I‘ve mentioned before how lovely Melville House’s Contemporary Art of the Novella series is and have been meaning for some time to read another. Bonsai (2006) by Alejandro Zambra felt like the timely choice, having recently been the focus of an article in The Nation (via The Literary Saloon) and to even the score for Chilean writers, what with Roberto Bolaño getting all the attention. According to The Nation article, “its effect on the world of Chilean literature has been entirely disproportionate to its size.”

It’s a short book, weighing in at eighty-three pages, many blank as they split chapters, allowing the content room to breathe. But within there’s a complete story, a larger story, in fact, bursting to get out. In this it could be said that it resembles the titular bonsai, all the attributes of a larger work condensed into a miniature.

As openings go, Zambra makes a bold pitch, giving away the ending and letting the reader know from the off that the journey about to be taken is a metafictional one:

In the end she dies and he remains alone, although in truth he was alone some years before her death, Emilia’s death. Let’s say that she is called or was called Emilia and that he is called, was called, and continues to be called Julio. Julio and Emilia. In the end Emilia dies and Julio does not die. The rest is literature:

Emilia and Julio are are university students that meet at a study group in preparation for their Spanish Syntax II exam and, despite initially disliking each other, their relationship quickly develops, Zambra detailing its journey, with occasional reference to previous lovers, in a beguiling mix of thick brush strokes and finely judged details.

As the opening declares, “the rest is literature:” and it’s literature that binds the couple and gives purpose to their relationship, a strange foreplay emerging whereby they working their way through Schwob and Mishima, Perec, Onetti, and Carver, amongst others, until they read Tantalia by Macedonio Fernández, a story about a couple who buy a small plant as a symbol of their love that ends in despair.

“That should have been the last time Emilia and Julio shagged,” the narrator says, but the couple continue on, having sex after reading pages of the classics (“They did terribly with Checkhov, a little better, curiously, with Kafka, but, as they say, the damage was done.”). Eventually, a shared lie between them – that they have read Proust – brings their relationship to a head:

It happened with Proust. They had postponed reading Proust, due to the unmentionable secret that linked them, separately to the reading – or to the lack of reading – of In Search Of Lost Time. They both had to pretend that their mutual read was, strictly speaking, a reread they had yearned for, so that when they arrived at one of the numerous passages that seemed particularly memorable they changed their tone of voice or gazed at each other to elicit emotion., simulating the greatest intimacy. Also, Julio, on one occasion, allowed himself to declare that he only now truly felt that he was reading Proust, and Emilia answered with a subtle and disconsolate squeeze of the hand.

In reading Proust for the first time, neither is prepared for the impact it has so their relationship breaks off, with Emilia heading to Spain – and dying! – and Julio getting on with his life. Julio’s path leads to an attempt to work for a famous writer, transcribing his latest novel and, on failing to do so, continues to transcribe the novel he imagines, based on a brief synopsis, that he would have been transcribing. In keeping with the metafictional style, he calls it Bonsai, and it bears a knowing similarity to the book we’re reading.

There’s so much more to this slight volume that comes to represent the bonsai. The authorial interjections force us to stick to the story of Emilia and Julio, with repeated messages to ignore characters for being “secondary” or observing a woman as she moves away “and begins to disappear forever from this story”, each potential thread of narrative routinely clipped so that all we have is this love story contained within the container its pages – Julio learns that “Once outside its flowerpot, the tree ceases to be a bonsai.”- that does represent the wider picture.

Caring for a bonsai is like writing, thinks Julio. Writing is like caring for a bonsai, thinks Julio.

Bonsai‘s story is, to borrow a line from the book,”a common story whose only peculiarity is that nobody knows how to tell it well” and Zambra’s attempt to capture this common story is wholly successful. With prose aware of its shortcomings, that takes steps to address them – pruning its loose ends and carefully shaping its narrative – it takes that common story and reduces it to its finer points, makes of itself an artform, and contains it within a flowerpot of pages. The rest may be literature, but the whole is art.

The Israeli writer, Etgar Keret, is probably best known for writing short stories, a few collections of which have seen translation. Typically the stories are very short, no more than a few pages, and his collection Missing Kissinger had no less than fifty tucked away within its pages. Kneller’s Happy Campers (1998) was the longest story in another collection, The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God and Other Stories, published in the US. Either it deserves to be published as a standalone book in the UK or its publisher is milking it in these recessionary times.

The novella follows the life – well, afterlife – of Mordy, who has recently committed suicide and found himself in a world not unlike the one he’s just left (“I’d always imagine these beeping sounds, like a fuzz-buster, and people floating around in space and stuff. But now that I’m here, I don’t know, mostly it reminds me of Tel Aviv.”)

The big difference here is that the population is entirely made up of suicides, each person showing the traits of how they offed themselves. Mordy’s new friend, Uzi Gelfand, shows the scars on his head where the bullet went in and out, and the girls at the local bars (“you could tell straight off how they did it, with the scars on their wrists and everything, but there were some that looked really good.” Those without scars, “who did it with pills or poison”, are called Juliets. There’s even room for celebrity suicides, where Keret throws in a cameo for some humour:

Last night was awful. Uzi brought this friend of his, Kurt. Thinks the guy’s really cool ’cause he was the leader of some famous band and everything. But the truth is he’s a big-time prick. I mean, I’m not exactly sold on the place either, but this guy, he wouldn’t stop bitching. And once he gets going – forget it. He’ll dig into you like a bloody bat. Anything that comes up always reminds him of some song he wrote, and he’s got to recite it for you so you can tell him how cool the lyrics are. Sometimes he’ll even ask the bartender to play one of his tracks and you just wanna dig yourself a hole in the ground. It isn’t just me. Everybody hates him, except Uzi. I think there’s this thing that after you off yourself, with the way it hurts and everything -and it hurts like hell – the last thing you give a shit about is somebody with nothing on his mind except singing about how unhappy he is.

On arriving in this afterlife, Mordy has found himself working a deadbeat job in a pizza chain called Kamikaze. When not slaving away he’s doing whistlestop tours of the bars, getting drunk. So, when he hears that Desiree, his girlfriend from before he killed himself, has also taken her life he sets off in the car, with Uzi, to find her. Such is love.

Like much of the novella, the journey taken is just as strange and funny as the premise. However, below the surface there are serious stirrings, Keret’s afterlife holding a mirror up to the world we live in and highlighting its flaws. At one point during their road trip racism is briefly touched upon as Gelfand overlooks his own circumstances to pass sweeping comments upon a group of people:

The people outside looked a lot like the ones in our neighbourhood – their eyes kinda dim, and dragging their feet. The only difference was that Gelfand didn’t know them – which was enough to make him paranoid.

‘I’m not being paranoid. Don’t you get it? They’re all Arabs.’

‘So what if they’re Arabs?’ I asked.

‘So what? I dunno. Arabs – suicides – doesn’t that psych you out, even a little?’

Along the way they pick up a Juliet, who maintains there’s been a clerical error because she didn’t off herself, and by the time they meet the eponymous Kneller the story, if not strange enough, takes a turn for the surreal, introducing almost whimsical ideas that, given the circumstances, never really feel out of place. Kneller, presiding over a commune, talks of the ‘miracles’ that happen in the vicinity, of which we see a number happening, but after that the breakneck speed events take seems as if it’s rushing to the end so as to mask that there’s not much storyline to be had and the charming conceit that opens the novel shadows the latter half. In all fairness, the conclusion is satisfying, but the road there is unscenic.

While its bizarre humour had me wondering where Keret would lead off to next, and its informal, sometimes colloquial style, was for the most part engaging, the same couldn’t be said for its characters: they were sorely lacking a dimension. All singular minded and sketchy. As his short stories typically only take a few pages each, one wonders if he’s not more interested in the surreal twists of imagination he is capable of than giving his playthings substance. So, while I’m not a fully fledged happy camper, I was satisfied enough with the ride, although, like all the characters, I was happy to check out.

A.L. Kennedy is one of Scotland’s greatest contemporary writers who, over the last twenty years, has produced a body of work spanning novels, short stories, non-fiction, screenplays, and more. In recent years she’s been a regular feature in comedy clubs, something which polarised opinion at the start, and since 2007 her stock has risen with a string of prizes and awards, including the Best Book at the Costa Awards (for fifth novel, Day) and the Austrian State Prize for Literary Fiction, putting her amongst distinguished names like Umberto Eco, Salman Rushdie, and Milan Kundera, not to mention two recent British Nobel laureates.

Other than a few short stories from her first collection, I’ve read little of Kennedy, owing to an increasing preference for world literature over what’s on my doorstep. Recently I’ve felt the need to survey home soil writers, and so it is that I read What Becomes (2009), a new short story collection, her fifth to date.

The collection is named for the opening story which opens with Frank taking his seat in a small, empty cinema and waiting for the movie to start. In the prolonged time it takes to gear up, he finds his mind wandering to recent events, to one night in particular that accelerated the fall of an already splintered marriage. As he prepares a soup, slices some squash, he accidentally cuts his finger and here Kennedy provides us with a fantastic piece of subtle foreshadowing, noting that “he hadn’t been paying attention and so he got what he deserved” and, later, when the denouement comes, the echo of “funny how he didn’t feel the pain until he saw the wound” assumes a satisfying symbolic power.

Frank’s a detective,  a catalyst in his failing marriage, for his mind deals with things differently than his wife (“she’d never known the rooms he’d seen…”) and communication between them is strained. While they share the grief underlying the story, each handles it in their own way. She fails to realise he’s hurting, while he retreats inside, forensically trying to overcome the insurmountable.

Invisible rooms – that’s what he made – he’d think and think until everything disappeared beyond what he needed: signs of intention, direction, position: the nakedness of wrong: who stood where, did what, how often, how fast, how hard, how ultimately completely without hope – what exactly became of them.

This sets the stage for what’s to come. The title recalls the old song that asks what becomes of the brokenhearted, and in the twelve stories that make up What Becomes, Kennedy sets out to examine scenes of hopelessness and heartbreak that are at times funny, other times uplifting, yet always underscored with melancholy.

In Edinburgh we meet Peter, a greengrocer, who finds his passions aroused when a younger woman starts hovering around his shop, more for him than his wares. And when he offers her some apples, saying, ‘They’re fine to eat, they’ll be fine for days. But everything’s going off in the end, isn’t it?’, Kennedy once again shows her flair for foreshadowing and picking the precise symbol that reinforces the effect of the overall story. Similarly, in Whole Family With Young Children Devasted, the title appears on a poster about a missing cat, but it readily applies to the wider issues of the story.

The telling of the stories is varied, Kennedy seemingly happy in first and third person modes, and getting into the heads of men and women. There’s also some mild experimentation, where Sympathy, about a woman having sex with a stranger in a hotel room, is told entirely through dialogue.

‘…if we keep talking, we’re going to end up –’

‘Getting to know each other?’

‘That wouldn’t work.’

‘Fine.’

