Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – Cancer Ward

Solzhenitsyn was always to be considered the great moralist of the Stalinist regime. Sent to a gulag for criticizing Stalin in a letter, he suffered first-hand the degredations and cruelties of Soviet rule. Awarded the Nobel Prize, exiled from Russia, only to eventually return, Solzhenitsyn’s life and works are intricately bound up with the fortunes of modern Russian history. Perhaps his most emblematic work is the short and marvellous One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich, depicting daily life in a Soviet labour camp, but it is in Cancer Ward (1967; banned the following year in the Soviet Union) where the scope of his ideas first found a substantial home. Primarily both allegorical and semi-autobiographical, Cancer Ward is set just a couple of years after the death of Stalin, and is set in an Uzbek hospital ward. It tells of the fortunes of a group of cancer patients; their illnesses, their histories, their hopes for recovery, their relationships and their treatment under Stalin.

We are first introduced to Pavel Nicolayevich Rusanov, a snivelling Party man who wears thin-rimmed spectacles and has swallowed the callous collectivized propaganda of the state. He sits in pompous judgement over his fellow cancer sufferers, most notably Oleg Kostoglotov (seemingly based to some extent on Solzhenitsyn himself), an embittered yet intellectually lively critic of the regime, who attempts to form relationships with two of the female nurses on the ward, Vera Gangart and the young nurse Zoya. Through these characters and others, Solzhenitsyn explores the impact of Stalinist rule, both on the individual and on society as a whole. The idea of the “cancerous” Soviet state with its “tumours” of labour camps is central to the novel’s themes; just as Kostoglotov, discharged from the ward towards the end of the book, realises that his life cannot ever be quite the same; so, in the zoo, gazing at the caged animals, he comes to understand that Russian life, too, cannot go “back to normal” following the horrors they have witnessed. Through the character of Rusanov Solzhenitsyn explores the human and intellectual fallacies of ideology; subsuming all thought, all feeling and all reason under the cold metal sheet of official state policy, a trick of despots and totalitarians everywhere, which allows human life to become cheap, which ultimately permits the most horrific crimes and destroys empathy. It is a sense of individual liberty which Solzhenitsyn seems to champion; whilst not any kind of cheerleader for Western liberal capitalism, he uses a barbed wire to scar the face of Stalinist propaganda, revealing the wounds beneath.

Also, of course, the book functions as an examination of the state of post-Stalinist healthcare and the suffering of those with cancer, both male and female (although the novel focuses mainly on the men’s ward, one touching scene in particular involving a vibrant young woman about to have her breast removed will stay with me). Solzhenitsyn depicts the realities of the patients: their fears, paranoia, obsessions and denials, as well as the doctors and nurses: the paucity of resources they have to work with, the overstretched system, and even a discourse on the relative merits of public and private healthcare through the private doctor whom Vera goes to see. Cancer Ward is sometimes a difficult book; easy to admire, for sure, but not easy to love. Discussing the artistry of prose in translation is always a tricky business, but Solzhenitsyn has a clear, plain and somehow sneakily profound manner of writing which gets under the skin; despite this, the book, clocking in at 570 pages in my edition, often feels longer than it is and can become turgid in places. There is little amusement here, and although there is a curious sense of life-affirming freedom embodied in Kostoglotov, it remains – as Solzhenitsyn’s legacy bequeaths its own Soviet X-ray to us – bristlingly ambivalent.

This autumn I learned from experience that a man can cross the threshold of death even when his body is still not dead. Your blood still circulates and your stomach digests, while you yourself have gone through the whole psychological preparation for death – and lived through death itself. Everything around you, you see as if from the grave. And although you’ve never counted yourself a Christian, indeed the very opposite sometimes, all of a sudden you find you’ve forgiven all those who trespassed against you and bear no ill-will towards those who persecuted you. You’re simply indifferent to everyone and everything. There’s nothing you’d put yourself out to change, you regret nothing. I’d even say it was a state of equilibrium, as natural as that of the trees and the stones. Now I have been taken out of it, but I’m not sure whether I should be pleased or not. It means the return of all my passions, the bad as well as the good.

