Like a detective story without a crime, the novel will not work without this twist. It will fall apart.

The book is based on a lie. Cadence Sinclair Eastman is a teenage girl coming from a wealthy, tall, athletic, handsome American family. There’s a brief and eye-catching first chapter that describes the Sinclairs and, like all Cadence’s descriptions, it is childish, whimsical, unaffected and very precise. The girl’s vain grandfather owns an island, and four best friends (three are related and one is Cadence’s boyfriend) spend each summer there – wallowing in silly good times. The notion of ‘best friends’ is questionable, though, as they tend to forget about each other’s existence once the summer is over. ‘Friends weakened into acquaintances’. It is also questionable because one summer an unspeakable thing happens.

It happens to Cadence. Did she see something she was not supposed to see? Was she raped? Cadence does not remember, because she probably hit her head on the rock and the only thing that is left of that strange day from summer fifteen is a bad headache that keeps tormenting her all through the next year. Well, she has to find out – because there are all these liars. Mirren, Johnny, Gat, even her mother – nobody tells her what actually happened, and so this book is this anxious trip that will have to end with a quite astonishing chapter called “The Truth”. And Christ will you want to know it.

Is it worth it, getting inside this girl’s head? I’d say yes. She might not be anything beyond her secret, but with a secret that big you do not need to worry. Besides, Cadence is full of good observations that are so infantile they border on genius. ‘Johnny, he is bounce, effort, and snark’. It’s a raw and sketchy and cranky world E. Lockhart creates, but it rings with genuine feeling. It’s a disturbing feeling, even sickening, but it is also quite fascinating. We Were Liars is what you could call a cleverly constructed cherry-bomb of a novel.

Well, let me put it like this. I was walking through a park in Siena and suddenly it started to rain. Nothing critical. Nothing a decent bench, a thick tree and fifteen minutes wouldn’t fix. There were maybe 150 pages left in We Were Liars and so much to do about the city. And then suddenly the rain was long over, my chance neighbour changed for the umpteenth time, Siena grew a little dim, and the book was closed on the last page. 

All, remember, all about that twist. But what twist.

Book review: DONNA TARTT - The Goldfinch (2013)

10/10

The Goldfinch is one of those books where you feel older at the end. You are wiser, but there’s a price. Your hair’s gone gray and your voice is husky and feeble. You smoke now. Maybe you’ve quit smoking. And you remember that all those years ago, back in 2013 or something, Donna Tartt won the Pulitzer Prize for this novel. Long, long time ago.

Donna Tartt gives ten-year gaps between novels a good name. Her latest book is so immense (close to 800 pages) and monumental (Nietzsche’s immortal ‘We have art in order not to die from the truth’ line almost doesn’t sound excessive) that you’d have to wonder if The Goldfinch is not, in fact, one of those.

Great American novels. Because it has everything to be one.

Interestingly, it is almost old-fashioned. Despite iPhones and numerous indie culture references. Despite the fact that we have a Bildungsroman that has angles ranging from romantic to detective to gangster (the latter is especially evident in the Amsterdam section of the novel that made me think of Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges). But you finish a chapter and the next one follows the story ever so faithfully. Character descriptions are so complete (though my favourite one is just a brief line of pure poetry: ‘He was a planet without an atmosphere’). And watch Tartt give you that ancient but highly effective drama at the end of some of these encounters. This could be the last time I saw him. I knew I would never see her again. It's 19^th century at best, and yet it works so beautifully.

Classic, simple narrative. Reading Tartt’s prose is like falling in life with the English language again and again. It’s rich, it’s precise, it’s very lush. Her dialogues are living things. And even when she is being pretentious, it never comes off that way. She is sharp and to the point. ‘Beauty’, she writes in a long but fascinating philosophical passage towards the end of the book, ‘has to be wedded to something meaningful’. Donna Tartt stays true to her word.

