Literature
Here are some words about words.
Invisible Monsters
Chuck Palahniuk
Palahniuk was one of my favourite writers for a very long time on account of his crass and classic nihilism. Wonder-provoking stuff. Blessed be the complete pointlessness. People may or may not know Palahniuk as the author of Fight Club, which Fincher took and turned and enhanced with tight direction and a stellar cast. Invisible Monsters first became apparent to me before I’d even read that prior book or seen its movie. In my early twenties, I guess it was (thus I can only conclude that I was late to the party), I became rather immersed in the pop-punk, electronica, baroque mingling genius of A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out. Doesn’t take a bunch of rudimentary research to find that many of the album’s fantastic lyrics were inspired by this novel and this writer. I think it’s up there with the quickest I’ve read something, and yet I felt so reluctant to finish that when I got to the penultimate page I turned it upside down and read it all backwards in gobbledygook, just for the fun and games and so I could write it down here. So here’s a review of Invisible Monsters, backwards and upside down.
Palahniuk captures such a spectrum of modern day concerns, from psychological frailty to gender, and from the vacuous modelling industry (albeit in absurd irony) to sexual abuse. His characters are multi-dimensional yet inconsequential in the wake of the subject matter. I get the feeling they are designed as vessels for raw truths, conduits to literary takeaways. Come to think of it…isn’t that all characters ever are? Isn’t that all any of us ever are?
Choke
Chuck Palahniuk
And so continues the agonising ease with which you can access Palahniuk’s language and societal scrutiny processes. Another novel that borders on being irritatingly compelling. Think I missed lunch two days in a row because I was incapable of placing it down on the arm of the chair for longer than, say, four and a half minutes. Oh god yeah if you’re reading it of an evening and you’re about two thirds through it the chances of you being bothered to go and cook dinner are minimal, so you just scran on some artichokes in oil or some wafer thin ham straight out the packet. With both, you make sure you’re chewing good and proper. Or do you?
In this novel sits pretty the familiar, Palahniukian (?) essence of cynicism. Customarily self-loathing and bleak, Victor Mancini is a sex addict and con artist that actively plays out as though he’s choking half way through meals to lure a ‘Good Samaritan’, who he then goes on to exploit. Mancini, it seemed to me, was a product not so much of his incessantly depressing environment (a calculation that can be pointed at many of Palahniuk’s characters), but rather of his incessantly deplorable matriarch. Despite all of his eyebrow-raising takes on the world, you’re somehow, anyhow inclined to sympathise with him, principally on account of the way he recounts his youth. Of course, as plopped down on page, this guy is a ginormous con man and certifiable piece of shit, rendering him slap bang in the heart of unreliable narrator territory. The result? You come out of it not quite knowing what to think. Aaaand that’s precisely why I love the author so much. Chuck Palahniuk’s works are a major reason that I honed in on ‘transgressional fiction’ in my final year of study. I wrote my dissertation on it. That achingly human sense that we roam around with odd and widely-accepted limits set against us. Limits of conduct, physicality, achievement. To transgress is to overcome, to shun perceived norms and perhaps even veer into the realm of ‘taboo’. What better basis for compelling writing? What better grounds for fascinating living?
1984
George Orwell
So cripplingly dystopian it’s silly. But hey, what’s that? Oh yeeehhhhh like 87.9% of its suggestions and most scoffable circumstances are lining up pretty rancid with the realities of current day affairs. Nice nice nice nice nice. Science fiction writers are lauded for their prescience, and there are surely fewer examples of its grim genius than here? You’ve got the facial recognition and AI revolution a la Orwell’s all-seeing telescreens. You’ve got ceaseless wars and floating fortresses in the shape of harrowing, impunity drones. You’ve got nice autocratic incarnations of Big Brother pushing their propaganda and keeping subjects in line. Don’t get me started on the Ministry of Truth. What is truth? Argue the toss for the rest of your life.
There was a really interesting passage in Thomas Pynchon’s introduction about ‘doublethink’, which, the more and more you think about it, swells in the mind and appears all-the-more regularly nowadays. Here and there. This and that. Yada yada — enduring passages of incredible, dark prose on media and thoughtcrime, on fear, rebellion and paranoia. Orwell seems to have captured, so quickly, countless traits detrimentally endemic to the human condition.
Anyway I’ve no doubt that when I first read it it was everything I’d come to expect, considering it is often placed alongside Brave New World in terms of dystopian vision, and goodness gracious don’t I love that Huxley novel. Each time I revisit both pieces they take on more and more clout; they cut through a little more horrifically in their narrative accuracies. I went to see an AmDram adaptation of 1984 a good few years back. Here are some of the bits I wrote:
Here in light of my work on surveillance. I was genuinely very impressed; the performances were smart all round, but (as you’d perhaps expect) the actor portraying Winston Smith stood apart. His mannerisms and emotions were wonderfully tuned and perturbing in the context of the play’s plot. The action unfolded in the Ministry of Love only, which makes sense when you have a limited set design. As Smith is pressed for a precise confession by a man with greyed hair behind a thin screen, we see the novel’s key course in recounts — an effective and intriguing fiddle with chronology. You didn’t get even the modicum of hope (however bleak) that is evident in Smith during the novel, as we knew from the outset that he’s been caught and bound. Julia, Goldstein’s book, O’Brien, thoughtcrimes and resistance — all these were recounted from Winston’s diary, and numerous-characters were played by the supporting cast of five. For the most part it reminded me of the power of theatre to manipulate texts and shape them into more intimate experiences.