Aside from the symbolic power of the stories, where the success is achieved is in Kennedy’s characters. Her understanding of them is second to none. As she describes their actions and feelings, their thoughts seem to take life of their own, interjecting, pondering, and reflecting on the hopeless situations that circumstance has dealt them. In Sympathy, which follows the death of a children’s entertainer (“Barry with the fake face for parties, Barry who loved to flirt”) who, like a fair number in this collection, was no stranger to an unhappy marriage. The child between is someone for his wife to love, “a consolation for his inability to love her”, a flesh and bones creation made without thinking.

Although, Lynne had been thinking: otherwise, she wouldn’t have stared at her husband as he first picked up his daughter, hefted her tenderly, gracefully, feelingly — so the nurses could not help but remember the scene, believe it — and she had thought — Got you. She’d seen his eyes: the wide, unfamiliar chill that was settling in them and she had thought — Got you. Fuck you. Deal with that.

A highlight of the stories is the humour that runs through the. As God Made Us, in which a group of British soldiers who met in hospital (“Hospital — great place to meet folk, get new mates.”) have their annual meetup, shows this in its dialogue, following the lads will be lads mentality that until the collection’s theme catches up with it in an explosive outburst. Other stories show a subtler, truer humour, such as in Vanish, where Paul finds himself sitting next to an annoying person in a theatre and experiences something we can laugh it, because it’s the way we may think ourselves:

It was ridiculous and unfair to imagine a person like Simon could unknowingly drain each remaining pleasure from those around him and leave them bereft. ‘Do you know his work? Amazing guy. I’ve seen every show.’ Even so, as Simon cast his hands about, shifted and stretched, Paul found himself taking great care that they didn’t touch, didn’t even brush shoulders, just to be sure that no draining could take place.

Returning to the title story, Frank ponders at one point the buttons on a personal music player, saying,

‘They’ve anticipated you’ll want to repeat one track, over and over, so those three or four minutes can stay, you can keep that time steady in your head, roll it back, fold it back. They know you’ll want that. I want that.’

It rings true for the stories in What Becomes and is perhaps a foreshadowing of the collection itself, for each story is a multi-layered affair that sheds its many skins with each reading. In its singular focus on the melancholy side of human nature, the whole is unified and it becomes a rounded work. And in those epiphanous moments where the stories show their cards, the revelations, through their believability, prove memorable. Kennedy knows you’ll want that. That’s what she delivers.

It’s unfortunate that Roberto Bolaño isn’t around to see his star in the ascendency in the English speaking world, following on from the acclaim given to recent translations, The Savage Detectives and 2666. The English translations began in 2003, the year of his death, with Chris Andrews’ translation of By Night In Chile (2000). And the translations are set to continue with more books – novels, short stories, and essays – scheduled to appear in the next year. What makes the volume of work surprising is that Bolaño turned to fiction late in his life, before passing away at fifty.

By Night In Chile is the feverish confession of Father Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix, a Chilean priest, literary critic, and poet with a shady past. Believing himself to be dying, he sets out one night to recall the major events of his life, relentlessly delivering his story as a lengthy rant wrapped up in a single paragraph. A paragraph that runs for a 130 pages. A contender, perhaps, for the longest known ‘famous last words’.

Father Urrutia begins his confession:

One has to be responsible, as I have always said. One has a moral obligation to take responsibility for one’s actions, and that includes one’s words and silences, yes, one’s silences, because silences rise to heaven too, and God hears them, and only God understands and judges them, so one must be very careful with one’s silences. I am responsible in every way. My silences are immaculate. Let me make that clear.

With all his talk of taking responsibility and mention of silences, we are immediately alerted that we are in conversation with an unreliable narrator and that we are going to have to tread carefully as he “rummage[s] through [his] memories to turn up the deeds that shall vindicate [him]“. Quite what those deeds are maintain interest as the narrative takes us on a dizzying journey from receiving God’s call at age thirteen through the political turmoil that affected Chile in the 1970s.

The moments recalled are extremely vivid. We spend some time with Farewell, “Chile’s greatest literary critic”, as Urrutia learns his craft and comes into contact with some figures of Chilean letters, such as Salvador Reyes and Pablo Neruda. There’s an extended piece where Opus Dei sends him to Europe to report back on the methods used to preserve dilapidated churches and finds pigeons are at the heart of the problem. The solution appears to be falconry, with many of the Old World priests adept in the art, an art which presages the impending Pinochet regime. Its delivery comes as a prose poem that, as befits Father Urrutia’s lyrical and feverish mind, lingers long and indecisive on details in a stream of consciousness, such as this example from a visit to Avignon:

Ta Gueule appeared again like a lightning bolt, or the abstract idea of a lightning bolt, and stooped on the huge flocks of starlings coming out of the west like swarms of flies, darkening the sky with their erratic fluttering, and after a few minutes the fluttering of the starlings was bloodied, scattered and bloodied, and afternoon on the outskirts of Avignon took on a deep red hue, like the colour of sunsets seen from an aeroplane, or the colour of dawns, when the passenger is woken gently by the engines whistling in his ears and lifts up the little blind and sees the horizon marked with a red line, like the planet’s femoral artery, or the planet’s aorta, gradually swelling, and I saw that swelling blood vessel in the sky over Avignon, the blood-stained flight of the starlings, Ta Gueule splashing colour like an abstract expressionist painter, ah, the peace, the harmony of nature, nowhere as evident or as unequivocal as in Avignon, and then Fr Fabrice whistled and we waited for an indefinable time, measured only by thebeating of our hearts, until our quivering warrior came to rest upon his arm.

Long sentences like this are par for the course in By Night In Chile, but are not the only means of expression. Bolaño changes the style throughout, throwing in patches of terse sentences to juxtapose the longer, recanting conversations (“And Farewell said:….And I:…”) without getting annoying, and hitting the reader with a salvo of Urrutia’s rhetorical questions. The book may be a single paragraph, but its patchwork of styles keep it engaging throughout.

Bolaño’s focus for the novel is the literary intelligentsia of Chile, as epitomised by Father Urrutia. When drafted to lecture the newly formed junta on Marxism, so that they may know their enemies better:

Was it all right? Did they learn anything? Did I teach them anything? Did I do what I had to do? Did I do what I ought to have done? Is Marxism a kind of humanism? Or a diabolical theory? If I told my literary friends what I had done, would they approve? Would some condemn my actions out of hand? Would some understand and forgive me? Is it always possible for a man to know what is good and what is bad? [...] Then, before I knew it, I was asleep.

With misplaced concern – look how long his questions keep him awake! – Urrutia’s path to self-denial continues as he seeks to prove he has done nothing wrong, all the while haunted by his conscience which he fears because it tries to make him address the truth. His self-assuredness of innocence does create doubt and he constantly seeks assurance:

Farewell, I whispered. Did I do the right thing or not? And since there was no reply, I repeated the question: Did I do my duty, or did I go beyond it? And Farewell replied with another question: Was it a necessary or an unnecessary course of action? Necessary, necessary, necessary, I said.

The scorn for the literary class of Chile comes in their inactivity under Pinochet’s regime. All around them people were being tortured and killed and the writers did nothing. They never rebelled. What should have been happening by night in Chile didn’t happen.

We were bored. We read and we got bored. We intellectuals. Because you can’t read all day and all night. You can’t write all day and all night. Splendid isolation has never been our style, and back then, as now, Chilean artists and writers need to gather and talk, ideally in a pleasant setting where they could find intelligent company. Apart from the inescapable fact that many of the old crowd had left the country for reasons that were often more personal than political, the main difficulty was the curfew. Where could the artists and intellectuals meet if everywhere was shut after ten at night, for, as everyone knows, night is the most propitious time for getting together and enjoying a little unbuttoned conversation with one’s peers. Artists and writers. Strange times.

While By Night In Chile is a powerful rant by Urrutia about defending his complicity in what transpired amongst Chilean writers, Bolaño’s subtext is a condemnation of such actions. During one crucial incident the priest notes that “all horrors are dulled by routine”. That may well be true, but the engaging way Bolaño maintains the narrative ensures that the horrors of silence are in no way, as the priest begins his account, immaculate.

It’s called Scotland’s shame, the sectarianism that has attached itself to Scottish society and festers therein. The absorption of Ireland’s exiles in the nineteenth century saw Catholicism take steps into the country, much to the chagrin of the Protestant ‘indigènes’, and the rest, as they say, is history. Although it’s not history per se as the divide created then is still very much alive today, most prominently masquerading around within the national sport: football.

Des Dillon’s play, Singin I’m No A Billy He’s A Tim (2005) tackles sectarianism head on. Since its initial performance at the Edinburgh Festival, the play has gone on to tour both Scotland and Northern Ireland, and it was even used by the then Scottish Executive to tackle the issue of bigotry at school level. By turning the spotlight on two football fans — Tim and Billy, immediately defined by their heavy brush stroke of a name –  supporting a team on either side of the divide, Dillon creates a dialogue that explores sectarianism.

Tim, in the green and white, is a Glasgow Celtic fan., and therefore of Catholic stock. It’s not long before Billy is calling him on singing a song about the Irish revolutionary Michael Collins:

Billy: I wish you lot would shut up wi that shite.

Tim: It’s my heritage.

Billy: Yer heritage!

Tim: There’s nothin wrong wi rememberin yer heritage.

Billy: I bet ye’ve never even been in Ireland. (Beat as Tim squirms) Have ye?

Tim: I’m not tellin you where I’ve been an where I’ve not.

A beat, then:

Billy: Ye’ve never been have ye? (Tim ignores him) Answer me then.

Tim: So! What if I haven’t?

Billy: Yees’re aw the same — rattlin oan aboot a place ye’ve never been. If I had my way I’d send yees aw back to fuckin tattie land.

In the dialogue between the two, there’s underlying irony to be had with Billy (“Ma heritage goes straight as a die to Ulster.”), a Glasgow Rangers fan, and therefore Protestant. Situations in real life are, of course, more complicated, but Billy and Tim prove adequate mouthpieces through which the fallacies and the hatred that lie at the heart of the problem can be aired. History, politics, religion, and institutions are all paid a visit for their role in the sectarianism of today.

The scene is a Glasgow jail, on match day. Not just any match day, but the clash of the Old Firm: Rangers and Celtic. Both Billy and Tim, however, have landed themselves in the cells. In such a confined space, there’s little more they can do than talk and take broad swipes at each other, unleashing the vitriol as it comes pouring out, and each eager to take the upper hand. While they are able to trot out all the cliches, the moronic arguments that have seen nothing but a stalemate lasting decades, their own ignorance and naivete in getting caught up in the cycle of bigotry reveals itself, from songs sung in the name of sport –

Billy: Hello — Hello — we are the Billy boys, Hello — Hello — you’ll know us by our noise, We’re up to our knees in Fenion blood…

– through outright insulting –

 Tim: …into these (rhythm of the old Coke advert) Orange-Mason-hand-shakin-Ulster-lovin-finger-ticklin-Tim-hatin-goat-buckin-Proddy-fuckin-bastards.