John Green – Paper Towns

.John Green’s Paper Towns has only just seen a British release, although it has been available in America and Canada for a couple of years now. Having been enthusiastically pointed towards it on various occasions, I was excited to finally get my paws on it a week or so ago. It’s one of the most fun, smart and touching books I’ve read for some time, and certainly one of the best YA novels I’ve ever enjoyed. The story revolves around the mercurial and enigmatic Margo Roth Spiegelman, a young woman about to graduate high school. She knocks on the door of her friend – and the novel’s protagnist – Quentin Jacobsen one evening and persuades him to join her on a crazy night of pranks and revenge. The next day, Quentin – who’s been head over heels for Margo for years –  finds out that Margo hasn’t turned up to school, and it soon becomes apparent that she’s run away or vanished. But Q quickly realizes that Margo seems to have left him some clues to her fate, and the narrative follows Q and his nerdy, quick-witted friends Ben and Radar as they try to find out what’s happened to Margo.

Green’s novel is eminently readable – I brushed through Paper Towns in just a few days – and extremely funny. I caught myself chuckling out loud on many occasions. “Getting you a date to prom is so hard that the American government believes diplomacy alone will not be sufficient and that force will be required.” The wit is one of the three things that make this novel so enjoyable: the others are a fast-paced and well-plotted narrative; and a genuine sense of profundity and thoughtfulness, as the motif of the “paper towns” is developed by first Margo and then, later, Q. (A “paper town” is a fictional place surreptitiously added to maps by cartographers in an attempt to “copyright” their maps; any other map they see which also contains this fictional place, they will know it’s a rip-off of their product). Green uses the idea to talk about the banality of suburban life and the feelings of helplessness and lack of self-understanding that these teenagers are feeling. The situation of these kids – about to leave high school, fretting over dates for prom and starting to realise that they will soon be leaving the school and one another for the final time, along with the maelstrom of emotions that leaving entails – will be familiar to everyone. It is a frequently genuinely touching novel interspersed with moments of hilarity and excitement, as well as John Green using the narrative to plug his favourite bands, which frankly I have no problem with at all when he has such good taste (the Mountain Goats, Billy Bragg & Wilco’s Mermaid Avenue, the Violent Femmes, all get a mention). Anyone who enjoys YA fiction, or really, anyone who enjoys exciting and intelligent writing, should read this book. I adored it.

Richard Russo – Empire Falls

Pulitzer Prize winner in 2002, eh? Very nice, Mr Russo, very nice. Empire Falls is, in its own way, rather marvellous. John Irving’s A Prayer For Owen Meany is one of my very favourite novels, and I was often reminded of it reading Russo’s warm and comforting novel, 500 pages of humdrum, small-town American life in a depressed, post-industrial Maine town. It’s a good, big, old-fashioned novel, no tricks, no gimmicks, no postmodern quirks and hiccups – it has character development, relationships, themes, betrayal, love, loss, jealousy, it is substantial, like a bear hug: Empire Falls is a mug of hot chocolate before bed, a reminder of a simpler but perhaps more satisfying time for novel reading. Miles Roby is the middle-aged, soon-to-be-divorced protagonist who runs the Empire Grill, in the town which bears the novel’s name. A thoughtful and even submissive character, Miles watches his ex-wife run into the arms of the self-styled “Silver Fox”, one Walt Comeau; watches his skinny young daughter navigate her way through the perils of high school, watches his reprobate father scrounge off everyone and anyone – and ponders both his own past, his future, and his perilous business relationship with Francine Whiting, the matriarch of Empire Falls, the owner of what remains of the town’s once proud industries (including his own Grill) . Mrs Whiting inherited the businesses after her husband, one C. B. Whiting, put a bullet into his skull some years before the narrative of the novel begins. The shadow of the Whiting empire, deacyed, hangs over the town, while Mrs Whiting rattles around her home, with only her psychopathic cat Timmy and crippled daughter Cindy – she deeply in unrequited love with Miles –  for company. The majority of the novel’s action, though, revolves around Miles Roby; a calm, pensive and well-developed character, like all the people in this novel. Russo is a good writer, no doubt, in the true, old sense of the word.