Electric Kool Aid Acid Test
Tom Wolfe
I feel great. There’s a 40 minute stretch of time wherein the sun hits the sky opposite my bedroom window — that grubby old goose. The finest tidings unto the giant power-orb, honestly, because it shifts ever-so-slowly across and casts me in its warm glimmer as I read the post-beat revelations. Just there in that cushty little sunslot I’m satisfyingly susceptible to all the excellent, erratic prose of Wolfe’s account — of Kesey and the Merry Band of Pranksters with the Hell’s Angels at La Honda, and the sun beyond the window works in straight lines whilst the fun bus rolls on Furthur in irregular meanders.
My bright eyes cross accounts of swinging sixty debauchery, a conclave akin to a new-religion striving for transcendence, chaos, or somewhere in between. I trace immersive descriptions of camaraderie and free-glo frenzy, documented in the style of New Journalism; all the while my muscles ache somewhat from a visit to the gym and a cycle-cardio summit and the dust, the sheer quantity of living moving minutiae catches this glorious light in this glorious 40 minute window and I feel as thankful as one is likely to on a Sunday.
The Hell’s Angels give way to the Beatles which gave way to an Anti-War Rally and the Pranksters, led by the insatiable Kesey, press onwards frenetically, captivatingly, toe-to-toeing with some of the biggest individuals and collectives of the zeitgeist. Somewhere between the outset and the accumulating culmination — publicised ‘acid tests’ (big, all-in parties going after ‘intersubjectivity’ and the dissolution of individual ego) — well, Wolfe steps away to do a few bits and Kesey’s been in exile, but soon enough they return to being very much on the bus with new characters here, there and everywhere between Mexico and the U.S. It’s a piece of non-fiction that exemplifies creative, journalistic storytelling, just as much as it’s a piece of non-fiction that documents the zenith of counterculture.
I may not have as extensive experience as I’d like reading Wolfe’s contemporaries and followers, but I certainly have a fervent enough admiration of his work to refer to him as the master of the non-fiction form, a genuine pioneer out front, packed to his underrated rafters with pen and notepad, never covered but always there, and I found myself again — upon finishing reading this piece — wanting to source and read another immediately. Alas, variation is the kindly cousin of progression, so I will move on to an overview of psychological tests and probably some Vonnegut after that.
The Bonfire of the Vanities
Tom Wolfe
The great patron of New Journalism with his own fictional goldmine, a sprawling novel of American culture in an (ongoing) age of avarice, disruption, tension, impunity, and vulnerability. Wolfe’s fiction writing draws massively on the artistic workings of seeing and commenting, of journalistic reporting and the trails of consideration it takes one down. His preface refers to the difficulty of finding content, and thus drawing it from all around. Indeed, all fiction is just non-fiction that’s been given a wee wiggle. He claims the challenge he faced here was creating characters. Challenge conquered, Thomas. We meet Sherman McCoy (a bond broker on Wall Street, with wandering loins and green eyes) as well as a deputy power of attorney or lawyer or some such role surnamed Kramer who is fearful of the justice system because of its cynicism, absurdity, and prejudices. (Pliant youth, pliant adults). These two separate lives build momentum and cross later down the line. It’s a classic rope-a-dope.
Tom Wolfe is a literary master on the whole but his dialogue is especially great. He paints incredibly vivid pictures through conversations — of 1980s New York, its greedy little mits, its fiery financial surges, its riptide of racial injustice and its legal system based on favours. The novel (which was released in serial form originally and thus every chapter is a compelling twist or progression on that which came before) follows this Sherman fella, this WASPy bond broker with his aristocratic chin and chiselled frame and untouchable position on the pedestal of society. It follows him until he hits a young black man with his car in the Bronx and his entire world comes crashing down as the social contract comes into question and his social death comes to fruition. Though I’ve read little Dickens in my time (some literary scholar you, Sam), I sense that Wolfe is to painting America in the tumult of the late 20th century what Charles was to the chaos of early Victorian London.
Ouuuehhww all the trials, tribulations, injustices and immoral manipulations explored in groundbreaking, fluid, immersive style. Blessed be the Wolfe! Howl with him! Within and between the (dis)integrity of journalism, fuckeries of finance and thoughts of the blind woman on social strata, there is a tale of a man descending into pure survival mode when all the chips are down, losing living life and becoming an example for other powerplays and schemes. Though pretty reprehensible, Sherman does earn a tiny tiny amount of sympathy on the odd page. That is a testament to Wolfe’s prose. We’re back here again. His sharp, smart verbals and perpetual scene-setting give us outstanding insight into a sort of grubby underbelly, an underlying psychology of selfishness, fear, and sphere of influence that transcends professions. Well, and decades, it would seem.
Ends and Means
Aldous Huxley
Starts out right lovely and right bold, all packaged up typically multifarious and finished with a very pleasant garnish indeed. Huxley opens accounts by discussing the many intentions and abilities of literature, as well as his intended course with this particular number. The ends and means, you say.