As the invective becomes exhausted, it seems the only way forward is for reconciliation, and in an ideal world this is what would happen. Dillon’s play explores this ideal world, becoming one along the way, as the notions of how to solve the problems of sectarianism manifests itself within the two players. In truth it happens all too easily, but the characters do come to it via logical means.

Although the skin of the play wraps around bigotry in Scotland, the bones are far more generic, for sectarianism is an issue that affects far flung areas of the world, like the tit-for-tat between Israel and Palestine or the genocide of the Balkan conflict — all disputes that have no end in sight. Dillon’s play works on the basis that common ground needs to be found between the sparring parties and from there, mutual understanding can be fostered, goalposts set, and favourable results achieved. It’s a simplistic enough idea, and hardly revolutionary, but it works in the context of opening up dialogue on the subject.

Tim: Look — I think everybody’s a bigot. We’ve all got bigotry. Every single person’s got bigotry for somethin.

The closing stage, where a symbolic unification occurs is poignant, for gone are the bilious songs that characterised both men and their upbringing, and in comes one that represents Scotland as a whole, the bigotry driven out.

The merits of the play would be best experienced in a theatre rather than on the page, as, given the subject matter, it’s a narrative that could bring people to the theatre who would never think to otherwise. While it’s laudable that it could be used to dispell myths, quash rumours, and educate people on the sectarian divide, its downside is that the casual banter and reheated arguments, especially to those who have heard them all before, become more of a novelty than a criticism. Sectarianism is Scotland’s ‘elephant in the room’ and more literature should seek to attack it. Singin I’m No A Billy He’s A Tim opens up dialogue, and entertains in doing so.

Having intended, at one time, to read the books of Philip Roth in order of publication, a brick wall was soon hit with second book, Letting Go, Roth’s first novel proper and still his largest to date. It just went on and on, never serving up the satisfation of progress. Now, with that reading goal abandoned, it’s open season on Roth. But where to begin? In the end, I went for The Breast (1972), a thin slice of Roth that would hopefully whet the appetite for some more. Which it has.

The Breast is the first book in a trilogy involving Professor David Kepesh and is an extended short story that pays homage to Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Where Kafka’s classic follows the experiences of the unfortunate Gregor Samsa as he, following uneasy dreams, wakes to find himself changed into a large beetle, Kepesh, thanks to a suspected “hermaphroditic explosion of chromosomes, wakes from a coma to find himself turned into a female breast.

…a mammary gland such as only could appear, one would have thought, in a dream or a Dali painting. They tell me that I am now an organism with the general shape of a football, or a dirigible; I am said to be of a spongy consistency, weighing in at one hundred and fifty-five pounds (formerly I was one hundred and sixty-two), and measuring, still, six feet in length.

Quite why Kepesh has found himself transformed is very much an irrelevance — he simply has, and how he deals with it is the subject of the book. It’s to Roth’s credit that he takes the initial idea and runs with it, ticking off the possible thoughts that someone in this predicament may encounter and doing so in a serious, contemplative manner.

 Alas, what has happened to me is like nothing anyone has ever known: beyond understanding, beyond compassion, beyond comedy, though there are those, i know, who claim to be on the brink of some conclusive scientific explanation; and those, my faithful visitors, whose compassion is deeply felt, sorrowful and kind; and there are still others — there would have to be — out in the world who cannot help but laugh. And I, at times, am one with them: I understand, I have compassion, I see the joke.

Although his situation is ridiculous and consciously invites laughter, the comedy of The Breast comes not from Kepesh but from those around him. He mutters lewd requests to his nurse who talks over him, never acknowledging his advances; his doctor tries to move his life on as if nothing has happened, and his father, a retired innkeeper now wasting his days working the phones for his brother’s business, seems almost oblivious to the changes that have come over his son:

He comes to visit me once a week and seated in a chair that is drawn up close to my nipple, he recounts the current adventures of people who were our guests when I was a boy. Remember Abrams the milliner? Remember Cohen the chiropodist? Remember Rosenheim with the card tricks and the Cadillac? Yes, yes, yes, I think so. Well, this one is dying, this one has moved to California, this one has a son who has married an Egyptian. “How do you like that?” he says, “I didn’t even know they would allow that over there.” Oh, Dad, I think to say, wonders never cease…

As one may expect, a large breast isn’t going to do much moving around and so the narrative is, for the most part, internalising punctuated with recollections of memorable scenes. Beginning with the question of ‘why me?’ Kepesh’s journey continues logically until he tries to convice himself that he’s mad, that he’s in a mental ward. The question of sexual frustration, that human desire for sex that can never be sated, is a major part of Kepesh’s struggle — being an organ incapable of orgasm is a nightmare. But the pain of adapting to the transformation seems all the more tolerable when faced with the alternative:

…having been terrified of death since I was two, I have become entrenched in my hatred of it, have taken a position against death from which I cannot retreat just because This has happened to me. Horrible as This is, my oldest and most heartless enemy, Extinction, still strikes me as even worse. Then you will say, maybe This is not so horrible after all. Well, reader, you say that, if you want to. All I know is that I have been wanting not to die for so long, that I just can’t stop doing it overnight.

All around Kepesh are people intent on staying within the blandness of life. His girlfriend isn’t sexually adventurous, his doctor ignores the magnitude of events, and his father hovers over smalltalk. When pondering his situation, Kepesh questions a “churning longing” to be  –

…utterly and blessedly helpless, to be a big brainless bag of tissue, desirable, dumb, passive, immobile, acted upon instead of acting, hanging, there, as a breast hangs and is there.

– and this nicely captures the idea of accepting the daftness of life and just getting on with it. This is what Roth is scrutinising in The Breast, and he successfully milks it for all it’s worth.

Alexander Pope is considered one of England’s greatest poets of the eighteenth century, known for satirical poems as The Rape Of The Lock and the Dunciad. He was a member of the Scriblerus club, along with names like Jonathan Swift and John Arbuthnot, a circle of writers that combined in the mocking of contemporary mediocrity in science and the arts. Works borne of this group were sometimes attributed to their fictional founder, Martinus Scriblerus.

Amongst the recognised output of Scriblerus’ was Peri Bathous, or The Art Of Sinking In Poetry (1727), Pope’s satirical attack on the poets of his day. Where criticism and disdain may be best put upon inferior works of literature, appreciation of this essay comes in its alternative approach: to praise bathetic instances in poetry.

Pope opens with an explanation of why it is necessary to study the poets of his day:

It hath been long — my dear countrymen — the subject of my concern and surprise that whereas numberless poets, critics and orators have compiled and digested the art of ancient poesy, there hath not arisen among us one person so public-spirited as to perform the like for the modern. Although it is universally known that our every-way industrious moderns, both in the weight of their writings and in the velocity of their judgements, do so infinitely excel the said ancients.

His essay is to be treated as an instructional piece for any poet, “to lead them as it were by the hand and, step by step, the gentle downhill way to the bathos — the bottom, the end, the central point, the non plus ultra of true modern poesy.” The first few chapters outline the reasons behind such a stance, noting that profit and gain should take precedence over the fruitless undertaking of writing for “men of a nice and foppish gusto”, not that writing for such men should be dismissed out of hand, for it would be a “great cruelty and injustice if all such authors as cannot write in the other way were prohibited from writing at all.”

In order to make it easier to understand how one may begin to ‘sink’, Pope proposes to collect “the scattered rules of our art into regular institutes” and presents us with his first maxim -

…that whoever would excel therein must studiously avoid, detest and turn his head from all the ideas, ways and workings of that pestilent foe to wit and destroyer of fine figures, which is known by the name of common sense. His business must be to contract the true goût de travers and to acquire a most happy, uncommon, unaccountable way of thinking.

– which requires the application of ideas infinitely below the object approached. In addition, he generously offers up a couple of examples from his contemporaries demonstrating how sinking may be achieved. (“Would it not be a shame if he who is smit with the love of the bathos should not sacrifice to it all other transitory regards?”)

As the lessons continue, The Art Of Sinking In Poetry calls to mind, tangentially, a book that would come some two hundred years later, Raymond Queneau’s Exercises In Style, for Pope provides a catalogue of literary terms — catachresis, synecdoche, metonymy — and works his way through them, citing ‘effective’ examples of their use. However, where Queneau would use such devices as a conscious challenge, Pope, in praising those poets who make use of them unconsciously, documents their sinking.

While there are occasions that it seems Pope is nitpicking, such as jargon, many of the poems Pope excerpts for his comical purposes are truly awful and rightly deserve a bit of a lashing. In some cases he explains why the approach is bad, while some cases speak for themselves, like the anticlimax of a couplet on the extent of British arms –

Under the tropics is our language spoke,

And part of Flanders hath received our yoke.

– or the cumbrous phrasing demanding a fire be lit:

Bring forth some remnant of Promethean theft,

Quick to expand the’inclement air congealed

By Boreas’s rude breath…

Poetry may be the focus of the essay, but its a work thay may be of interest to those who would seek to improve their writing in any literary medium, as the underlying call is for those who would write to consider what they are putting to paper. At times, Pope’s prose can feel a little confusing, a side-effect of its age, but the wit transcends the years to ensure that the book has its funny moments while getting its point across — namely, less sinking, more thinking.

The American writer Robert Coover would appear to be a dot on the landscape of British literary consciousness – I don’t know how well known he is in the States – but a small number of his better known titles, such as The Public Burning, The Origin Of The Brunists, and short story collection, Pricksongs And Descants, have recently been appearing on the shelves of my local Waterstone’s. Curious to know more, but without immediately buying, I read about him online and found that he is a postmodernist of some repute and that his novel The Public Burning was the first major work of fiction to use still living people as characters (it was narrated by Richard Nixon). So, intrigued enough to wanting to sample Coover but not intrigued enough to get bogged down in a lengthy wedge of postmodern trickery, I opted for one of his novellas, Briar Rose (1996), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and a reimagining of the Sleeping Beauty tale.

Although there are many variations on the Sleeping Beauty story, the common thread follows a girl on the cusp of adulthood forced to sleep for a hundred years after pricking her finger on a spindle, and who can only have the spell broken by a kiss. To this end Coover tells us the story from the point of view of three characters, told in alternating sections: Beauty, the handsome prince, and the evil fairy whose spindle is responsible for Beauty’s condition.

Briar Rose opens with the story of the prince on a quest to reach a castle after hearing rumours of a sleeping princess (“for all her hundred years and more, still a child, innocent and yielding. Achingly desirable. And desiring.”). What else can he do, as is the hero’s vocation, but race to her rescue? The castle has seen better times and a briar patch has grown around it, preventing easy access. Nevertheless, in an opening tinged with sexual imagery —

He is surprised to discover how easy it is. The branches part like thighs, the silky petals caress his cheeks. His drawn sword is stained, not with blood, but with dew and pollen. Yet another inflated legend. He has undertaken this great adventure, not for the supposed reward — what is another bedridden princess? — but in order to provoke a confrontation with the awful powers of enchantment itself. To tame mystery. To make, at last his name.