Theodore Decker is a New York boy who visits the Metropolitan Museum of Art with his mother to look at one of her favourite paintings (“The Goldfinch” by Dutch artist Carel Fabritius). There is a huge explosion and the boy somehow retrieves the picture out of the ashes and the dead bodies. Theo’s mother dies, and he is almost like a modern-day Oliver Twist. His enthralling adventure starts. He gets to know his runaway father. He falls in love, tragically and eternally. He meets his best friend, an exciting Ukrainian boy named Boris (yet again I tip my hat to Donna Tartt: most of the Russian language bits are very credible). Completely by chance, he encounters a mentor, a father figure. The generous and naïve Hobie is a charming Dickensian character, and it’s great to see how different worlds collapse into each other at various points of the novel. It’s that kind of book: by the end of it, you feel that everything has happened. And all the way through, Theo has kept the picture. Faithfully, frightened of being found out, only occasionally unwrapping the heavy package to peek at what Boris so wittily described as his dear friend’s ‘zolotaya ptitsa’ (literally: golden bird).

Indeed, it’s like Donna Tartt set out to write the impossible. The ultimate novel about art. I would not say that it is (how can you?), but it is one hell of an artistic statement. It is an art statement. She tries to see that pattern (‘maybe I see a pattern because it’s there?’), something that would go from William Blake and to Lady Gaga. She got as close as you can, without burning yourself or compromising the fact that you’re but an artist. She even named her book The Goldfinch. How humble is that. How bold. 

And it is not just that you’ve grown older. You are at the point of no return, you are basically dead already. ‘Life is catastrophe’, with art as its sole saving grace. “The Goldfinch” by Carel Fabritius, painted in 1654. ‘I was different’, says Theo when he looks at the picture years later, ‘but it wasn’t’. 

Book review: JAVIER MARIAS - The Infatuations (2013)

I tried to retell the plot of this novel to a friend the other day. Usually retelling plots is a very silly thing to do, certainly never to be attempted without gloves on. I failed miserably. The eloquence and the subtlety were lost, the understatement went missing, and the story turned into tasteless old junk from your kitchen’s freezer. What we were looking at was a Mexican soap opera unworthy of anyone’s time or attention. Which is a shame. Because The Infatuations is something of a triumph.

And then again – it would be the same with Marcel Proust (note that I’m not making any far-reaching comparisons here). In Search Of Lost Time would be no more than a sentimental French melodrama. Swann and Odette would be a cliché. Same with Flaubert and countless others. Which is all to say that some novels simply can’t be dissected that way. For all its intriguing plot shenanigans, The Infatuations is all about the style.

I’ll give away the premise. Maria (or Prudent Young Woman) is from the world of publishing. You might forget that in the process of reading the book, but try not to. It’s important. Each morning she comes to one particular café in Madrid, and each morning there’s this married couple sitting nearby having breakfast. Looking so happy and contented. Maria feels drawn to them, she becomes infatuated with the image. The smiles, the little laughs – but then you never really know with people, do you?.. A terrible accident happens, and Maria has an unlikely chance to do what no one should ever do: get close to the object of her obsession. The story does go to fairly exciting places once we leave the cafe, but like I say. All about the style.

The style is meticulous, but always graceful and never labored. It twists and twirls, often around one scene or even a thought. It’s enchanting, and you get entangled into the textures that create true beauty out of what is essentially mundane and repetitive. Somewhere in the middle of the novel, Javier Marias retells (ah!) the plot of a short story by Balzac (whose main idea – ‘the dead are wrong to come back’ – becomes so significant in this context). It is done in a very detailed, nonchalant, matter-of-fact way. But very early into The Infatuations I realised that if we’re never going to leave the Madrid café in the course of these 352 pages, I won’t mind. I’ve accepted the rules of the game, I’m in. It will take you two pages to see where you stand. I personally bow my head to both the author and Margaret Jull Costa, the translator of the novel.

Marias likes a sparkling sentence that he can later suck on for a paragraph or two. “It’s easy to introduce doubt in someone’s mind” is surely a key one, reflecting as it does the strange, existential, slightly Dostoyevskian world that Maria finds herself in. Where you can neither confirm nor refute anything and where each truth is only a half-truth. The characters are never real. They breathe, but abstractly, and their looks never come through. They’re not even one-dimensional – they’re translucent. But The Infatuations is that kind of book. It creates its own universe inaccessible to conventional senses and way beyond Spain. With a plot that is merely an embellishment. 

It was a long read for me, but then I never really pushed it. Like all great art, The Infatuations was great escape.