His intellectualism. His poise. His writing with characteristic boldness about the state of society (economic, political, hell, you name it he’s probably covered it in some capacity), and just what remedies the world of 1937 may call upon to avoid perpetual conflict and discord. Strikingly, many of the concerns in its chapters and essays were legitimised only a couple of years later by the lead up to, boiling point of, and consistently horrid events of WWII. Honestly, his social commentary seems even more striking now. What’s changed? Let me rephrase — what, of genuine meaning and value, has changed?
I tended to repeatedly envisage his being sat writing it, grumbling amidst his own era of constant nefarious shoulder rubbing. There is a lot of discussion of war, and when you consider it — there hasn’t been any extended period since it was written in which peace and prosperity have stepped out of the mud and the murk and the filth for long enough to be done away with. Something especially commendable is Huxley’s denouncing of geopolitical initiatives, governmental ineptitude, large scale organisations and their singular intent. He focuses instead, where he can, from the outset and throughout, on the individual. On the idea of the ‘non-attached’ citizen as the ideal, peaceful citizen. Any large scale reform is ineffective without the sincerity of those pushing for it and ultimately implementing it. All in all, there aren’t many words to read that don’t resonate one way or another with my own life and its trajectory. Of course I refer to being schooled, going to university, getting a job, doing better at it, earning more, getting higher higher higher whilst all the while getting entirely lower and more confused. Anywho, he shifts from smart (albeit half-baked) manifestos for socio-political reform slap bang back to the individual’s role in it including comments on theology, belief and the body/mind dualism. A lot of the notes on education are probably the most poignant I’ve read on balmy summer evenings next to slow flowing waters of the Thames. Education is the only thing that can drive us sideways, and it doesn’t seem prone to any sort of change. How on earth he managed to put all of these components together in a coherent body of work is beyond me. Bravo.
Island
Aldous Huxley
It’s hard for me to comprehend let alone convey in any set of arbitrary symbols just how extraordinarily well Aldous Huxley both comprehended and conveyed the excruciating gorgeous nuance of what it means to be human. Island is an astonishing piece of literature — a vision of idyllic life piercing and soothing precisely because of the backdrop of our own time. Attempt to do its sprawling sense some justice, I dare ya.
Huxley was an explorer and a spiritualist, engaging with various religious movements and mind-altering drugs during his life in pursuit of truth, light, hope, understanding, or all of the above plus far more. This novel focuses on twists to traditional Eastern religiosity. Its narrative hinges on characters experiencing or taking on a holistic approach to interaction, self-fulfilment and education. This is offset by a pragmatic and empathetic approach to population, medicine and possession. In his conceptual exploration — the last completed piece before his death — Huxley explores hypnotherapeutic remedies, the shunning of materialism, and the seamless marrying of western science and eastern Mahayana Buddhism. Of course, these are all just words, just inadequate symbols I’m jotting down to try and qualify the experience of reading his work and consulting the thoughts of his life, his analytical take on society in the form of one far removed. In Island, he essentially formed a remedial fiction to the qualms of Ends and Means.
Anyway, what a terrifically enlightening, harrowing and poignant commentary on social and human life. The final few pages will stick with me for as long as my sub-par cranium will allow [see Memory]. Will, after getting to know the pivotal Palanese and tracing their culture with fine inquisition and accelerating acceptance, takes some Moksha medicine. The descriptive passages! The account of hallucinogenic, mystical experience. The empowerment and confusion and dread and sheer compassionate joy. The scenes of Will (eyes closed and eyes open, encountering both the Essential Horror and God itself) put a blissful carpet beneath the growing tensions in Pala, hint at the futility of it all, and then start to waver again in the face of it, as Murugan and Rendang’s army announce a United Kingdom and exploitation of oil resource and an inevitable dimming of idealism. Quite the final hurrah, Aldous.
Libra
Don DeLillo
I haven’t read DeLillo before, but his prose is so far very rich; jumping between character establishment and zeitgeist commentary early doors, I sense, is vital to the kind of busy book and cataclysmic subject matter: Oswald’s involvement, the post cold-war tension, the political grandiosity and the ultimate death of Kennedy. The bounds of creative non-fiction are stretched but isn’t that what defines the genre, lends it such a compelling position at the canon’s fringes? It’s not a short book. God I bet you feel like you’ve read it now, no?
So how will the CIA representatives conduct their clandestine meetings to bring Cuba back into the equation? Into the big bubbling fun conspiracy? How will Lee Harvey Oswald harness his communist sympathies and distinction from the normal kids his age? Well we know the answer, but the processes and the politics and the multiform personal journeys are the vital parts in this piece.
Some indeterminate day I sat by the river under the sun, across and somewhat safe from the chilly breeze. There, I finished it. Having delved very heavily into its fine form for a stretch of four days, life crept inevitably up on me and kind of stemmed smooth progress. However fractured, this hiatus didn’t ruin the reading experience. Lee’s leftist sympathies and the conspiratorial whispers of the security services brush shoulders and overlap and culminate in that ultimate tragic 6 seconds and the key message, I guess, is that history is formed of characters as rich and tragic as the acts they’re known for. That context is king, but it’s quite naturally skimmed. The weaving of narratives sometimes lost me, as did the multitude of conspirators and other characters, but those points are likely more down to my method of reading than to DeLillo’s expertise, because in all honesty there is a cleverness and an attention to detail in his craft that I perhaps have not seen in creative non-fiction since In Cold Blood. Onto the next one.