If the novel has flaws, they are in its pacing; it isn’t until quite late on that the stakes are raised, and it does go through some doldrums half way through. But the reader should persevere: the explosive and revelatory events in the book’s final sections are a worthy pay-off, all the more so for the painstaking character development that Russo has delivered. Janine, Miles’ ex-wife, proud of her weight loss and first experiences of orgasm; the shy and troubled young John Voss, a school colleague of Miles’ daughter Tick (Christina); and Tick’s on-off jock boyfriend Zack, the son of rising police chief Jimmy Minty, one of Miles’ great life rivals. All of these characters and more are given life and personality, lightening up Empire Falls until it feels as realistic as, yes, the blue-collar worlds that Irving creates. A reader “immerses” themselves into this book, reads it by bedside lamp and locks out the outside world. I shall miss Miles and his vertigo as he stands in front of the church, paintbrush in hand; I shall miss the genuinely moving relationship he has with his daughter (finally the one true and genuine instance of love in the whole novel), and the sense of frantic excitement Russo created in me as John Voss returns, menacingly, to school. I shall even miss Max, Miles’ wheeling, dealing father, food in beard and glint in eye, sponging money for booze off another sucker.

All of this mirrored, of course, in Russo’s social themes: the decay of post-Reagan America, the closing of the textile mills, the unemployment, the sense of being trapped, the decline and fall, the trash making its way down the river. In the end, how do people cope with these tragedies? These quiet, slow infestations of hopelessness and the death of a meaningful future? They deal with it, of course, in the way the human beings always have and always will: with each other. Empire Falls is marvellous, if not revolutionary: cuddle up to it.

William Faulkner – As I Lay Dying

As I Lay Dying was published in 1930, and continued Faulkner’s tremendous run of genre-defining Southern literature. Present here is all the intensity, latent violence, religiosity and melancholia which marks the tradition he helped define. Addie Bundren’s death in her family home is marked by her eldest son Cash knocking together her coffin from within view of her window, her teenage daughter Dewey Dell standing over her waving a fan, and two other sons – Jewel and Darl – arguing with their father about his plans to fulfil Addie’s request to bury her in Jefferson, Mississippi; an arduous journey which takes up the majority of the novel’s narrative. Or, rather, “narrative”. As ever with Faulkner, this work is as much about style as it is about the story or the characters or the themes. The text is divided into short sections, each of which is narrated by one of various characters in the story. It is Darl who has the most sections to his name, and thus becomes the de facto protagonist of the novel, but all the major characters: Dewey Dell, the father Adse, Cash, the youngest child Vardaman, even Addie herself as well as various neighbours and even some minor characters – all have sections where they narrate. This allows Faulkner to dive into the inner lives of each of these characters and reveal the gulfs between them, the chasms in communication they suffer from, and the rival interpretations of one another’s actions which dominate the novel thematically. This is a rich vein in Southern writing – Carson McCullers’ superlative The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter also turns on notions of the impossibility of human being to truly and honestly communicate their inner selves to one another – and it is mined to great effect here by Faulkner. It is most clearly demonstrated in the character of Jewel, a headstrong and stubborn young man, who rarely narrates in the novel and is defined more through his actions than his words. And while Jewel is regarded as callous and unfeeling  by the majority of the people around him, his actions reveal a man who cares deeply for his mother, risking himself on more than one occasion for her. Meanwhile, Dewey Dell – often seen by others as a soft and dreamy young woman – plucks up the courage to go to the pharmacist for drugs to get rid of her unwanted child; conceived with a local farmhand Lafe. The pharmacist makes her perform sexual favours for him before giving her medication which doesn’t even do what she wants; in this chapter, and in Addie Bundren’s own chapter, in which she laments the death of her girlhood and innocence through a loveless marriage and a continuation of children (including one – Jewel – with another man) Faulkner displays the concern for women’s positions and women’s difficulties of the time, propped up by a literalist Christian dogmatism which victimised women – which he also displayed in The Sound & The Fury.

The novel is short yet endlessly rich in theme and symbols; the image of the family carting Addie’s coffin across the Southern landscape has an almost Biblical feel to it, as the buzzards collect around the wagon, stinking more and more each day. Darl, the “intellectual” one, the thoughtful and intense one, juxtaposed throughout with the independent Jewel and the stoic Cash,  is suspicious of the whole enterprise from the beginning, becoming more and more disillusioned with the process of taking Addie to Jefferson, until eventually he sets fire to the barn where the family are staying overnight. Rather than face the law and any potential fines, Adse has Darl committed. Again, Faulkner makes us think about the gulf in communication and understanding between the family members. Is Darl a heroic figure here? Misguided? Or actively malevolent? And Adse, insisting that the family travel across rivers and fords for days on end with a stinking corpse in a coffin to honour his wife’s wishes to be buried with her people – is he a selfless, dedicated husband? Or is the whole episode merely an excuse for Adse to get some new false teeth from Jefferson? The ease with which he introduces the new “Mrs Bundren” in the novel’s final line suggests a less-than-noble motivation for him. There is no objective or even subjective narrator to tell us. Only a succession of individual voices, each given to us with their own foibles and illusions, all in Faulkner’s distinctive and effortlessly beautiful stream of consciousness prose. Of course, let’s make no bones about this: As I Lay Dying is frequently – especially at the beginning – a confusing novel, where the reader is often unsure as to who is related to who, or about whom various characters are speaking, or even what is actually happening on the page at various moments. It is a rewarding reading experience, and I am well aware that if I read this novel again in three months and then wrote about it, it would read differently to this. Such is the way with William Faulkner.