— the task is there to be undertaken, despite statements that he’d had been better off searching for the Golden Fleece or “another bloody grail”.Soon we are with Beauty, high in the castle where she sleeps her century’s sleep. But it’s not without a serious of recurring dreams “each forgotten in the very dreaming of them” although some elements produce an “ambient familiarity”. Her dreams see her wandering the castle, its myriad locations amorphous and unspecific, and longing for “the one”. And tucked away in these dreams is the evil fairy, her lone companion who regales her with tales of other sleeping princesses:

Whe she woke up— What was her name? What? The princess: What was her name? Oh, I don’t know, my child. Some called her Beauty, I think. That’s it, Sleeping Beauty. Have I heard this story before? Stop interrupting. When she woke up— How did she wake up? Did a prince kiss her? Ah. No. Well, not then.

Where fairy tales are prone to a form of Chinese whispers, so too do the evil fairy’s stories take on new forms and variations with each telling while remaining true to the original. In her ever forgetful dreams Beauty is ignorant that the stories are her story, albeit garnished, and Coover takes these fantastical tales – of incest, rape, ogres…and bears! – and injects a sense of real world logic into them —

Has that smug sleeper paused to consider how she will look and smell after a hundred years, lying comatose and untended in an unchanged bed? A century of collected menses alone should stagger the lustiest of princes.

— that, in turn, seems to influence the characters into becoming more logical themselves and begin to develop self-consciousness whereby they realise they are archetypes and struggle against it. The prince, for example, knowing that there isn’t a hero’s life once you are living happily ever after (“What is happily ever after, after all, but a fall into the ordinary, into human weakness, gathering despair, a fall into death?”) finds himself almost happy to be trapped in the increasingly aggressive briars (“he slashes, a branch falls; it grows back, doubly forked”).

The question is who’s mind are we in, if we are in anyone but the author’s mind? Is the princess in the castle a myth that drives the prince onward? Is the prince always, but never, coming to the rescue simply an instance of wishful thinking? The questions play back and forth with each other, placing us back with the prince at the start of the book: in a tangled briar of words that seem to part easily at first but eventually keep us rapt in their embrace.

With the impact of recognising Herta Müller as the 2009 Nobel laureate in literature slightly dampened by rising expectations that she would be the recipient I find myself still happy, like last year, that it has went to a writer I have no experience of reading. When this happens, it’s always a welcome recommendation from the Swedish Academy, like J.M.G. Le Clézio last year, who I have since read and enjoyed. I now look forward to reading one of Müller’s works in the near future.

The annoying thing about the Nobel is not the prize itself, but the predictable reactions that follow. If it’s not demonstrating exasperation over how unknown the writer is (see Another obscure Nobel Prize literature winner. Sigh!) it’s calls of the prize being Eurocentric because an American hasn’t won it for a number of years, such as this in the Washington Post:

The latest Nobel literature selection has revived chatter about whether the Nobel Committee favors European writers — even the most obscure ones — over Americans. Mueller, an ethnic German born in Romania, is the third European in a row to win the $1.4 million prize. It has been 16 years since an American won it (1993, Toni Morrison).

Sixteen years, eh? It’s been ninety-six years since an Indian won it and an additional two on top of that since a Belgian was recognised. And, still, there’s plenty of countries that have never produced a laureate. What so many seem to miss is that it’s not a national award but an individual one, as per the will of Alfred Nobel:

It is my express wish that in awarding the prizes no consideration be given to the nationality of the candidates, but that the most worthy shall receive the prize, whether he be Scandinavian or not.”

The American media may crow about how the prize is Eurocentric, especially fired up by then Permanent Secretaty Horace Engdahl’s comments in 2008 about how America is too insular and ignorant to challenge Europe as the centre of the literary world but the big difference is that while America is a single country, Europe consists of fifty separate nations, each with their own history, politics, and culture. If the Academy recognised a writer from France one year it would still be a far cry from awarding a Hungarian, a Finn, or a Georgian the following year. They may all be European, but the worlds they inhabit will be completely different.

Instead of taking no American writer being recognised in recent years amost as a personal insult, the positives are still that, rather than having a reason to cheer on the nation’s favourite sons and daughters, there’s the possibility of a new writer to discover. Surely there’s been movement since that described by the first American laureate, Sinclair Lewis, in his 1930 Nobel lecture, The American Fear of Literature?

…in America most of us – not readers alone but even writers – are still afraid of any literature which is not a glorification of everything American, a glorification of our faults as well as our virtues.

Perhaps that’s why Adam Kirsh, writing in Slate, made this daft comment last year:

The Nobel committee has no clue about American literature. America should respond not by imploring the committee for a fairer hearing but by seceding, once and for all, from the sham that the Nobel Prize for literature has become.

The ignorance surrounding the Nobel Prize in Literature is something that becomes tiring after a while. What are we to think, for example, of a group that overlooked the likes of Mark Twain, Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, and so on? Nothing, I’d say. Authors live and die and the Academy can’t predict that. It may be that Nabokov was in with a shout of winning the Nobel in 1977 but went and disqualified himself by dying in July that year. It may not be. There’s no point second guessing the normally secretive Swedish Academy. Just enjoy their recommendations. Or not. But let’s not bring nationality into it. It goes against the idea of the prize.

Science fiction has been in the news a lot these days, most notably with Kim Stanley Robinson’s much publicised criticism about the lack of recognition awarded to the genre by judges of the Man Booker Prize (although it’s likely that sf publishers don’t submit the works for consideration). It’s a genre that seems to want to break away from being ghettoised and obtain respectability, to prove that it’s a genre of ideas rather than, as stereotypes imply, the domain of nerds.

It’s not a genre that I would consciously gravitate to, put off as I am by the notion of space operas and many a sf cover, but I see no harm in sampling from time to time, although my preference would seem to go to those recognised as good examples of what science fiction is capable of, and it’s for this reason that I turned to Walter Tevis’ The Man Who Fell To Earth (1963). It’s probably better known for the film adaptation starring David Bowie but the original novel is an enjoyable journey in its own right.

The book opens in the year 1985 with our titular ‘man’ wandering around Kentucky and having his first experiences of interacting with human beings:

It was a woman, a tired-looking woman in a shapeless blue dress, shuffling towards him up the street. He quickly averted his eyes, dumbfounded. She did not look right. He had expected them to be about his size, but this one was more than a head shorter than he. Her complexion was ruddier than he had expected, and darker. And the look, the feel, was strange — even though he had known that seeing them would not be the same as watching them on television.

It is through television – and FM radio – that he has observed humanity before arriving on the planet from Anthea, his own world. To understand their ways helps in dealing with the “complex, long-prepared plan” he has come to effect. Said plan isn’t immediately explained but forms part of the novel’s mystery as we watch the rise of Thomas Jerome Newton (his assumed identity) from selling gold rings to small jeweller’s for lows sums to becoming a wealthy man by patenting and producing advanced technology for the market to consume under the umbrella of World Enterprises Corporation. The only hint as to what Newton needs the money for — his target amount is five hundred million dollars in five years — is in his answer to his patent lawyer, that it’s for a research project.

Being a novel set during the Cold War it’s no surprise that suspicion towards foreigners should feature in the novel, and with his meteoric rise in status, Newton begins to inspire the doubts of many people, notably Robert Bryce, a chemical engineer who, upon seeing one of the W.E. Corp’s new products – a self-developing camera film – concludes that it “It’s got to be a whole new technology…somebody digging up a science in the Mayan ruins…or from some other planet…” and burrows his way into Newton’s employ in order to sate his curiosity.

The relationship between Newton and Bryce is an interesting one as the initial suspicion over Newton’s true origins leads to an eventual friendship, and also allows us into Newton’s existential quandary. He’s a man alone in the world, different to everyone on the planet and losing his identity the more he lives as a human and yearns to out himself as an Anthean.

Then he spoke aloud, to himself, in English. ‘Who are you?’ he said. ‘And where do you belong?’

His own body stared back at him; but he could not recognize it as his own. It was alien, and frightening.

While the novel’s title could be read literally, about a man falling to Earth, the truer premise lies in Newton’s decline in purpose. From intentions to serve a masterplan his Anthean self begins to disintegrate under the gravity of human ways, accelerated by a certain closeness to his low status housekeeper, who introduced him to gin and taught him “that a huge and indifferent mass of persons had virtually no ambitions and no values whatever”, and the thought of his own people loses its importance:

…he, the Anthean, a superior being from a superior race, was losing control, becoming a degenerate, a drunkard, a lost and foolish creature, a renegade and, possibly, a traitor to his own.

Tevis’ prose isn’t particularly showy, he deals mostly in facts and details and drifts through the minds of his characters. But in Newton he lingers longer and captures well the loneliness and sorrow that can affect a man who stands alone, obsessed with “vague guilts and vaguer doubts” and with no real confessor in his midst. His decline almost feels inevitable and with the ongoing questioning of himself (“…was it merely that a man surrounded by animals long enough became more of an animal than he should?”) Tevis achieves an agreeable balance of depth alongside pacier sections.

Toward the end of the book there is a mention of the Watergate scandal that, for a book written in 1963 is remarkably prescient, and would hint at Tevis having made later amendments to his work. The pictured edition doesn’t make mention of this and one wonders what other changes may have been made to the original text. But original text or updated probably doesn’t matter for The Man Who Fell To Earth is a satisfying tale that contains a wholly science-fiction premise but delivers it lightly with little emphasis on the science and much more on the fiction.

In Ichthyology, the opening story of David Vann’s collection, Legend Of A Suicide (2008), there appears a fly that gets stuck in a fishtank and, in its panic, sends off a series of ripples that highlight his predicament. It’s a visible showing from the insect and, having little consciousness, it can’t fight instinct in making its panic known. Humans differ, however, and the troubled father of Roy Fenn was not going to be found flapping helplessly in the water. Instead he took himself onto the deck of his boat and, with his .44 Magnum, shot himself. It’s an act that made its own ripples, affecting others, and the mystery around that suicide forms the basis for this book.

It’s hard not to see Roy as a loose version of Vann, whose own father commited suicide in 1980. Of the six stories making the collection, five of them are narrated by an adult Roy, casting his mind back to growing up in the empty expanses of Alaska, where life seemed to consist of nothing more than riffs on guns and fishing.

While the stories are independent of each other, they are deeply anchored in the life of Jim Fenn. The portrait painted is of an impenetrable man with “neither eyes nor ears for matters below the surface”, a weakness for women, and a history of failed investments. In Rhoda, where we meet his second wife – Roy’s stepmother – we are shown how Jim acts, storing his concerns without seeking to tackle them, when he worries that Rhoda may leave him:

“She’s not going to leave,” I said.

My father squinted looking out over the brush on either side distrustfully. “I wish I could believe that.”

“You can,” I said. “She told me she wouldn’t.”