White Noise
Don DeLillo
Sure to be darkly funny and bitingly on-the-nose.
Yep, it’s so bloody good. The combination of comedy and darkness in its coverage of death. How discovery and death interact. Our course through life is but a collation of data and impulses and exchanges that ultimately lead somewhere we either never really understand or actively ignore at our peril. The author’s voice is marvellously run through with irony and absurdity but also the most astute observation of the human swede — all its outlandish turns and common perceptions. He’s a quite brilliant writer. It’s quite brilliant. Did I mention the novel in a positive light at all?
It takes me back — in one way, another, or plenty more still — to my studious years. Getting my oversized shnoz right deep into literature was something I loved, by and large, notwithstanding the depth of philosophy that saw me dip in motivation to live. Mind, what was catalysed by certain literary or contemplative passages back then has still accompanied me a wee whiff since, so we'll put no blame on DeLillo or his wonderful peers. The following quote pretty aptly ties in to the topic of my dissertation (transgression being an upward spiral, never mind) and to my enduring intrigue in human limitation:
‘I think it’s a mistake to lose one’s sense of death, even one’s fear of death. Isn’t death the boundary we need? Doesn’t it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit’.
So there’s been an airborne toxic event, one fella teaches Hitler Studies, and plenty of pagetime has been given to the dissection of filmic car-crashes (as re-affirming, rather than crass). There’s been many typically obtuse philosophical conversations with Jack’s son Heinrich. Then there’s been the biggest plotline, I suppose — that of Dylar. Dylar is a sort of undeterminable, (un)achingly precise drug that negates one’s fear of death. And that is what the narrative progressively revolves around: negotiating that primal understanding of mortality whilst trying to get on with it all.
On the topic of death, actually, I remember being told to step outside of a hotel room when I was what? 6? Older? The year or moment or location eludes me, but I remember coming back in and Ma being in tears and Dad being super sad but supportive and trying to elucidate to two youngish kids that their grandad had died, and me and my sister — well actually I can’t account for her so I won’t lump her in with me — well, I was obviously shocked and saddened but was I so through reading the room? Distraught through a sort of desperate by-proxy, looking at my own mother in bits and then glancing to my sister (and I can see my face now in some sort of out-of-body retrospective way) trying to get a read on the gravity of the fact, of what death actually ultimately spells out besides its totality? It’s so very odd looking back on it now. Was it my first real experience of death? Must’ve been. My first memory of it, at least. The fringes of my recall are hazy but I can make that much out, and I remember the sort of muted, docile vibe the next day. There was a big lawn out the front of the B&B or guesthouse or whatever it was we were staying at (big white building, I think). The lawn had freshly mown grass on it and my sister and I ran ahead playing and jostling and all the rest of it, and the freshly mown grass got into the little gaps between our shoes and our feet, and we went on, and I remember my Ma and my Pa walking behind hand in hand.
So White Noise is a provocative piece, yes. Give it a go.
Crime & Punishment
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Justifies in every line its revered position in the literary canon. I see no great merit treading on the toes of countless thousand scholars, for they’ve delved into and ruminated on its themes far better than I’d ever be able to. LET ME SAY THIS. The depth of its philosophy, and the myriad of moral questions only served to heighten my misunderstanding and wonder of the world. Lashings of gasoline. Time after time, as well! Fuel to the fire of gnawing, recurring interior questions and patches of upset. Timeless prose that steps beyond its context and into the heart of the human condition. Lyrical passages and points that one can apply wholeheartedly to modern day soul-searching, to modern day incarceration, to modern day woes. I was struck by Raskolnikov’s outlook on action and consequence, and the arguments for determinism. I was, during this series of days, I guess, feeling a lack of control.
Notes from Underground
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The unceasing river of thought and emotion that has led to this point right here is likely to remain just as unceasing, perhaps with a somehow heightened pace or ferocity of ceaselessness over the next, hm, 60 odd years. Adulthood. ClassSSSSsss. A horrid hyperbolic exclamation to open some literary commentary but what less can be expected when the focus of attention is Notes from Underground. I have read this grim little wonder three or four times, and am yet to figure out whether the writing/speech/questions in its pages give rise to new interests and pursuits, or whether they entirely dampen any sense of individuality I may have clung on to. Why so?
Well, because Dostoyevsky — in covering the isolation, destitution, alienation and anger of our unnamed narrator — points to the matters that dwell in nastier corners of every heart. His concerns about society are just as apt, just as painful and pertinent now as they were over 150 years ago, in a different language, culture and country. This very fact could prompt me to focus my attention somewhere other than the page (exciting!), because the prose in this novella — as in other canon-defining wonders — is just too good to replicate or overcome (bleak). Goodness me Fyodor, you really did have one of the most ingenious, articulate literary minds, didn’t you? Huh! Didn’t you!!!! But hang on why on earth would I stop scribing? Why would I make haste while the sun hides behind a dense cloud? A lot of the writing I do is a remedy for memory, no doubt, but there’s more to it than that. There must be? Fortunately I need not consider this at any great length because someone’s done it for me. Here’s a typically existential excerpt for you. Lucky lucky thing,
And also this: why, actually, do I want to write at all? If not for an audience, then couldn’t I simply go over everything just in my mind, without putting it on paper? Right enough. Yet it will somehow be more solemn when put down on paper. There’s something more impressive about it, there will be more judgement of myself, it will be in better style. Besides, I may in fact get some relief from writing it all down. Today, for instance, I am particularly oppressed by a certain memory of long ago. It came to my mind vividly the other day, and ever since then it has stayed with me like an annoying tune that won’t leave you alone. And yet you must get rid of it. I have hundreds of such memories; but at times one will come up out of the hundreds and oppress me. For some reason I think that it will leave me alone once it is written down. Why not try, then? Lastly, I am bored, and I never do anything. And writing things down actually seems like work. They say work makes man kind and honest. Well, there’s a chance, at any rate.