Book review: KATE ATKINSON - Life After Life (2013)

These days it’s all about the gimmick. Well, maybe not all, but if you want to get by in the brutally competitive world of the modern novel, it has to be something more than a plot, a character or even a bloody good twist. It has to be the gimmick. Something that could interest a bored teenager on a random city bus.

For her new novel, Life After Life, Kate Atkinson went for something very special – if not necessarily original: we get to experience the life of one Ursula Todd or, to be more precise, we get to experience the lives of Ursula Todd. A sensible alternate title would be Life After Life After Life After Life (etc.). The gimmick is that it’s not a straightforward line of events, Kate’s idea being that a life is basically just a bunch of big and small what-ifs, like what if that boy kissed Ursula against her will or what if Ursula slapped him or what if Ursula let him kiss her. It’s just one tiny episode on Ursula’s 16^th birthday, behind the shrubbery, and the list of possible futures resulting from it is really quite endless – every single one making Ursula an even more complex character than she already is (there’s a bit of magic here, like foreseeing future and experiencing strong deja-vu’s). Indeed, this book is like the ending of French Lieutenant’s Woman gone totally, clinically mad.

It doesn’t always work, and a good idea used can on occasion become a good idea abused (the whole thing does, inevitably, turn into a bit of a mess towards the second half), but when it does work – it makes Life After Life a brave, compelling, entertaining novel that is not afraid to go – in a matter of a few pages – from a rural mansion called Fox Corner (a piece of idyllic Britain that belongs to Ursula’s parents) to the hysteria of Hitler’s Germany to disturbing pictures of bombed babies during the Blitz in this never-ending loop of lives.

Fine writing all around, and it was the sheer punch-like brilliance of the novel’s first page, which has to be read and reread, that proved to be so convincing. (To say nothing of the actual scene: after all, it’s not often that you get to read of an apparently successful assassination of Adolf Hitler in 1930.) The family life in Fox Corner is described with a sharp female eye for amusing details. Plus, humour and warmth are to be found in old-fashioned but irresistible lines like “Butter was plastered on to the roll with no regard for the hard labour of the cow”. Then, in a freewheeling postmodernist spree, it all gets rather Dickensian in the part where Ursula marries a young Casaubon from London called Derek. Quite an eclectic ride, then, even if that can be forgiven in a novel that spans so many decades and thrice as many lives.

Life After Life is not a particularly long novel, but it is one of those where by the end of it you feel you’ve aged together with the main character. It’s a good feeling, certainly rather reassuring, because maybe if that first chapter wasn’t convincing and you threw the book away or maybe put it back on the shelf, something undesirable or even irreparable could have happened. Or darkness would have fallen, as Kate Atkinson has it so often in this excellent novel that is a little ridiculous but mostly fantastic.

8/10

Book review: RACHEL KUSHNER - The Flamethrowers (2013)

Who are these people? And why are they naked?

Wishy-washy art be damned. Decent books, okay albums, nice films, a real deluge of those, should get the hell out. As something measured by shelf life, their sole purpose is to meet expectations and ‘mediocritise’ the whole thing. And while some of us would not be able to figure out what ‘the whole thing’ even is, let’s not forget that provoking love-or-hate reaction from public is exactly what art should do. What Rachel Kushner did with The Flamethrowers. Which is deliriously self-indulgent and so nonchalantly cool.

As Morrissey put it in one of his recent interviews, some people are art. By analogy, some books are art. Not in the way that a writer is an artist (not necessarily) and literature is a form of art (you’ll be amazed), but in the way that art stares at you from each and every page of these books with what could be described as a predatory smirk. This is very much the case with The Flamethrowers, a novel about a young girl from Nevada called Reno who sells her motorbike and, in pursuit of her artistic leanings, comes to New York of the 70’s to have this thing called ‘art’ smashed all over her face in a way that is frightening, thrilling, disgusting and quite overwhelming.