Tom Robbins – Skinny Legs And All

)Where to begin? Just where to begin? I’ll come right out and say it upfront: Tom Robbins’ Skinny Legs and All (1990) is some of the most fun I’ve had with a novel in a long time. Happily, it’s also one of the most intellectually exciting and provocative novels I have read for months. I came away from this book somewhart dazzled and with my mind spinning with ideas – I can honestly think of no higher compliment to pay a work of fiction. The plot is, well, ludicrous: our story opens with newlyweds Ellen Cherry Charles and “Boomer” Petway – he a deceptively simple redneck welder, she a wannabe rebellious artist from a deeply Christian family –  making their way to New York in Boomer’s customized truck: customized to look like a turkey. After a passionate fuck in a deserted cave, they leave behind a dirty sock, a spoon and an old can of beans, who – yes, they are characters in the story – meet up with Painted Stick and Conch Shell, ancient religious instruments coaxed back to “life” by the couple’s copulations and Ellen Cherry’s passionate pleas for her husband to call her “Jezebel”. Painted Stick and Conch Shell are determined to return to their old home, Jerusalem; and Dirty Sock, Spoon and Can o’ Beans are more than happy to go along for the ride. All of this serves as a prequel to the main axis of the novel: the restaurant Isaac & Ishmael’s, opened by an Arab and a Jew in New York, where Ellen Cherry eventually gets a job as a waitress. The main attraction at the restaurant, which is constantly suffering bomb threats and terrorist explosions, turns out to be a beautiful teenage girl who belly dances under the name of Salome, and who ultimately promises to dance the Dance of the Seven Veils, sending the clientèle into a frenzy. While all of this is going on, Ellen Cherry’s fundamentalist preacher uncle Buddy is planning to bring about the Rapture by paving the way for the Third Temple of Jerusalem to be created. The novel is structured into seven sections, titled “The First Veil”, “The Second Veil”, and so on, each of which, at its conclusion, pulls away another of humanity’s willing deceptions, frauds or canards, bringing us closer and closer to the true state of human affairs.

The prose is crowded, bursting at the seams with similes, analogies, metaphors, bustling and jostling for position on the page. A police car has “blue lights flashing like a mutant shoppers’ special at a post-nuclear K mart”, for example. At first this was overwhelming and even off-putting, but Robbins’ maximalist style is just another function of his overactive imagination and energetic, rollercoaster mind. Don’t be fooled by the plot description above: this is a profoundly serious work, even as it is couched in absurdities and levity. It is a deeply feminist book; as Robbins delved into the history of Jerusalem and the religious conflicts which have marked it, he reveals the domination of the patriarchal clerics over the Great Feminine, Astarte and shows us how, since the dawn of Abrahamic faiths, religion has functioned as a tool of the patriarchy, suspicious of the feminine, suspicious of the female sexual appetite and female power.

Despite an often ostentatious masculine display that would indicate otherwise, the sexual drama (or melodrama or force) was largely, historically, directed by the female. That was particularly true among human beings, in which species the male had gone to ludicrous and often violent lengths to compensate for what struck the more insecure of men as an inferior sexual role. One of the lengths to which they went was the establishment of patriarchal religion and the recasting of a father figure as the producer of the show, although from the very beginning, the cosmogonic principle has been feminine. Those men, envious and anxious, not only fired the Great Goddess (who smiled upon all manner of sexual expression, including that which moderns were to label “promiscuous” and “pornographic”), but they also spent thousands of years and billions of dollars trying to conceal the fact of her existence.