Right on. I never do anything.
No but there’s something therapeutically vital about materialising in words on paper or on screen the invisible, potent strands we call ‘thought’, or ‘worry’, or even ‘memory’. Having something to read back on is important, no? Writing shit down may rejig the strands now and at points in the future, reminding you that you’re more than immediacy; you’re more than the hand that reaches out for something at any given moment.
Notes from Underground is so dark and so utterly conscious of being read that any response bubbling from its cynical turns is already known by the figure with the pen, and thrown back at you with a kind of one-upmanship that at once humbles you and leaves you wanting more. What a tasty little recipe for great literature.
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
What a journey.
Dmitry (referred to often as Mitya) is the elder of Fyodor Karamazov’s sons. He is the least graspable and picturable of the offspring in the novel’s earlier stages. Ivan, the middle son, is a writer of revolutionary notions and has the ability to engage/debate with just about anyone. Something of a polymath? An article of his that has come under discussion already is the relationship between the State and the Church. It is in this intelligent, seamless way (and others like it) that Dostoyevsky plops in dense passages of philosophical, political, and theological musing. He doesn’t break the narrative to introduce commentary, it’s all in situ. Alexey (Aloysha) is the youngest of the three, a somewhat enigmatic but altogether respectful character who manages to capture the admiration of nearly everyone he comes into contact with. He is, initially, a religious novice at the monastery of Elder Zossima. Names! Namesy names names. As is typical of Dostoyevsky’s fiction, they come and go thick, fast, thin, narrow, slow, wide, and otherwise. I struggle to keep up. Tiny brain me. Brilliant brain, his.
​
It’s exquisitely written. There’s a battle for Katerina between Ivan and Dmitry, and the latter brother also has a thing with Grushenka, and all these characters are nuanced and manipulative, glanced at through the incredibly complex quiet of Alexey, who observes and laments and conspires. Fyodor Karamazov himself is perhaps one of the most wild and repugnant characters I’ve encountered, well, in any literature. The intelligence of Dostoyevsky’s descriptions sit akin to his scrutiny of religious legitimacy, a questioning that motivates and scores the peregrinations of those surrounded by it. Tackling — scrap that — enjoying such a seminal beast of a novel has been a sporadic undertaking. That’s never been my favourite way to read. Unless it's short fiction or vignettes or travel tales. Then it’s fair game, right. But with longer pieces I like to get my conk lost and get a grasp and do a few four hour stints that take me a further 150 pages and then it feels like you’re digesting and digging a piece rather than piecing together patches. Nonetheless.
​
A section, chapter, or maybe even entire part of particular note documents the younger life and learnings of Father Zossima. Its persistent, poetic recalls (albeit relayed through the narrator) help elucidate the very course of human and moral existence, covering all the complexities of cause and effect that brings one to being a devoted ascetic monk, a religious figure of nothing but kindliness.
Alas, no masterpiece is so without big decisions and crunchy conflict. Father Zossima dies, and the tumultuous circumstances following his death push Alexey into a state of incredible flux and sensitivity; he seeks out a remarkable mystical encounter with the spiritual essence of his deceased elder, committing himself further to a life of extraordinary devotion to faith and its spread. Meanwhile we’re thrust headfirst into all the qualms and conundrums of Dmitry’s pursuit of Grushenka. The number of names, subplots, relationships and encounters (subtle & grandiose) are enough to make you spin, but I got into a solid habit of flicking back through pages to tales bygone when they once again rise to emotional pertinence. The parables, religious metaphors and psychological study of faith are pervasive and fascinating, serving as a narrative thread that places you and keeps you hooked. There’s something in that.
​
Stick with me. By this point, we’re getting to the crux of the action (if such a remarkably rhizomatic affair can be judged to have a ‘crux’). Dmitry has just been picked up in the town where he’d gone to fetch Grushenka from her old lover, and he’s been picked up by officers accusing him of patricide. He did batter Grigory (the father’s beleaguered servant) a bit but, well, and but of course masterfully, there’s a smart little gap in proceedings meaning we don’t know who was the cause of Fyodor Karamazov’s dead body and how it came to rest rigid on its back in his bedroom. We know the delirium of love and of hate, of religion and of atheism, and that humanity can be just as delirious and dangerous irrespective of those allegiances. Hereafter, the narrator starts to oust Ivan as slightly off-mark when it comes to sanity, for he’s having conversations with an apparition — a smart devil's advocate. So the Dad’s dead, the eldest son is in the throes of questing and prosecution, the middle son is losing it, and the youngest is still mourning the death of his spiritual guide. Nice content.