As with any self-respecting novel of modern times (though not on modern times), the plot of The Flamethrowers jumps all around the place. There are flashbacks you expect and there are flashbacks you don’t expect. Rachel Kushner is totally in charge of proceedings though, and she is never afraid to break things up a little: for instance, right in the middle of the novel there is a scorchingly brilliant chapter enumerating the actions of The Motherfuckers, an anarchist NY group of the 60’s, whose founder Reno meets at one of those tedious art-parties where you are equally bewildered, put off and amused. It’s an entertaining breather, but it also adds credibility (which was hardly Rachel Kushner’s main concern, to be honest) to the book swarming with mostly imaginary but perfectly realistic writers, graphic artists, sculptors, etc. Speaking of sculptors, it’s through one wealthy, minimalist artist (is there a worse combination?), Sandro Valera, that Reno gets into that world. She becomes his girlfriend – a girlfriend of a wealthy, minimalist artist. Sandro is of the Valeras, a powerful Italian family that owns a huge motorcycle empire in Rome. And Moto Valera is the bike that Reno rides.

While the premise is quite straightforward, The Flamethrowers is filled with plots. Reading the novel, I kept thinking to myself, not unpleasantly, that several books of short stories could come out of it: take that story about dead rabbits or one about a woman who got hit on the hip by a meteorite. Brilliant, intriguing ideas that come pouring out of the artist’s impressionistic, imaginative mind, and if some of it starts looking like a mess – you hang on to it like you do to a great David Lynch film. And what could possibly be easier when Rachel’s prose is so charismatic and so intoxicating, and you find yourself purring in dizzy delight: ‘he looked like Zeus lost in a casino’, ‘he said ‘cops’ with a tough, flattened New York accent, as if he were beheading the word with the chop of his voice’, etc. The prose is joyful and lush, but the devil is of course in the detail, so you get Rachel mentioning the Motherfuckers crashing an overpriced Ukrainian diner for it to later quietly resurface as a place where Reno and Sandro eat. That’s art for you. And that’s artists: naked, impotent, vaguely gifted motherfuckers quietly usurping the city like a sprawling gang of zombies.

On love or hate. Indeed, I don’t believe there is a person who would close the book thinking this was a decent, okay, nice read. There are those who would think The Flamethrowers (in itself certainly a symbol, because art does not just lead to creation) is a novel of the year and there are those who would stop reading or drag themselves through by way of a ridiculous habit. Me, I think it’s the novel of the year. It is everything art should be: bizarre, brilliant, polarizing. Interestingly, having read and loved the experience, I can’t even see Reno in my mind. But I can sense, feel, smell her, and every credit to Rachel Kushner.

In fact, my only regret is that I haven’t read Rachel’s debut novel, Telex From Cuba (2008; fantastic title at the very least). But there’s no regret like a sweet one. And yes, this review is pretentious – but then so is its subject matter and so is art.

9/10

Book review: A.S.A. HARRISON - The Silent Wife (2013)

There were these two girls in your class. One smoked, was red-haired and, by the look of it, could have an equally brilliant career in art and/or in pornography. She was cynical, smart, seductively feministic. Needless to say, all the boys in the class wanted to sleep with her. The other had beautiful wavy hair and was generally a good girl. There was a mystery to her, and she came off as an intriguing introvert. Her cynicism (if there was any) was well-balanced and reasonable. She had good grades, and boys rarely talked to her. As it happened, both girls became writers. The first one wrote Gone Girl. The second one wrote The Silent Wife.

Indeed, parallels between the two novels are inevitable. Both deal with dysfunctional families (sleepy monsters, silent grudges and such), both are told from two perspectives (‘boy’ and ‘girl’ in Gone Girl; ‘he’ and ‘her’ in The Silent Wife), and both work extremely well on different levels. The key one, of course, being ‘psychological thriller’.

The thrills are significantly scarcer in Harrison’s case. They are a little more subtle, a little less flashy; this owes a lot to the author’s style, which is all elegance and understatement. There’s very little that happens in the first part of the book (by page 30 you might ask yourself why in God’s name is this not a short story): you get the silent wife going about her life in a quiet, forgiving way. The silent wife knows her husband cheats on her, but she is determined not to let that ruin their family. The silent wife is a psychotherapist and can think herself into anything. They have no kids (yet) and they are, quite inexplicably, still unmarried (hence ‘silent’). And then you get the husband (ironically, something of a silent husband), who narrates his part of the story. And what a despicable bastard he is: his lover is a young girl called Natasha who also happens to be the only daughter of his best friend. The gathering storm breaks into the real thing the moment Natasha says she is several months away from giving birth to their child.