My father stopped hiking and looked at me then as if I were someone entirely new to him. “She told you?”

“Yes.”

“But why?”

“I asked her.”

Such an inability to communicate appears again and again throughout the book and there’s no doubt this has partly led to his suicide. Without a shoulder to lean on and an ear to hear him out we rarely get a sense of his thoughts and feelings, all of which allows Roy to build up a mythology around his father that goes some way toward the overall title of the book.

In the third story, A Legend Of Good Men we drop in on Roy’s mother after his father’s death where there’s little stability in her love life —

The men she dated then were a lot like the circuses that passed through our town. They’d move in quickly and unpack everything they owned, as if they’d come to stay. They’d tempt us with brightly colored objects — floweres, balloons, remote-controlled race cars — perform tricks with their beards and hands, call us funny names like snip, my little squash plant, ding-dong, and even apple pie, and yell their stories at us day and night. Then they’d vanish, and we’d find no sign left, no mention even, as if we’d simply imagined them.

— and we see the breadth of unsuitable father figures that, like Jim Fenn, just disappear one day without a goodbye. Guns abound here, referenced in an obsessive way — “…a Browning .22-caliber rifle, a .30-.30 Winchester carbine, a .300 Winchester Magnum with scope…” — and when Roy breaks into his own house, there’s an eerie dissonance whereby he describes it as if it’s the first time he’s seen it. It’s a tactic that works well to try and understand different perspectives, something which the book parallels on the whole.

The writing in Legend Of A Suicide is almost always controlled. Vann keeps a tight rein on his prose, careful not to let it fly off too far from the polished sparsity that characterises it, and this sometimes creates a cold distance between the narration and the recounted events. However, when it comes to the Alaskan landscape, he allows himself the occasional indulgence, offering up delightful passages, such as in later story Ketchikan. where Roy returns to meet someone from his father’s past:

At thirty, I rode the Alaskan ferry past the coastline of British Columbia, past white-ringed islands, forests extending beyond the horizon, gulls and bald eagles, porpoises, whales, all in close, rode past sunsets over the open ocean, lighthouses, small fishing villages, into Alaskan waters where mountains sloped steeply upward out of fjords, and on, to the town of my childhood, strung narrowly along the waterfront, drenched perpetually on mist, the place of ghosts, I felt, the place where my dead father had first gone astray, the place where this father and his suicide and his cheating and his lies and my pity for him, also, might finally be put to rest: Ketchikan.

Interestingly, the stories that make up the book would feel of little importance if it weren’t for the centrepiece, the novella Sukkwan Island which drops the first person for third and tells us of a time where Roy and his father headed out to the wilderness for a year. Ill-equipped for the experience, but too stubborn to call an end to the endeavour, we regularly see the closed off personality of Jim Fenn break down into late night bouts of tears as he confesses his inadequacies to his son.

God, I felt bad. I felt sick all the time. But I kept doing it. And the thing is, even after seeing all that that did, and all it destroyed, I don’t know for sure that I’d act any differently if I had the chance again. The thing is, something about me is not right. I just can’t do the right thing and be who I’m supposed to be. Something about me won’t let me do that.

This novella is the best thing about the collection as it shows that Vann is capable, after a few reflective stories, of pacing his writing, and the drama created from its limited cast shows much to commend. What’s particularly special is that it goes some way toward ensuring that Jim Fenn, as a man, remains ungraspable. As Vann tries to unlock aspects of Fenn’s personality he does so in a way that opens up contradictions between the stories, slight differences that go some way to producing the myth behind the man rather than the other way around.

For the author it must have been a therapeutic experience to tackle the real suicide that underlies this fictional representation and the slightly maddening way that he comes at the same subject repeatedly, yet in unusual ways, ensures that the reader is given a window into the confusion. “Memories are infinitely richer than their origins” we are told at one point and in the end these private memories are what keeps the legend of Jim Fenn going, as answers are never conducive to keeping mysteries alive.

There is a sense of history from the opening pages of Kressmann Taylor’s Address Unknown (1938), mixing the echoes of the Great War, still vivid in its characters’ memories (“Fourteen years since the war! Did you mark the date? What a long way we have traveled, as peoples, from that bitterness!”), with their deeper personal connection. Told in letters between Jewish American, Eisenstein, and his business partner, the German Schulse, this (very) short novel spans fifteen months in the early 1930s during the Nazi machine’s rise to power.

In the first few exchanges the friends are genial, talking shop, Germany (“the breadth of intellectual freedom, the discussions, the music, the light-hearted comradeship”), and mentioning Griselle, Eistenstein’s headstrong sister and former fling of Schulse, who is traveling Europe as an actress. Liberal politics abound, then darkness descends as Eisenstein asks  (“Who is this Adolf Hitler who seems rising toward power in Germany?”)

What is initially frightening about Address Unknown is how Schulse, privileged in Germany following his economic success in America (“we employ now ten servants for the same wages of our two in the San Francisco home”) makes the rapid volte-face from declaring Hindenburg “a fine liberal whom I much admire” to a scathing attack on liberalism:

A liberal is a man who does not believe in doing anything. He is a talker about the rights of man, but just a talker. He likes to make a big noise about freedom of speech, and what is freedom of speech? Just the chance to sit firmly on the backside and say that whatever is being done by the active men is wrong. What is so futile as the liberal? I know him well because I have been one. He condemns the passive government because it makes no change. But let a powerful man arise, let an active man start to make a change, then where is your liberal? He is against it. To the liberal any change is the wrong one.

The powerful man that arises needs no introduction, and it’s not so much Hitler who features in the novel but the poison that his Fascist tenets instills in a man’s mind. From an early observational capacity Schulse describes him (“the man is like an electric shock, strong as only a great orator and a zealot can be”) but it’s soon obvious that any impartiality is slain by the sword of oratory:

As for the sterm measures that so distress you, I myself did not like them at first, but I have come to see their painful necessity. The Jewish race is a sore spot to any nation that harbors it. I have never hated the individual Jew — yourself I have always cherished as a friend, but you will know that I speak in all honesty when I say I have loved you, not because of your race but in spite of it.

Although the change in relations between the two men seems rapid, with the letters following each other as the pagination insists, its the long gaps between these in the story’s time, often months, that add to the book’s power. We are left to wonder what has been happening in these unwritten periods. How has Schulse allowed himself to secede and convince himself of the efficacy of Hitler’s regime? Have Eisenstein’s nights been sleepless as he anticipates the next reply? And what of their common bond, Griselle, travelling between Vienna and Berlin, especially when her brother notes about the letter he has sent her?

…it has been returned to me, the envelope unopened, marked only address unknown, (Adressant Unbekannt). What a darkness those words carry! How can she be unknown? It is surely a message she has come to harm.

Into its minimal pages Address Unknown packs an incredible wealth of content, describing through one man Germany’s “hysteria of deliverance” under the auspices of a doer —

The whole tide of a people’s life changes in a minute because the man of action has come. And I join him. [...] I am a man because I act. Before that I am just a voice. I do not question the ends of our action. It is not necessary. I know it is good because it is so vital. Men are not drawn into bad things with so much joy and eagerness.

— and showing how words are just as much a weapon as armaments, perhaps even more so with their power to control people that will readily renounce who they truly are to follow a crazed destiny they would otherwise never consider. When Schulse talks of German destiny —

If I could show you, if I could make you see — the rebirth of this new Germany under our Gentle Leader! Not for always can the world grind a great people down in subjugation. In defeat for fourteen years we bowed our heads. We ate the bitter bread of shame and drank the thin gruel of poverty. But now we are free men. We rise in our might and hold our heads up before the nations. We purge our bloodstream of its baser elements. We go singing through our valleys with strong muscles tingling for a new work — and from the mountains ring the voices of Wodan and Thor, the old, strong gods of the German race.

— the words of the Nazi doctrine are evident, for this is a man who has lived comfortably in the United States, and never suffered the hardship of post-war Germany.

If the compact nature of Address Unknown is powerful itself for Schulse’s journey, Taylor strengthens it further by working the idea of words’ power to a wonderful twist that plays on the paranoid, censorious nature of the regime it successfully lambasts. Taylor could not have known what horrors were yet to come from Nazi aggression, but in this tale she rallies against its rise, and the results, when they arrive, are both satisfying, abrupt, and apt.

The longlist for the 2010 Independent Foreign Ficton Prize has been announced, and it’s quite a small press friendly affair. As usual, titles under consideration were those translated works (from a living author) published in the prior year within the UK, and the prize money gets split equally between author and translator. Here’s the longlist:

The Coronation, Boris Akunin (Russian, trans: Andrew Bromfield) [Weidenfeld & Nicolson]

To Music, Ketil Bjørnstad (Norwegian, trans: Deborah Dawkin & Erik Skuggevik) [Maia Press]

The Madman of Freedom Square, Hassan Blasim (Arabic, trans: Jonathan Wright) [Comma Press]

Brodeck’s Report, Philippe Claudel (French, trans: John Cullen) [MacLehose Press]

The Blind Side Of The Heart, Julia Franck (German, trans: Anthea Bell) [Harvill Secker]

Fists, Pietro Grossi (Italian, trans: Howard Curtis) [Pushkin Press]

Yalo, Elias Khoury (Arabic, trans: Humphrey Davies) [MacLehose Press]

The Kindly Ones, Jonathan Littell (French, trans: Charlotte Mandell) [Chatto & Windus]

Broken Glass, Alain Mabanckou (French, trans: Helen Stevenson) [Serpent's Tail]

Your Face Tomorrow, Volume 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell, Javier Marías (Spanish, trans: Margaret Julla Costa) [Chatto & Windus]

The Housekeeper And The Professor, Yoko Ogawa (Japanese, trans: Stephen Snyder) [Harvill Secker]

Thursday Night Widows, Claudia Piñeiro (Spanish, trans: Miranda France) [Bitter Lemon Press]

Chowringhee, Sankar (Bengali, trans: Arunava Sinha) [Atlantic]

The Dark Side of Love, Rafik Schami (German, trans: Anthea Bell) [Arabia Books]

Sunset Oasis, Bahaa Taher (Arabic, trans: Humphrey Davies) [Sceptre]

The shortlist will be announced some time in April. I have a number of these books on my shelves and would like to think I can get around to reading a few of them but, given my prolongued reader’s block, I’m not holding out much hope.

“Most crimes are a mystery in the beginning,” says the Public Prosecutor in concluding a press conference discussing a woman’s murder. In this case, it’s a real mystery: a woman’s naked body has been accidentally dredged up from a Swedish canal and, with no clues forthcoming and nobody reported missing in the area, the police can’t even put a name to the victim.  This is the gambit of Roseanna (1965), the first of ten police procedurals featuring Martin Beck, written by husband and wife team, Per Wahlöö and Maj Sjöwall.

Where much of the crime fiction that I’ve read before – few, admittedly – has focused on the methods of the lone detective, from Holmes to Poirot, it was a refreshing experience to find that Sjöwall and Wahlöö had situated their crime story away from supersleuth glamour and into the realistic drudgery of the Homicide Bureau where being First Detective Inspector is just a job like any other, albeit one that requires a certain dogged mindset.