It is a novel that manages to explore the beauty and cruelty of family, love, faith and more, each in astonishing complexity and somehow in equal measure. The final hundred or so pages document the arguments of defence and prosecution at Mitya’s trial, and are as remarkable as the many hundred that precede them. The trial becomes less about the patricide itself and more about a remarkable potential of doubt, about the ability of the human spirit to interpret information, to dissect and explore it, about the innumerable strands at work, a network in fact, within that very human spirit. Dostoyevsky’s work is in many ways a case of its own, a valuation of the workings of belief, drawing on evidence (empirical and otherwise) as well as all the frailties and fallacies of human emotion. A marvellous passage towards the end — spoken by the eloquent defence attorney Fetyukovich — covers the semantics of fatherhood, of earning the right, the role, not just by begetting a child but doing a duty by it. As an author and as a thinker, Dostoyevsky deserves the title ‘father’, and in as close to a God related way, too, for not just the writing he produces, but for the centuries of provocation it has stirred, and continues to stir.
It is an absolute pleasure. I don’t need to say that its acclaim is justified; such a confirmation is a callous underappreciation of its brilliance. For damn certain, Dostoyevsky is up there with Huxley on the list of my favourite authors. All I read of his pushes me to question and cherish life.
Into Thin Air
John Krakauer
Jon Krakauer writes a remarkable account of his ascent of Everest in ‘96 — an ill-fated venture to the Earth’s most compelling and challenging point. A storm rolled in and wiped out our climbers. I guess now is as good a time as any to shift from the matter to the mode? Krakauer’s descriptive passages shift from elation and excitement to desperation and despondence. His prose is ever-admirable, as is the way he manipulates time to aid his narrative. A really brilliant travel author, and a compelling, tragic piece of nonfiction.
The recalls are still so vivid, though tainted by retrospective conjecture and investigation, and the sense one gets when reading it is that no lucid line of words can do justice to the hypoxic disillusionment of 28000 feet. Somehow a takeaway was wanting to get more into hiking and mountaineering, so I did, but there and right there and maybe even less than there do the parallels end. No great opus or disaster journal has sprouted from my own ridgey perusions.
12 people in total lost their lives during that Spring season; eight on the climb that Krakauer documents. It is a harsh and upsetting account, but one of intelligence, humility and sensibility. Some of the climbers faced the most horrible ends imaginable as others clung onto life, precariously so. A postscript sees Krakauer debate the validity and rebukes of another book, published on account of Anatoli Boukreev — a guide on Scott Fischer’s team. He felt Into Thin Air debased his professionalism and integrity. Krakauer was subject to similar slander though, and it descended into an argument of facts. Tough, hypoxic recollections that aim to understand some of what went wrong on the mountain in May of that year. That is, indeed, the aim of the Outside magazine writer, and I feel he does it damn well. The guilt and conscience of survivors is masterfully conveyed in the final fifty or so pages. The admission of error is a hard recurring point. Ultimately, the book pays homage to the spirit and strength of mountaineers, and to the often fierce nature they find themselves in.
The Man in the High Castle
Philip K. Dick
This proved to be a really interesting read, but that phrasing suggests a sort of light-touch surprise and otherwise does a disservice to my anticipation, which was real. They made an adaptation on Prime a few years later I think. Never watched it. Thanks for tuning in for my review.
The novel deals with alternate histories and futures. As a general rule of thumb, alternate present is fiction, and thus throwing possibilities at that which has gone and that which looms tends to be a fairly successful platform for an engrossing story. The US is segmented, and is rather pallid under Imperial rule. The Axis alliance prevailed. The Nazis won. Blast.
The whole picture is rather reprehensible, but the world-building is compelling so we forgive it its grey demeanour. Or perhaps we can bear it precisely because we know it’s a fiction, and some of our cells thank their lucky stars throughout reading it. Regardless, it’s run through with all the meticulous gold of Philip K Dick’s unique voice.
What are we looking at, precisely? Sustained oppression, eugenics and nastiness nibbling its way through the land of the free. One of the protagonists works in an antiques shop pedalling artefacts of American liberty, authentic and rip-off nods to the prosperous past. There’s diplomacy, deception, and duality abound, with plenty of interesting takes on and references to the problems associated with a ‘concrete’ reality — duality is a major theme, as is knowledge and artifice. And who, may I very well ask, doesn’t bloody love a piece of literature within a piece of literature? Hugely pivotal here. The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is a novel of speculative fiction that’s banned where it is, but it gets around, and that’s a nice little driving force for the narrative. An alternative history of WWII within an alternative history of WWII within our perceived understanding of WWII…idealism within dystopia within…well, what is this?
Lovely little layerage. You should read it. it seemed at first to end kind of abruptly, with some rather smash-cut frankness in the final chapter or two. Alas, as with all great art, its intricacies become more apparent only after a lengthy period of mopey rumination.
HHhH
Laurent Binet
A non-fictional account of the deplorable action and eventual assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Nazi’s secret services, intertwined with passages by the author on how he came about the information necessary to write the book, and his own personal struggle with remaining true to what’s deemed historically accurate. I studied this book in my Creative Non-Fiction module. It is excellent. It is. Not only in outlining the heritage and motives of Heydrich, but also in providing the reader with an idea of what can be faced by one attempting to write about history with intelligence and truth, but also with flair and drama.