It is not too enjoyable giving the plot of The Silent Wife because it is all a bit of an awful cliché. From the girl’s name to the best friend part to the pregnancy revelation, the whole thing should crash on the floor with a heavy, lethal thud. The fact that it somehow doesn’t (that’s a ‘somehow’) is a testament to the compact, nuanced prose and the part-vexing, part-mesmerising silence of the silent wife. The silence is a winning formula, simply because anything could come out of it – in particular when the past is so troubled and the brain is working overtime.

Whereas in Gone Girl you started with despising Nick and feeling for Amy, taking sides in The Silent Wife is barely an issue: both characters are equally unlikable. Aesthetically, I was more interested in her part, because writing from the male perspective doesn’t always work. When he tells his drinking buddy in a bar something as rotten as ‘that’s the spirit’, it’s a little wince-inducing – not because it is improbable (it isn’t), but because of the way it looks on paper. Still, you warm up to it, as you warm up to the actual novel, which expectedly erupts in a storm that is bound to leave you scratching your head over a number of trivial and not-so-trivial questions on your present decisions and your possible pasts (to borrow a Roger Waters line).

The ending has to be very sad though. The Silent Wife was A.S.A. Harrison’s debut novel; and it was also her last novel: she died of cancer right before the launch of the book. It was a debut novel at 65, which is a remarkable achievement in many ways. Not least because it’s a very fine little book that certainly deserves to be read. And that, as we all know, is all any writer could ever ask for.

7/10

Book review: MORRISSEY - Autobiography (2013)

While any sane person would be advised not to spend too much time trawling through the back doors of his favourite artists (a personality not seen in a work of art is a personality not worth seeing), autobiographies are different. Yes, they often end up pulpy melodramas or boring self-serving homilies that will on occasion (god no) alter your perception of an artist in question, but once in a while you might also stumble upon a literary masterpiece that will leave you awe-struck and dumbfounded. And I was expecting a classic from Morrissey – I just couldn’t expect it would be quite this good.

Forget about the Penguin Classics imprint (if you don’t have the guts, then at least find the courage to applaud him for the cheek) and forget about Morrissey having favorite artists (as opposed to ‘favourite’ artists) – what you are looking at here is a monumental piece of non-fiction done by a man who was very much aware right from the start that ‘monumental’ was the only thing worth going for.

The evil question here would be why Morrissey bothered in the first place. To settle scores? To satisfy a narcissistic whim? To remind us of his existence? But evil questions are better left unanswered, so let’s just consider the words (words, words, words: 457 pages of words) and the gamble on posterity so explicitly seen in the memoir’s title. Fuck your clever suggestions torn out of the Smiths’ lyrics – Autobiography is maddeningly perfect.

Speaking of lyrics, Morrissey loves them so much they are spread all over this book in lovely cursives, which only accentuates what we’ve suspected all along; yes, of course it has all been true: all that misery, all that bitterness and all that loneliness. From “Reel Around The Fountain” to “I’m OK By Myself” – every word rings with experience and inner feeling. Don’t doubt Morrissey’s integrity. Honestly, the best thing he can say about the human race is hidden somewhere in the middle of this memoir: “People are certainly oddities”.

In a book so richly textured and so beautifully written (often florid, but always articulate), everyone is bound to have his own favourite pages and lines. Myself, I felt enchanted right from the very beginning: the lush, poetic way with which Morrissey describes his childhood, his teachers, endless odd jobs, the drab city that, yes, has so much to answer for. (See? Morrissey’s integrity is precisely the reason why you want to support each Morrissey’s sentence with Morrissey’s lyric.) The unspoken truth soon to be revealed to our young man is this: “Effeminate men are very witty, whereas macho men are duller than death”. Girls love him; fast-forward 30 years later: girls still love him – with the possible exception of Siouxsie Sioux.

The Smiths’ years, and this has puzzled and riled up a lot of people, are quickly dispensed with. The Smiths’ years are just years, you see, Morrissey’s years piling on top of each other to make up his life and this autobiography. Yes, he loves the music and for a few years Marr is a true soul mate; yes, he doesn’t like the production on the debut album and Strangeways, Here We Come is The Smiths’ masterpiece (no argument here), but he is just as interested in persistently slagging off Rough Trade Records and decrying dodgy record deals. His family, his apartment, his love of animals and his growing inner frustration are just as essential to the story as who wrote this or who came up with that. It’s simple: what you want to hear is not necessarily what Morrissey is interested in saying.