As jobs go, Martin Beck’s is one that appears to be led by some glimmer of predestination —

Martin Beck wasn’t chief of Homicide Squad and had no such ambitions. Sometimes he doubted if he would ever make superintendent although the only things that could actually stand in his way were death or some very serious error in his duties.

— and, as seems the staple for any dour detective, once it gets its hooks into you, all else falls by the wayside, notably the marriage, which had “slipped into a fairly dull routine” and, in snippets throughout, shows little chance of reparation:

At five-thirty he called home.

‘Shall we wait for dinner?’

‘No, go ahead and eat.’

‘Will you be late?’

‘I don’t know. It’s possible.’

‘You haven’t seen the children for ages.’

Without doubt he had both seen and heard them less than nine hours ago, but she knew that just as well as he did.

‘Martin?’

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t sound well. Is it anything special?’

‘No, not at all. We have a lot to do’

‘Is that all?’

‘Yes, of course.’

Now she sounded like herself again. The moment had passed. A few of her standard phrases and the discussion was over. He held the receiver to his ear and heard the click when she put hers down. A click, and empty silence and it was as if she were a thousand miles away. Years had passed since they had really talked.

Where Beck’s head is really at is in the thrill of the case. However, when the victim surfaces in early July the investigation moves at a pace typically reserved for snails. The aforementioned press conference is bereft of details because the case itself has few leads. Even when a tip off from Interpol finally kickstarts proceedings, the pace of the case still seems lethargic for the contemporary reader, yet in no way releasing its grip.

In this age of mobile telephones, computers, email, and electronic records, it almost seems incredulous the way Martin Beck and his colleagues go about their days: waiting for files being sent through the post; hunting payphones to report back information; travelling back and forth between Stockholm and the town of Motala; scanning manifests for data that, today, would only be the click of a button away. And when things start moving, tracing the crime to a tourist-filled boat, the scope of the case becomes apparent:

Eighty-five people, one of whom was presumably guilty, and the rest whom were possible witnesses, each had their small pieces that might fit into the great jig-saw puzzle. Eighty-five people, spread over four different continents. Just to locate them was a Herculean task. He didn’t dare think about the process of getting testimony from all of them and collecting the reports and going through them.

There are no clues in Roseanna conveniently left to help solve the crime. What’s required here is old-fashioned police work, following defined procedures, to whittle that list of eighty-five down to a single murderer. The cops read over case notes countless times; they scour testimonies again and again; each time they hope to spot something between the lines that they haven’t seen before. The problem they have is that in real life people are not so much black or white as they are shades of grey and so justice comes to face the obstruction of ulterior motives and withheld confessions. This quality of people is something of which Beck is conscious, as shown in one particularly wooden moment, where he separates himself from the media sensationalists that cover such stories:

Martin Beck straightened up. ‘Remember that you have three of the most important virtues a policeman can have,’ he thought. ‘You are stubborn and logical, and completely calm. You don’t allow yourself to lose your composure and you act only professionally on a case, whatever it is. Words like repulsive, horrible, and bestial belong in the newspapers, not in your thinking. A murderer is a regular human being, only more unfortunate and maladjusted.’

When Wahlöö and Sjöwall wrote their Beck novels they took on alternate chapters. Any inconsistency of style is perhaps ironed out by translation, but the prose here, spare and taut, is little more than functional, yet it also reflects those policeman’s virtues: calm and logical and stubborn. There are times when dialogue feels stilted but it’s a minor deflection from the narrative that is almost, from start to finish, gripping in its way without, given that it was translated over forty years ago, feeling dated.

Although the first of ten novels, the expectation was that they would be taken as a single, larger arc called The Story Of A Crime. Of the crime in Roseanna, I’ve barely mentioned it as that would detract from the experience of rolling up the sleeves and following the logical progression of Martin Beck and his team as the day job becomes an obsession —

Martin Beck remained and listened to the work day die away. The telephones were the first to become silent, then the typewriters, and the sound of voices stopped until finally even the footsteps in the corridors could no longer be heard.

— and the seemingly impossible case has its story unravelled and the resulting thread leads from eighty-five suspects to one. Most crimes may be a mystery in the beginning, but they can be measured in the satisfaction of their conclusion. And, so, with this one case satisfying, it’s a pat on the back and back to the day job: there’s nine more cases to be solved.

The tributes that followed the recent death of David Markson inspired me to pick up one of his novels, something I’d been hesitant about before. Cursory flicks in the book stores had shown that those available were little more than page after page of collected quotes, statements, and musings. There couldn’t possibly be a story in there. But then, literature is replete with unconventionalists – e.g. Borges, Calvino, Joyce – and sometimes you’ve got to trust their experiments to delivering on whatever they set out to achieve. To this end, I settled on This Is Not A Novel (2001), published with an unassuming cover by CB Editions, and trusted Markson to deliver.

Any initial reservations with the concept of the book were quickly allayed with the opening sentences, two distinct lines that set up the premise for the book and introduces Writer, assumed to be Markson himself, as he expresses his thoughts on the creation of fiction and its many components:

Writer is pretty much tempted to quit writing.

Writer is weary unto death of making up stories.

Lord Byron died of either rheumatic fever, or typhus, or uremia, or malaria. Or was inadvertently murdered by his doctors, who had bled him incessantly.

Stephen Crane died of tuberculosis in 1900. Granted an ordinary modern life span, he would have lived well into World War II.

This morning I walked to the place where the street-cleaners dump the rubbish. My God, it was beautiful. Says a van Gogh letter.

Writer is equally tired of inventing characters.

In his tiredness, the characters — if we label Byron, Crane and van Gogh so — that inhabit the book are drawn this way, in only a brief line letting slip a fact or two, and seemingly unrelated to what has gone before. The breadth of names is impressive as Markson gives us details of writers, poets, singers, architects, jazz musicians, composers, and painters running the gamut of history. The common thread running through much of these references is that of death and what these artists died from, and so we learn of Thomas Mann’s death by phlebitis, Wyatt Earp’s by chronic cystitis, and of Frank Lloyd Wright’s heart attack — a few plucked from a catalogue of hundreds.

The obsession with death has purpose, and as Writer finds himself nearing the end of his life, his thoughts are on his legacy as an artist. While not explicit, the connections between the disparate facts shed their subtlety and we begin to see how people can survive beyond their lifetime, be it their works, their unsolved mysteries, or in tribute:

Among Dickens’ children: Alfred Tennyson Dickens. Henry Fielding Dickens. Edward Bulwer-Lytton Dickens. Walter Landor Dickens. Sudney Smith Dickens.

Among Walt Whitman’s brothers: George Washington Whitman. Andrew Jackson Whitman. Thomas Jefferson Whitman.

The links between the statements are wide ranging with respect to the artist and we touch on Writer’s preoccupation with madness, influences, relationships, other artistic flourishes, and what defines the longevity of an artist —

The peculiar immortality of Sulpicia. Six love poems, totaling only forty lines, and customarily tacked onto the collected works of Tibullus. For two full thousand years.

— which is no mean feat for a piece of fiction that aims to have “no intimation of story whatsoever”.

Part of the pleasure in the novel is being able to draw the imaginary lines between the proffered facts and to build up the story of Writer who, no matter how tempted he may be to quit writing, is an artist first and foremost and will write regardless. A writer, once an idea sinks its hooks into them, will wrestle with that idea to produce their art and in This Is Not A Novel Writer’s desire to produce something different (“Plotless. Characterless.”) pushes him on through more cleverly executed demonstrations of free association, his personality beginning to shine more despite the unrelated lines:

Ultimately, a work of art without even a subject, Writer wants.

There is no work of art without a subject, said Ortega.

A novel tells a story, said E.M. Forster.

If you can do it, it ain’t bragging, said Dizzy Dean.

With all the death and other assorted miseries, there’s still a streak of humour that runs through the book, which is perhaps not unexpected in such a playful piece. At one point Writer muses on Harold Bloom’s preposterous claim to the New York Times that he could read at a rate of five hundred pages per hour:

Writer’s arse.

Spectacular exhibition! Right this way, ladies and gentlemen! See Professor Bloom read the 1961 corrected and reset Random House edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses in one hour and thirty-three minutes. Not one page stinted. Unforgettable!

To most readers, if not all, This Is Not A Novel will contain anecdotes about some people known to them and many more that aren’t. It’s tempting to enjoy the act of looking up Markson’s references as they appear on the page to get a complete sense of who he’s bringing in to Writer’s thoughts, and from which books quotes are drawn. But to do so would break away from the ultimate goal of a book that revels in having no action “yet seducing the reader into turning pages nonetheless.”

Recalling the Dizzy Dean quote, there’s sly references to what’s been involved in producing the book —

If you find this work difficult, and wearisome to follow, take pity on me, for I have repeated these calculations seventy times. Wrote Johannes Kepler.

— and a sense of hope for its future, the fate of which, is at the mercy of posterity:

My work is not a prize composition done to be heard for the moment, but was designed to last forever. Said Thucydides.

As to what Writer is writing, that’s up to him. At various interjections he suggests what it may be, “if Writer says so”: an autobiography? An Egyptian Book of the Dead? So, if Markson decides that this is not a novel, who are we to argue with the artist? But while it’s a novel that purports not to be a novel, there’s one thing for certain — it is novel.

Technology in the early twenty-first century is changing our lives — the way we do tasks; how we interact with friends;  how we meet potential partners. The rise of Big Data, assisted by our willingness to offer up our daily minutiae to large companies in in our ever connected world lets them know more about us than we do about ourselves, and readily exploit that knowledge. It is not so much this world, in its relative infancy, that forms the backdrop to Dexter Palmer’s Version Control (2016), so much as further along the path, perhaps twenty years hence, where the Instagram generation are approaching their forties. A near-future where autonomous cars zip along the streets and clothes shops just use your social media statistics to select your perfect fit. Goodbye, changing rooms!

Our primary focus in this world is Rebecca, a part-time operative at Loveability, a latter-day match.com, who has been feeling “a certain subtle wrongness” with the world. Her husband, Philip, doesn’t share her concerns; in fact he doesn’t see the world in the same way. His focus is almost completely on his laboratory where, surround by his small team, he wastes all hours of the day working on his causality violation device, a project he wishes others didn’t call a time machine. That these two met at all is curious, given the toe-curling introduction he makes on the aforementioned dating site, showing him inflexible at changing his tone from academic papers to flirting:

The whole package, with the formality of his introduction and the weirdness of the accompanying videos, was so bizarre that it was doomed to failure — his admitted handsomeness aside, it was hard to see how any woman could read that note, and watch the lecture and the unaccompanied drum solo, and be attracted to this guy.