Binet managed to do both of the things that he professed to want to do:
1. Stay true to his subject matter: I was taken aback by the depth of research, the richness of knowledge of Heydrich, his numerous heartless inferiors and, of course, his few barbaric superiors. Operation Anthropoid is not something I was familiar with in any sense, so it was, in a bitter sense, pleasant to learn of Gabcik and Kubis and Valcik and their selfless heroics. The pertinence of history and its forgotten folk, immortalised.
2. Allow the form to flourish: There are certain artistic privileges in the craft of writing a novel. In fact, there is complete, baffling freedom. Many of these liberties are not necessarily applicable to the writing of historical or creative non-fiction. What this text did was provide a grand ol’ guideline for what kind of issues one may face when tackling the non-rewritable valleys of history. Yet he also does it with complete aplomb; fillers, embellishments and conjectures are respectful and remarkable, giving the story an otherwise impossible roundedness.
Opening Skinner's Box
Lauren Slater
Opening Skinner’s Box should be rebranded Opening Sam’s Eyes or Stimulating Sam’s Brain, despite its insular specificity and the 10/10 likelihood that such a move would alienate potential readers the world over.
What’s it about? What is it? How did it do that? What do you see? What’s that squidgy thing up there got to say for itself then?
Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century. This book covers some of them. It covers them real captivating n that. So if you’re wrapped up comfy and want to let your brain let your eyes trace words across a page and prompt thought about the very thing allowing it all to happen, then delve into these smart stories of social pressure, authoritarian attitudes, diffusion of responsibility, behaviourism, predetermined decision-making, truth shading, lie rendering, and much more alike. It’s a very well written account of inquisitive minds, some pathologies, some hasty experimentation, and some enduring discoveries. Why’s it well written, you ask. Well because she wrote it well. Descriptive flair, meet readability and wisdom. You will be forming a new vigilante group. We want you to go out and flick the patellas of anyone missing a beat. Accessible language, oui si yes, but also intricate and detailed and grounded in some remarkable science.
WHAT IS MORE INTERESTING THE BRAIN? There would be nothing? Anthropic.
From Slater’s ‘conclusion’, I noted this:
‘What is science? Is psychology science? Is it fiction? Is it philosophy?...the experiments, many of them anyway, may be best understood as kinetic philosophy, philosophy in action’.
No need to comment on that. Have a pleasant day.
Requiem for a Dream
Hubert Selby Jr.
Make no mistake, this is a disturbing and damn good depiction of a dark corner of contemporary society. Addiction in its numbness and its grittiness. Addiction in its perpetual cruelty and its fleeting, vacuous joy. Good god with a barrel of small feet, the thing is just wrought with so-called “limits”, but very few remain by the end. A barricade of taboos are explored, flirted with, transgressed and ultimately dissolved in a dizzying run of degradation by the four core protagonists, spanning everything from heroin and sex to diet pills. A regular frenzy of ideologies and imagined societal constraints that they’re either conscious and discarding of or entirely oblivious to.
​
The style and vernacular are more difficult components to analyse. Hubert Selby Jr. spurted the work out in a sort of mild mania befitting of its contents, opting for swift drafting and high-speed scenes over adherence to grammatical norms.
We trace four New Yorkers as they lose their way, succumbing to their (perceived) nefarious inclinations and going on to frequent, in various degrees, institutions of therapy and rehabilitation, parties of baseless debauchery, dark corners and sooty social circles. If you want a nice hit of bleakness for a few days one sunny British summer, delve into it. If you’ve not yet — watch the movie. Aronofsky squeezes like four times the average number of cuts into a movie, with sharp, smash shifts that allude to frenetic desire and the hopeless hook of vice. Cast is crazy. Clint Mansell’s score is a stirring, haunting wonderpiece.
Chasing the Scream
Johann Hari
This one ‘ere be one of the most difficult books to put down since some Palahniuk affairs of yesteryear. It contains not only incredible, immersive, and thoroughly informed non-fiction writing, but the subject matter — well, let’s just say it is or should be of profound interest to anyone a) of this generation and b) the inclination to think:
Drugs.
What I hadn’t realised until I read it was just how rife the apparent ‘issue’ of drugs has been throughout history, and just how the last century’s War on Drugs has made matters significantly worse than pre-prohibition. That’s obviously the author’s polemic, but it’s also perhaps mine. Case studies include biographical accounts of leading figures (both on the prohibition side and its drug-using/selling counterpart) in the War, such as Harry Anslinger and Arnold Rothstein. Hari articulates fascinating plights and personal politics, from street-users and addicts around the world to staunch policymakers. And they touch a nerve. We trace the powerplays of Mexican cartels and New York corner runners, as well as the work of Portuguese reformists and the somewhat glittering national response to decriminalisation there. Reading it is to re-think and to re-evaluate. It paints the notion of addiction in a more nuanced yet clinically clear way, from the outset, than the view of most governments and so many of the general population…
In short, it’s one of the most insightful journalistic pieces I’ve read in a long time, if not ever. I had a strong debate with my parents about the issue of drug legality (or lack thereof), and what could be done to change the seemingly hopeless, perpetually worsening issue. I am with Hari — in the camp FOR decriminalisation/altogether reforming our approach to drugs and addiction. I’m in this camp one third because of my own experience, one third because of the things I have seen, and a strong final third because his argument is so articulate and irrefutable.