Besides, “nothing that isn’t my own seems to work for me”. So understandably much of Morrissey’s interest is invested in his solo years. Deliriously successful American tours (marred by madness and slander), meticulous descriptions of chart successes (and failures – those record labels), a passionate love affair (ah yes) and, of course, the unfortunate centrepiece: the lawsuit filed by the Smiths’ drummer Mark Joyce, the ensuing trial (John Weeks, “may you turn in your urn”) and the inevitable defeat are described through pain and with a great deal of spiteful and bitter detail. Will you take Morrissey’s side? Of course you will. And then later, much quieter years, that nonetheless bring out one incredible, dramatically understated moment: Morrissey comes to Denmark and finally feels at home. The world fainted, my eyes got watery. Now you see?

There’s certainly much bitterness in the book. While Marr is more or less spared, Joyce, Rourke, Geoff Travis, John Peel, NME and countless others are all dismissed with various degree of care and vitriol. Morrissey has every right to be bitter; close people dying around him, people he thought were close leaving and betraying him – these are just a few recurrent motifs in the book that constantly strives for pattern and consistency. But it’s not just bitterness and it’s never quite despair. There’s droll humour (pages describing the Smiths’ one-time rhythm guitarist are hilarious), there’s love (the way Morrissey speaks about Bowie and Auden and the New York Dolls is both beautiful and accurate) and, towards the end, there’s that light that never goes out. Because it’s been a life well spent, as told by a talented and fulfilled man who has never once compromised his vision, taste or integrity. The book may be drenched in Morrissey’s ego, but it’s not like he hasn’t earned it. Yet. Baby.

And for God’s sake, forget about vegetarianism and sexuality. Because if you don’t, this book will find you wanting. Because this is an Artist’s book, through and through. Because before you know it, a line like “most people keep their brains between their legs” will come up and Morrissey will be done with you.

‘Accomplished’ is an understatement.

10/10 

Book review: MARTIN AMIS - Lionel Asbo: State of England (2012)

Martin Amis’s writing has always been vicious. It doesn’t matter if it’s been a gruesome book on Holocaust or a comical short story about sex addiction, Amis’s wit is essentially brutal. A quick glance at the cover art of Lionel Asbo will no doubt tell you that the book is as well versed in violence as his breakthrough novel Money, a reference point not entirely random.

Indeed: Lionel Asbo: State Of England is Amis at his most ruthless. It’s him delving his teeth into the modern England, exposing its vices and then pissing all over them with his trademark style. The prospect, you have to admit, is irresistible.

Amis had a short story titled “State Of England” back in the 80’s, so you would think he’d been coming round to Lionel Asbo for quite some time. However, the end result feels almost effortless: of all well-established writers who came to prominence 30 or even 40 years ago (it’s exactly 40 years since the publication of The Rachel Papers), Martin Amis is the one you would entrust with the heartless task of tackling the modern times. Or, to be more precise, State Of England.

Which is a pretty sorry state to say the least.

The setting is contemporary London, specifically a God-forsaken borough called Diston Town, and Lionel Asbo is a 20-something thug who, if struck with the choice whom to strangle, you or one of his two dogs, would unblinkingly pick you. He also happens to be the uncle of Dennis Pepperdine, a 15-year old teenager who is rather sensitive and of mixed race. The two live together, and while the narrative is exhilarating from page one (Dennis’s confessional letter is pure comical genius), it is all just a clever setup for the moment Lionel wins an absolutely outrageous sum of money on the National Lottery. Initially it’s lush and disfigured, then it predictably hits the inevitable tits-up stride: Amis in full swing. The swing including violence (“the muscular violence that lies coiled in clouds”), sex (“straightforward copulation: this is what happens when a zoo rapes an aquarium”), money (but of course) and all those things he’s been writing about all along. Amis's comfort zone is a scary place.

As for the style, it’s nothing new: Martin Amis always writes like Martin Amis. It is mostly punishing hardcore this time, but he does it with witty and intelligent aplomb only he can muster. He is full of unexpected similes and singular metaphors, and he also has an almost sloppy way with that erudite brand of the English language – yet he is always convincing and never fails to entertain. You feel he actually enjoys writing about it all, that raunchy and gruesome world where cruelty is a pastime, and the inimitable way in which he can take this world apart and then assemble into an art form. All elements are in place, including that big dramatic moment towards the end, where Amis gives it away – about the Lionels and the rest, in the way of Dennis’s biggest life lesson: “They can’t love – hell, they can’t even be loved”.