Yet, somehow, Philip (“clearly guileless and unguarded and unembarrassed”) is the winner of Rebecca’s heart from a field of online players. Their subsequent narrative traverses time, leaping back and forward between the now and then, padding out their histories and introducing a further circle of characters drawn from personal and professional relationships, though all roads eventually converge on the laboratory and the causality violation device.

In spite of the seeming complexity of Philip’s device, the science fiction elements of the story are eased into, with most touches being passing references to near-future ways of life, such as insect protein bars (and shakes) and touchscreen restaurants, that are certainly already in contemporary existence but perhaps not commonplace to still be unusual. The device itself is little more than a MacGuffin that allows Palmer to spin his story off a single incident and present a triptych of alternative timelines. Such a device, and the discussion of its possibility, is grandiose, although Palmer ensures that by focusing a relatively mundane situation it is easily understandable.

Across the tapestry woven there is much given over to the exploration of ideas. The balance of religion and science, epitomised by Rebecca’s father and husband respectively; or that of cold hard facts versus creativity between, again, Philip and his son, Sean. Gender and race are also prominent, brought about by the lack of diversity within scientific circles —  pale, stale, and male — and also in the experience of relationships, explored within the online dating scenarios tapped from Rebecca’s job. One black scientist, recalling his creative writing days before moving into physics, reflects on his attitude to race (“excruciatingly uninteresting”) against others’, and is perhaps a pre-emptive strike from Palmer on how to approach his work of fiction —

The message was clear: that while the work of Corey’s white students would be take at face value, whatever Carson turned in was doomed to be read through the lens of his race. If the story was not explicitly about race, then the tale would instead be of his reluctance to speak on the one subject that, surely, must occupy all his walking thoughts.

— when the approach would be different when dealing in other areas:

No one would look at a published scientific article and comment with a sorrowful shake of the head about its author’s reluctance to confront issues of identity. The author would merely relay the results obtained from the data; the data, which knew neither race nor gender nor any other demographic, would be free to speak for itself.

Yes, what really concerns Palmer is the nature of data in the new information age, how it’s used, and the dangers inherent. One one level data is a democratising force, everything being a series of zeroes and ones, but at the same time it’s the data that captures us within demographics. As we move into the future defined in Version Control, there are powers out there able to exploit us based on the data we give up freely. The routes we take in our autonomous cars; our parameters for online love; every video watched; every post made online; or status update liked. All this manifests itself in the regular on-screen appearances of the President, who regularly interjects himself into peoples’ lives, like a high-tech Clippit, his comments always tailored to their concerns — be it in handling bereavement or giving tips for home baking — in an emotional manipulation that offers hope for everyone in the nation.

The ideas are all solid enough, but where the novel really struggles to engage is in their presentation. Admittedly the adage of show, don’t tell can only go so far when trying to get complex information across, but rather than drip feed we get long passages of expository dialogue to get us up to speed.

“First, the idea of the multiverse is essentially the fantasy of preserving perfect information. One of the hard things to deal with in life is the fact that you destroy potential information whenever you make a decision. You could even say that’s essentially what regret is: a profound problem of incomplete information. If you select one thing on a dinner menu, you can’t know what it would be like to taste other things on it, right then, right there. “

Version Control concerns itself with all possible worlds but Palmer’s prose feels more like all possible words; each page is a slough of text that leaves no detail to the imagination. Brand names, songs, and social networks come and go: it’s all too much world building for something almost exactly our own. The novel could arguably be slimmed to half its five hundred pages to give it some zip, as it’s extremely dull to wade through. Plus, paired with characters that are neither interesting or engaging, Version Control saps goodwill, thus turning the final page gives a sense of achievement over satisfaction. That said, the final coda see’s Palmer’s writing at its most energetic: the pace picks up, the more purple prose packed away. But along the way there is too much overwriting, such as when an angry babysitter, on Rebecca’s return three hours late, is shown “tapping the place on her wrist where a watch would have been in an earlier century.” or when what is set up like a Chekhovian gun is later found to have been firing blanks.

Throughout the novel there are references to Joyce’s Ulysses, and it’s perhaps fun to consider Version Control as some sort of loose template placed over the Odysseus myth, casting Steiner as the journeyman, lost for years in his work. Rebecca, her fidelity to the absent Steiner while her job sees her directly interacting with suitors in online dating has shades of Penelope, caught between her father’s man of God and husband’s man of science. Telemachus finds himself boxed in the body of their son, Sean, an artist as a young man. Joycean it’s not however, and it feels like ten years have passed in plowing through the book, rather than a single Bloomsday.

As a light science fiction, Version Control easily presents its alternative world but struggles at times with presenting smoothly its weightier concepts. Palmer allows himself to travel along all narrative roads to see where they lead and, in doing so, this version is rendered overlong and, in places, sluggish. Maybe there are other versions – less incomplete, more edited – for the story here could, quite simply, do beta.

While Yuri Herrera already has two novels rendered in English, his third to be translated, Kingdom Cons (2008, tr. Lisa Dillman, 2017) was actually his debut. A slim volume, like his others previously translated, it focuses on crime in an interesting way (via a musician called Lobo) and is less concerned with the machinations of crime than it is the images such endeavours build around it and project outward.

When he was young, Lobo’s father popped an accordion in his hand, showed him some chords, saying, “This is your bread”, and then vanished in search of a better life. His mother followed soon after. This early abandonment has seen Lobo grow up on the streets, with only the gift of song to aid his survival:

The street was hostile territory, a muffled struggle whose rules made no sense; he managed to endure it by repeating sweet refrains in his head and inhabiting the world through its public words: posters, papers sold on street corners, signs. These were his antidote to chaos.

This sort of life is a drudge, with only the occasional event punctuating its monotony:

He never took notice of the calendar. It seemed absurd because days were all alike: do the rounds of tables, offer songs, hold out your hand, fill your pockets with change. Dates earned a name only when someone took pity on themselves or another by pulling out steel and shortening the wait.

It’s just another day doing those rounds that opens the novel, as Lobo spies a man taking his seat in a cantina with “no urgency and an all-knowing air, as though made of finer threads” and his entourage fanning out around him. Soon, an altercation with a drunk leads to the crossing of Lobo and the man’s lives and it becomes one such date that earns a name as this man is the King and Lobo is absorbed into his court, and that dreary perspective that knew only the streets is instantly widened.

It was exactly as he’d always envisioned palaces to be. Supported by columns, paintings and statues in every room, animal skins draped over sofas, gold doorknockers, a ceiling too high to touch. And more than that, it was people. So many people, striding down corridors. This way and that, attending to affairs or looking to shine. People from far and wide, from every corner of the earth, people from beyond the desert. Word of God there were even some who had seen the sea.

In this new setting, Lobo becomes the Artist. His role is to write songs – corridos – that amplify the King’s successes. He moves silently through the palace, listening, using others’ stories “to weave the fabric of his songs”, and in celebrating their feats, give their glory also to the King “who made it all possible”. Such songs feature the novel’s wider cast, the “good guys” all with archetypal names – the Heir, the Manager, the Doctor, the Jeweller – indicative of their specific roles within the court.

He was a King, and around him everything became meaningful. Men gave their lives for him, women gave birth for him; he protected and bestowed, and in the kingdom, through his grace, each and every subject had a precise place.

This vague naming convention for characters, coupled with an equally vague setting (the City) makes Kingdom Cons seem quite mythic and timeless; universal, as if it could be picked up and placed elsewhere without damage to its core story. While the book never really makes mention of drugs (it’s poison, product, or heaven) where we are actually is in Herrera’s native Mexico, near the US border, and, if a passing reference to a doomed busload of girls is any sort of clue (“a job’s a job”), then it’s a city not unlike Ciudad Juarez, and the court of the King is, in reality, merely the base of a local drug lord. The Artist’s songs therefore sing the kingpin’s glories, building up his legend so that others fear him and dare not challenge his supremacy.

As we know with kings, their reign is always temporary; they die or are deposed, and the throne passes on. So it is for each nameless archetype within the story, always at risk of being easily replaced; no names needed, just a role. And as the translated title cleverly alludes, until Kingdom Come; the King replaces God at the centre of this criminal universe, and the story grinds on forever.

In telling the story, Herrera maintains a certain distance. We rarely enter the characters’ heads so their actions tend to speak more to their motivations than any level of thought. As a story within the narco world, it’s less interested in the drugs operation day job – the smuggling, double crossing, and ruthless killing – but in taking reality and sifting it until something more honest remains, echoing the influence, perhaps, of Juan Rulfo’s 1955 classic, Pedro Páramo. One can well imagine that it’s sparse prose, light but packed with meaning, is more poetic and, like the Artist’s songs, musical in the original Spanish.

The book throughout uses abbreviated forms of though and although (tho and altho), though (tho?) it’s not quite clear why the stylistic choice has been used, but they were slightly jarring to read. Is it to recreate some level of informality that exists in the original Spanish? The translator’s preferred shorthand, perhaps? A minor quibble, as it doesn’t appear to enhance the story’s delivery.

That delivery is less as an engaging all-guns-blazing storytelling narrative, and more like distilled wisdom, a tale told many times by a narrator looking beyond the glamorisation of violence and acknowledging a greater truth about propaganda.

They’d rather hear just the pretty part, but the songs we sing don’t ask their say-so, a corrido ain’t a painting that hangs on the wall to look pretty. It’s a name and it’s a weapon.

Kingdom Cons isn’t a painting either. But it’s a stylised portrait of Mexican narco life, a crime fable that acts as a weapon for criticising the harm done in its wake, touching on how it affects others’ lives, and perhaps asking why it has to be like this, ad infinitum. The King is found to be “a single drop in the sea of men with stories”, but these stories will just keep coming as there’s always someone willing to assume an archetypal role, thus it seems a problem without a solution will always have its prose and cons.

“Where does something begin?” is the opening line to Kerstin Ekman‘s The Dog (1986, tr. Linda Schenck and Rochelle Wright, 2009), and it seems at first a silly question. Where else but the beginning? However, this is tale set in the cyclical pattern of the natural world: where animals live, breed, and die; where plants, once fertilised, disperse seeds for the next generation; and where the passing of seasons sees winter snapping at its own tail. In this cycle of life, we need an entry point as:

It doesn’t begin. There’s always something else before it. It begins the way a stream starts as a rivulet and a rivulet starts as a trickle of water in the marsh. It’s the rain that makes the marsh water rise.

We therefore begin with a puppy (“A dog. But he didn’t know that”) who has become separated from his mother and now finds himself sheltering, lost and alone, under a spruce’s root.

The root encircled him like a rough brown arm but it didn’t keep him warm.

The journey the dog takes, as he takes tentative steps in the world is like exploring the world beyond a wintery Bob Ross painting, where among the happy little trees there’s all manner of life going on in a perennially snow-covered Sweden. At the ground-level the natural world is alive, with fat bugs, voles, grouse that take to the skies when disturbed, otters, and the occasional moose. Those distant cousins, foxes, compete for food. Everything is a learning opportunity for the young dug: scents, tastes, sensations, and danger.

He was on his own, working out what he needed to know.