​
(Yes I am aware Hari has a pretty cloudy past in terms of journalistic veracity, and there's no doubt that this piece isn't a tell-all, be-all bible for the issue, but it covers key theories and postulations we shouldn't ignore).
It seems mindless to continue persecutions and prosecutions and ostracisation that only widen disparities between addicts and those enforcing laws on them. Being unable to get a job because of a criminal record courtesy of having a small bag of weed on you (a hyperbolic example, but a legitimate one) means you’re not going to spend your time working and contributing to society; there’s potential there for falling into deeper issues of addiction with stronger drugs. Not regulating drug provision means ‘criminals’ and gangs are in charge. The drugs they sell are both more impure and more dangerous. People lose their lives/fall deeper. It goes on. Absolute minefield of a topic and you’re unlikely to ever agree entirely with someone you discuss it with, but this book traces and takes down so many poignant points vis à vis the War on Drugs. I have recommended it to a lot of people.
My Secret History
Paul Theroux
Paul Theroux’s My Secret History is, shamefully, the first of the author’s works I have tackled, despite having been meaning to read him (The Great Railway Bazaar, especially) for years. I was taken immediately by the prevalent themes of faith, sex and adolescence, fed to us by a narrator more lyrical, insightful and subtle than Holden Caulfield. Quite a long book isn’t it? Seems to me quite a sad thing to consider, albeit a pragmatic one, when finishing a piece of literature: should I read a short one and then move on to a bigger one, or do I tackle a longer piece now and reward myself with something more succinct, or do I take note of all the slightly longer pieces piling up around me and quit my job and grow a beard and sit cross legged in the woods and read read read until I teach myself to retain information once more?
I digress. Theroux is an exemplary writer by the way, and his protagonist in this instance has that remarkable level of muted depravity that draws audiences, alongside a sort of infectious front-and-centre narrative voice. Andrew Parent is also in possession of complete control over his own content; as such the distance and detachment that we feel is not only the result of our own (hopefully admirable) moral compass, but of his narcissistic intentions.
I read the protagonist becoming more and more ripe with malicious cognitive dissonance, more and more unethical in his behaviour. Manipulating, evading, weaving. The fact he’s a writer who travels made it particularly tough for me to detach myself and deny admiration of how he’s got to be where he is with a wily intellect and outwardly easy-going persona. Perhaps you’ve got to be all sorts of decayed on the inside to make it as a scribe alive — I suppose this is a point that Parent makes a couple of times. One of my favourite quotes from the novel (whilst perpetually degrading himself with adultery and a egocentric temper that pushes him to the brink of being totally indefensible) is this: “I was writing for my life. I was writing to prove that I existed. It was as though I was inventing a written language, innovating a book, originating a point of view; taking deep breaths and trying to come alive”. Hey, he gets it. Hey, he expresses it way better than I can.
“One of the greatest things that writers did, I thought, was to isolate an event, and light it up with the imagination, to make people understand and remember; not just events, but people and their passions. Forgetting was much worse than failure; it was an act of violence. For all writing is aimed at defeating time. No one could become a writer – no one would even care about it – until he or she experienced the impartial cruelty of time passing”.
Man o man.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Milan Kundera
Now now, this one. An intriguing combination of fictional narrative, self-aware asides by the author, and some lovely philosophical commentary.
Yeah it’s a stunning novel, run through with allegories, thoughtful observations and strange dream-like turns. Its title refers to the historical dichotomy of heaviness and lightness, in the context of lives weighed down or floating free, ethereal, to unknown recurrence, and the corresponding (flawed, Kundera argues (?)) labels of negative and positive, difficult and bearable, deterrent and desired. This central notion and its remarkable literary manifestations here are an opposition to Nietzsche’s supposition that we are all in recurrence and that we return ad infinitum to live further lives. Heavy.
In the book, Tereza and Tomas star, and we follow their paths through Czechoslovakia of the late 60s and early 70s — a period of great event, upheaval and turmoil. The writing flicks from one topic to another rather excellently. There’s no forced segues or jarring sequences, and Kundera never detracts from the lives of these detailed, troubled, compromising characters. There are infidelities from Tomas (which leads to plenty of multi-dimensional character-study asides, especially the life of bowler-hat wearing Sabina and frenetic, friendly Franz), accounts of embodiment as set against the soul, of a dog called Karenin that meets a slow and sad end, plenty of discussion of sexuality in (and without) the context of love, social stratas, the pains and perils of opposing Russian capitalism, the weight of God as against the actual (and metaphorical) weight of shit, giving up the gun as a prestigious surgeon to wash windows, the Grand March as the ultimate form of kitsch, and lots of other captivating passages which both contribute to the larger whole (a tragic but compelling account of human life) and function as succinct little ruminations in a time of political frailty, household harrows and wavering contentments.
That there review is about as understandable as certain passages of the novel? Would you agree? Would you? Fucking answer me.
The interweb summarises it in a much better fashion, arguing that the novel supposes and shows that “each person has only one life to live and that which occurs in life occurs only once and never again — thus the "lightness" of being”.
A hearty showing of existentialism, wouldn’t you say?