Make nо mistake: Lionel Asbo is nothing more than a Martin Amis novel. And, crucially, nothing less. So if, like me, you think Amis is the sort of writer who gives postmodernism a good name, there’s no reason why you wouldn’t consider his latest a modern classic. It has drive and urgency to it, and, for once, its comical brutality rings disgustingly true. Vicious and viciously good.

9/10

And to further emphasise how highly I rate Lionel Asbo, this is the full list of Amis’s novels marked Vonnegut style:

The Rachel Papers (1973)    B-plus

Dead Babies (1975)    B-plus

Success (1978)    B

Other People (1981)     A-minus

Money (1984)    A-plus

London Fields (1989)    A-plus

Time’s Arrow (1991)    A

The Information (1995)     A-plus

Night Train (1997)    A-minus

Yellow Dog (2003)     D

House Of Meetings (2006)    B-plus

The Pregnant Widow (2010)    A

Lionel Asbo (2012)    A

Book review: WILL SELF - Umbrella (2012)

If you have ever wondered whether a book can hate you, Will Self’s Umbrella will bless you with a densely voiced, slightly illegible but resounding yes. This novel hates you on every page, unconditionally and with a passion. It hates your cute haircut and the soft expression in your eyes. It hates the immature cuticles on your fingers. It hates the way you read, the way you try to skip the thorniest passages and get to the meatiest parts – those that would be ‘interesting’ or even ‘understandable’. Primarily, it hates your guts. To the extent that the way with Umbrella is to try and win its trust and maybe even affection – by tightly gripping the book, by holding on and believing in that big, old-fashioned sacrifice for the sake of art. Because this really is your only chance.

Take almost any contemporary writer of note and a few Bookers (well, maybe of shortlisted fame – like Mr. Self himself), and you will see that underneath all that ‘higher voice’ and artistic integrity, there’s a great desire to be loved. It’s give or take with ‘understood’, but to be liked is a must. The plots and the prose are there spreading their legs for you or at least smirking adorably for some kind of love and enjoyment. With Will Self, there’s just no such thing. Here is a man who simply doesn’t care. Which isn’t really so hard to do when you are a young artist who is really more young than an artist. But when you are someone as established as Will Self is, when you write 1000 published words every day (this is according to a recent interview with the man), that’s a completely different story. It means shortlisted is as far as you are ever going to get. It means University and college courses will faithfully snub your works. It means people will either love or hate you.

It’s more like love for me, but by no means has it been a perfect record. While I consider myself a huge fan of Will Self’s writing (and that includes his fiction as well as his journalism), I do admit that The Book Of Dave is there lying somewhere eyeing me with disdain. I still believe that novel needs a rope, a gun and a machete. Well, perhaps one day.

This time, however, I was quickly and ruthlessly won over by the single and singular metaphor that so expertly and so poetically ties the whole book together. First you read it as the novel’s title on the cover or elsewhere. Then you have a passing crush on it when you see it in the epigraph. (James Joyce’s timeless quote: “A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella”.) Then you see it under various guises throughout the book: it could be a syringe and it could be a penis. It could be many things, and if you are more intrigued than enlightened, that’s not such a bad thing either.

And then there’s of course the actual novel. It’s never too easy, is it, and I can still hear my mind noisily resisting the humourlessly lush prose huge on words (in all their endless manifestations), lacking in paragraphs and threaded with merciless cursives that on occasion appear so sudden and so random. Except they aren’t, so do try to hang on to these three interwoven narratives, time periods and characters. The 1918 story of Audrey Death, a munitions worker and a feminist, who falls victim to a severe epidemic of encephalitis lethargica, can so easily ooze into an interior monologue of Dr. Zack Busner, a retired psychiatrist who in 2010 looks back on his work (namely 1971) in Friern Mental Hospital where a strong drug helped him awake his post-encephalitic patients – including Audrey Death. It’s one hell of a read, one that is fascinating rather than engaging. It’s a bit like David Lynch’s Inland Empire without any visual aids or depictions of immaculate female breasts to help you weather the storm. You don’t see anything but the language – but the language is good. Illegible not by accident but by design, Will Self’s writing is a congested jungle of words that barely give you a chance to let a page slip by, take a break or even breathe. Still, as long as you can run into jewel observations like “old age is a form of institulisation” or “it’s a matter of time – how you understand time”, you should be doing okay. It’s basically your stamina, your attention, your intuition and your love of art. Speaking of which, Umbrella is so offensively, so deliberately pretentious that it slaps you with that word (a-r-t) as tirelessly and consistently as a gloved hand of an erudite boxer.