The bulk of the book is the dog’s adventure as he learns to live in the world, first by instinct (hunger, thirst) and later by the knowledge he accrues, banking sensations for future reference rather than, say, recollection:

Remembering and forgetting are the same murky depths. Something swirls up from the sludge – he recognises it. It settles – he forgets but he knows. He is just the hard mask over vivid things remembered, elusive things forgotten.

As seasons pass and the dog grows, in ability, awareness, and size, he better equips himself for situations. If hungry, he knows where to hunt for eggs and voles, and he knows the danger from owls (“game birds fled, flapping off between the trees, not even attacking in self-defence. Owls, though, dived down.”) But on the edges of the spruce forest there’s another aspect of nature to learn about: humans. They’re a great unknown, doing incomprehensible things, using strange tools. But while all the other beasts may flee, dog’s are of course man’s best friend and have a different relationship, perhaps even an instinctual affinity, with humans. Although, as The Dog shows, to make the leap from the cold, curled root of a spruce to a warm, loving bond with man takes the building of trust

While the wider book brings nature to life, where it really exceeds is in its observations. Ekman’s eye is wise to the natural world. She’s watched animals interact and noticed the way berries ripen, wrinkle, and fall. And she’s clearly spent many a day with a four-legged friend, that the dog truly feels alive on the page. So well realised is he that it would be no surprise if Ekman actually went as far as abandoning a puppy in the woods and settled back to jot down her observations via a hidden camera. The sniffing, the marking of territory, and each drawn out stretch. Every moment patiently watching, always attentive to threats. Every flight from risk or wag of the tail. His sense of curiosity and purpose.

Slushy water and sour lingonberries. Feathers in the moss, straggly, odourless. Nothing but water in his aching stomach, wet paws in the marsh. Push on, push on, slow and sloggy. Chew on feathers, suck on bones. Water dripping on nose, stinging eyes and aching belly. Traipse and trudge. Crouch with belly to the snow. Push on with nose to the ground.

But on the edges of the spruce forest there’s another aspect of nature: humans. They’re the great unknown in nature, doing incomprehensible things at the edges of the animals’ world. They hunt and shelter differently; they burn things and use machinery. While all the other beasts may flee, the dog is of course man’s best friend and has a different relationship, perhaps even an instinctual affinity, at the core of his own nature.

Peppered throughout the book there are a few accompanying illustrations by artist Henrik Krogh, charcoal (?) sketches that add some further texture to the book’s scenes, but they arguably aren’t needed, so clear are the descriptions. It would be hard to comment on Ekman’s style, given it’s translated from Swedish, but the rendered prose is light and precise, with enough white space to believe the words are resting on snow.

A rich fable relayed in beautiful detail, we watch as the dog takes two parallel journeys, learning how to survive in a vicious world and, more emotionally, learning to trust others. Having questioned where to begin, the tale having wagged the dog needs an exit, which it duly takes, knowing that the longstanding bond between man, like the cycle of nature, is unbreakable.

Despite existing in some literary middle ground between short story collection and novel, Jim Crace’s debut, Continent (1986), won the Whitbread First Novel Award. His encore, The Gift of Stones (1988) invites no such dubiety, as it’s very much Team Novel, delivering a single narrative thread, rather than a series of shorter tales linked with a common theme.

But stories are at its heart, with the unnamed narrator recalling her father’s life, mixing her remembered experiences with speculation and the many stories he, as a storyteller, told. As a boy her father had lost a portion of his arm, but there was always a story for its loss:

He would invent tales to explain the injury. The arm was taken by a drunk and hungry traveller who mistook it for a chicken. Or it came away at his birth when the women, made impatient by their night-long vigil, tugged too hard upon it. Or it was torn free by an animal – no one knows its name. One bite.

As a result of the injury, the father grew up “like some wild plant, ragged, unattended, not much use”. In this day and age, the loss of a limb is no barrier to achievement but, where Continent took us to an imaginary land mass, and examined the effects of the known world hitting its shores, here Crace takes a step back in history, into pre-history, and narrows the tale to a small settlement at the end of the Stone Age, surrounded by an unknown world. Thus the father’s destiny was to be a stonemason, like all the other villagers.

The advantage of the father’s uselessness is that, despite being a non-working mouth to feed (“In such a place you earned respect through flint. It was the bedrock of their world.”), he is free to wander and explore. Returning with tales of the world beyond the village, of sailing ships along the coast and new rocks the likes they’ve never seen, he honed his skills as storyteller, a raconteur thrilling his audience, becoming an aide to trade.

…when he spoke he shaped the truth, he trimmed, he stretched, he decorated. He was to truth what every stoney was to untouched flint, a fashioner, a god.

The trading in knapped stone is what sustains the village; in exchanging their wares they remain fed and safe. It is also their connection to the wider world, the stories brought by passersby. This security is the titular gift of stones. Without this quality they would no doubt succumb to passing traders and raiders.

If all that the outside world needed was to pound and crush and hammer like savages then any rock would do. But once they wanted more, to pierce and slice, to cut and scrape, to remove the flesh from the inner side of pelts for making clothes, to have harpoons and arrows light and sharp enough to fly and kill, to cut back wheat with just one sickle-stroke, then they, those farmers, horsemen, fishers, wrights, could not be free of us and we were safe.

As we know from history, stone segued to bronze, and the villagers’ own complacency threatens their place in a lawless world. And here we can join the dots between the novel’s milieu and the world it arrived in with mythically drawn echoes of Thatcher’s Britain, wherein traditional industries lost out to new services, as mines and factories closed and smaller towns lost purpose. Stripped of its inspiration, Crace elevates the subject, finding a more universal view of how civilisations may decline and serves up a warning against complacency while also asking who remains to tell the tale and what of it we may believe.

As we know, the daughter is telling this tale, and we only know her father through her words, and her version of his words with their own questionable veracity. It’s a narrative device that befits the setting, that of a time before literary records. There are no scribes to capture glories, and so The Gift of Stones resembles an oral history; it’s that tale passed down through the generations, shaped and tweaked, like flint.

And the telling of the tale is wonderfully wrought, wholly consistent in its world, delivering layers of story each laced with meaning. Every simile, metaphor, and allusion is at one with nature and limited to the extent of the narrator’s world. In Crace’s Stone Age evenings may have a “rosehip sunset” and red stones can be the colour of “elderberry stain”; every such brush stroke deliberately poetic and beautiful.

The entertainment of stories, and our engagement with them, is reflected well throughout, be it the narrator’s appreciation of her father’s tales; or the villagers’ wonder at the delights beyond their acre; and perhaps even in our own enjoyment of the book itself. And a finely crafted tale, as the narrator notes, is what gets the best reactions.

Why tell the truth when lies are more amusing, when lies can make the listener shake her head and laugh – and cough – and roll her eyes. People are like stones. You strike them right, they open up like shells.

Without fictional accounts, we are left with facts. And in The Gift of Stones, facts are inconvenient truths, they are the one thing that people are afraid to face: that what we know today will one day be left behind, just as stone gave way to bronze. That our hands “made tame, secure, and virtuous by labour” are always at risk of being made idle.

The passage of fifty-five millions years sounds extremely epic, but here, in Peter Adolphsen’s Machine (2006, tr. Charlotte Barslund, 2007) that passage in time is compressed into the less monumental count of eighty-eight pages. Granted, when averaging 625,000 years per page, a book of this length and that time span isn’t going to linger long on details; what we therefore have is an exercise in style, following the intersecting path of an oil droplet and a couple in a car.

Adolphsen’s narrator opens by telling us that in 1975 a drop of petrol combusted in a car engine, converting to exhaust fumes. This minor event, trivial and unnoticed, finds its place in a larger system.

The universe is in possession of such immense quantities of matter, space and time that it is possible, through changes caused by changes, to try out endless combinations resulting in the present huge number of structures ranging from amino acids to galaxy clusters. The story of a speck of matter is thus the story of these spontaneous structures and their altered states.

As if to demonstrate this ever-changing nature of the universe, we quickly learn another such way that this initial explosion can express itself.

…the drop acquired its most unstructured state in the form of exhaust fumes, yet managed nevertheless in this state, twenty-four hours later, to bring about a structure both complex and chaotic: cancer.

Machine, therefore, is the story of chaos theory in action, a number of random coincidences creating an ever-flowing pattern of cause and effect. Although a truer starting point may well be the Big Bang (or whatever came before it), we’re introduced to the early Eocene period, at the end of a hot misty day as a herd of Eohippus, a tiny horselike creature, gather around a lake. A spark – the universe is always in motion – of lightning triggers the last days of one particular eohippus, its heart destined to become the fossil fuel that will bring about the aforementioned cancer, although we are invited to ponder this telling when the narrator makes a claim that seems unknowable.

I know this because I was eavesdropping from the neighbouring balcony as she inhaled the particles which triggered the pathological cell division.

Indeed, how could someone narrating today know such details about the past? While explained, Adolphsen’s prose is not without its games (though not the tricksy or charming sort) as he advances through a sequence of postmodern techniques: lists (and lists within lists), most notably an inventory of peoples of the Soviet Union of Socialist Republics; sentence structure in a breathless, page-spanning LSD trip that manifests as an unpunctuated, lower case, single sentence; and regular short digressions into seemingly random topics (The Book of Mormon, poet Kenneth Rexroth, the Ford Pinto, etc) that slot nicely into the greater narrative. While he dispenses with the passing of time in a mere matter of words, he is content to slow things down, exhausting the minutiae of a split second.

While not exactly an instant, the novella lingers longest in 1975, where we meet its two key characters. First, Jimmy Nash, an Azerbaijani immigrant chasing the American Dream (only to find himself working in the same industry he left behind: oil); and Clarissa Sanders, a biology student for whom greater understanding of ourselves via controlled experiments will further humanity. Their subsequent road trip is well done, exploring various subjects in tune with the novella’s themes. At one point they find themselves lost, and a brief exchange between them highlights an acknowledgement of the grander perspective on show in Machine:

Where did you come from?’ he asked, attempting to reverse the logic. ‘Perhaps you need to go back to your starting point in order to know where you want to go.?’

‘That’s a bit feeble, don’t you think? Surely all you’ll learn is wherever you wanted to go at that time. Besides ‘my starting point’, where is that? When I got out of bed this morning? The hospital where I was born? The country my ancestors came from? And which ancestors? The apes?

The novella is full of machines: cars, the human body, Soviet regimes, marketing, and more. Ultimately, these are all cogs in the larger system, that seemingly random universe (chaotic or organised, your call!); just as our eohippus, Jimmy, Clarissa, and every page, sentence, word, and letter are part of the book. It’s all information being passed along.

Machine isn’t the sort of book you settle down with for thrills or step-off-the-page characters, but as a literary exercise it works on its own terms. Its narrative delivers bald facts of life with cold scientific terminology, but even in the vastness of time, within the complex structure of coincidence, there are moments of warmth that shine through and find meaning in the ultimately meaningless.