A few months ago, I wrote here about Umberto Eco’s tedious and overblown Foucault’s Pendulum. You, Umberto Eco, are you paying attention? You want to write about the intricacies of religious history and have a madcap narrative too? This is how it’s done. Religion, feminism, art, the intractable problems of the Middle East, and the existential crises of an inanimate can of beans are the concerns of this dizzying, hilarious and stupidly entertaining novel, in which the misogyny of religion (“Jezebel!”) is torn apart, in which the women villified by Judeo-Christian mythology (notably Jezebel and Salome) are recast as challengers to the dominant narrative of masculinist religious discourse, in which the vapidity of much postmodern art is punctured (defeat as a form of celebration, hypocrisy of anti-establishment artists), in which a pink spoon has as much personality as a human being, in which a foot fetish is explored, in which ideas burst off the page and ram their way into your brain. I shall certainly be reading more Tom Robbins in future – in the meantime, Skinny Legs and All has served as a marvellous introduction.

George Orwell – Coming Up For Air

Ah, it was all fields round here when I were a lad.

Coming Up For Air (1939) was the last of Orwell’s “social realist” novels; published just before his two final great staments, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. And while it bears more, at first glance, in common with the likes of Keep The Aspidistra Flying than with either of those two, one of its charms and intrigues is how the germs of those later two majesterial works are latent here. The story concerns one George Bowling, a chubby middle-aged travelling salesman living in the English suburbs just before the outbreak of World War 2. Bowling constantly refers to himself as “one of those middling types”; his lifeless wife Hilda gives him little joy, his job is acceptable, his house in the anonymous Ellesmere Road pleasant enough but uninteresting. As the war seems to loom on the horizon, his thoughts turn back to his childhood in the English countryside village of Lower Binfield. A time of idle boyish pursuits: fishing, bicycle racing and chasing girls. Bowling is seized with a sudden urge to revisit his old home, to visit the world he knew before World War 1 came along and changed everything. What he finds, of course, is a world changed: the town has expanded, factories dominate, the quaint family businesses all closed down now; the family friends are dead, the childhood sweetheart grown fat and boring – bombers circle the skies in preparation for the coming war. Even George’s idyllic boyhood pond, scene of his most treasured fishing memories, is now a rubbish tip.

Don’t mistake me: Coming Up For Air is not a tedious, quaint, fatuous Laurie Lee-style nostalgia fest for a hopelessly romanticized bygone time. Bowling’s sweet memories contrast sharply with his retro-active intellectual knowledge of what must really have been happening at the time – the unemployment, the poverty and the workhouses; in this strange way, the novel seems to prefigure the fascination with the permeability of memory which marks the works of Ishiguro; and Proust himself is mentioned (as someone Bowling “wouldn’t have read”). What Bowling understands at the end is that the old world has gone, he lives in changed times, times where nostalgia, rose-tinted spectacles and the yearning for the past are as antiquated as the pewter dishes of the “sham countrified”, expanded Lower Binfield.

I’ll tell you what my stay in Lower Binfield had taught me, and it was this. It’s all going to happen. All the things you’ve got at the back of your mind, the things you’re terrified of, the things that you tell yourself are just a nightmare or only happen in foreign countries. The bombs, the food-queues, the rubber truncheons, the barbed wire, the coloured shirts, the slogans, the enormous faces, the machine-guns squirting out of bedroom windows. It’s all going to happen. I know it – at any rate, I knew it then. There’s no escape. Fight against it if you like, or look the other way and pretend not to notice, or grab your spanner and rush out to do a bit of face-smashing along with the others. But there’s no way out. It’s just something that’s got to happen.

Orwell’s prose, as ever, chimes with the rhythms of everyday speech, the voice you wish you could have: except in this novel, something slightly different occurs. Bowling’s colloquial, uintellectual thought processes bumble along, and something deeper emerges unbeknownst to him; a kind of menace, a darkness and a yearning, floating sleepily above the top of the text, insinuating itself into your mind. The cumulative effect is disquieting and the book is deceptively straightforward. This dual layer of narrative is mirrored in Bowling’s preoccupations and realizations: above the sleepy, brain-dead England hovers the threat: Fascism. And perhaps Orwell summed up this novel best himself in his memoir of the Spanish Civil War: he wrote in Homage to Catalonia of “the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.”