However, it would be a sign of bad taste to decry pretentiousness in such a daring novel. Interestingly, excluding a boy with an iPad and a few other details, Umbrella could have been written back in the 1920s by an especially snotty and edgy Modernist inspired by nothing else but determination and self-belief. Which means, I guess, that Will Self achieved whatever he had set out to achieve. I mean, how many writers these days are prepared to go this far? Martin Amis tried and failed with Yellow Dog. Kazuo Ishiguro did well with a much more modest The Unconsoled. But it’s Will Self that had the guts to take the top prize. Even if, technically, he was stalled at the shortlist stage.

Maybe it’s way too easy forget these days that art can, and perhaps should, be challenging. Hell, even difficult. Will Self himself has admitted that it’s a difficult book. One, however, I will give any number of literary awards to (not that he will need them). And before I sign off and urge you to read the damned thing, as insistently as I only could, I would like to stress yet again that this novel is not entertainment. Nor needs to be. But do believe me: bruised and beaten, you will somehow find solace in that.

9/10

Book review: GEORGE SAUNDERS - Tenth Of December: Stories (2013)

Quite simply, this is the greatest collection of fucked-up short stories I’ve read since Will Self’s Grey Area. The latter is a book of way-out plots presented in a relatively straightforward manner (plus, the language is beautiful and almost conventional – by Self’s standards). By contrast, Tenth Of December is made up of way-out plots weirded out even further by broken, bizarre presentation. In fact, your appreciation of these stories will very much depend on your acceptance of George Saunders’ style. Which comes off as deliberately careless and unintentionally clever.  

My reaction after reading each one of these stories was more or less the same: well, this is weird – but it’s really good, too. The book contains freak diaries, interior monologues, multiple narrators speaking in tongues (I may be exaggerating here); you won’t be just enjoying these stories, the enjoyment can hardly be guaranteed, you will also have to make sure you know what is actually going on. It can be argued that the whole point and appeal of a story like “Exhortation” is that the reader has to find out/guess the job of the narrator. It’s not a tiresome post-modernist puzzle, but it’s certainly a great example of art that is well-crafted and understated.

When you get inside the world created here (and it is a world, Saunders’ style beautifully ties together all these ten stories into an odd little universe of mostly amiable freaks and losers), you will see that it’s really quite simple. Take David Lynch’s Eraserhead as an example. Behind the grotesque make-up and the disturbing visuals, you actually get a very familiar portrait of young family life. Much here is just as recognizable: a soldier coming home from war, an employee seeing his boss having sex with another employee, a small guy burnt by jealousy and his own smallness. It’s never too simple, however, and there’s no shortage of the author’s wild imagination messing with your head. “Escape From Spiderland”, a futuristic tale of sex/love experiments, is particularly good in that respect.

Also, barring some eccentrics (see “Sticks”, which is a perfect one-page story), there are lots of seemingly straightforward characters here. But only seemingly so, ‘seemingly’ the result of odd circumstances and their often unexpected heroic (or ‘heroic’) actions. See “My Chivalric Fiasco”, see “Victory Lap” (my favourite), see the aforementioned “Escape From Spiderland”.

Perhaps the best thing about Tenth Of December is that these are all memorable stories, which is probably the combination of 'huh?' moments (how about the weird, harrowing perversion in “Puppy”?), George Saunders’ great sense of humour and, obviously, the style. I’d very much recommend staying with that style, trying to immerse yourself into that deceptively perfunctory, elliptical English. It’s not perfect (this sort of writing is bound to lose you on occasion), and I’d say the collection is a little front-loaded, but as far as truly great literary experiences go, believe me – this is the real deal.

8/10