Coming Up For Air is a fine novel: despite the fact that I struggled manfully through a rather tedious extended section (some thirty pages or more) on George’s boyhood fishing memories – I thought I’d never see the back of his endless descriptions of rods and different kinds of carp, and worms, reels, and so on. While ultimately I found Keep The Aspidistra Flying to be a more satisfying novel, there remains no doubt that Orwell is one of the greatest of English writers.

Roberto Bolaño – 2666

It’s very difficult to know where to begin when thinking about 2666, the final work and magnum opus of the late Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño, which has been widely reviewed and regarded as a masterpiece that redefines what the novel is capable of. The novel was published in 2004 but was only translated and published in the English-speaking world in 2008. Clocking in at 900 pages (and at nearly 1,100 in the original Spanish) it is a dark, intense, violent and brutal ride through a hell on earth, and the corresponding ways in which writers and critics can only fail to illuminate and comprehend these horrors. Some details: 2666 was intended to be published as five separate novels but an artistic decision was taken by the publishers to present the work as a unified whole, believing that this was Bolaño’s true intention (his desire to see it published separately was motivated primarily by financial concerns for his family after his death, which he knew was coming), and because the novel does hold together as a whole. It is also for this reason that I’ve decided to write about the book as a whole rather than in parts, as I have seen some people do. So. We have five “sections” of this novel: “The Part About The Critics”, “The Part About Amalfitano”, “The Part About Fate”, “The Part About The Crimes”, and “The Part About Archimboldi”. It opens with four European literary critics, obsessed by an obscure German writer named Benno von Archimboldi. Their insular world brings them into love triangles and personal dramas, and eventually they turn their quest into an attempt to track down the reclusive writer. Brief, shadowy moments of violence permeate this otherwise straightforward section which satirises the self-absorbed world of the literary culture; pulses of something dark and unspoken (such as the section where two of the critics launch a violent beating upon an Asian cab driver, only to return to their normal lives as if nothing had happened), which grow and grow throughout the chapter. Eventually the critics’ quest leads them to Santa Teresa in Mexico, where they believe Archimboldi to be. And it is the fictional city of Santa Teresa, on the US/Mexico border, which is the ninth circle in this book: the vortex of evil. Santa Teresa here stands for Ciudad Juárez, a place where, over the last fifteen years or so, hundreds of women have been brutally raped, tortured and killed, their bodies abandoned in the desert or in the garbage disposal units of maquiladoras. Most of the cases remain unsolved. It is this central horror which Bolaño makes the centrepiece of his novel.

Part 2 – we leave the critics at the end of Part 1, and we do not encounter them again – concerns Amalfitano, who we had previously met as a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Santa Teresa during Part 1. This chapter charts his descent into paranoia and a kind of madness (madness is a recurring them in this book, one of many, as we are witness time and again to asylums and those who inhabit them – most memorably the painter who caused a sensation by cutting off his own hand as the central part of an autibiographical work). This is the shortest section by far and Bolaño here takes us further into the sense of the foreboding, the sinister – there is a dread to this chapter, nameless and unspoken, but fully present and lacerated through every paragraph. This dread develops yet further in “The Part About Fate”, which concerns an American journalist, nicknamed “Fate” by his colleagues, who, following his mother’s death, is sent to Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match. Fate works for a magazine covering black and African-American issues, and meets Black Panther preachers (in a memorable scene, we read a lengthy and inspired sermon by the preacher on five key concepts: DANGER, MONEY, FOOD, STARS and USEFULNESS) before travelling down to Mexico where he is drawn into a world increasingly nightmarish and harrowing, but where the central horror itself is yet to be revealed. Throughout these sections, mentions of “the crimes” and “the killings” proliferate gradually, bringing us closer and closer. In “The Part About Fate”, we learn that one man has even been arrested for some of the murders; how effective this will be remains unknown.

A word here about Bolaño’s writing: it is frequently a joy, if you’re paying attention – and you will. His skill is to be able to write in a calm, matter-of-fact, non-intrusive, ostensibly realist kind of way (as he does at the novel’s opening) and then gradually, by increments, so that you barely notice, he shifts gears until you suddenly realise you are reading Proustian paragraphs and sentences, which veer off wildly into sub-clauses and reminiscences,  with attendant potent descriptions of the poverty and exploitation which define Santa Teresa. And you hadn’t even noticed. It’s an achievement. And it is with this sense of prosody, with the impending sense of a sinister force, and with a growing fear of the killings, that we begin the longest chapter and the novel’s centrepiece, “The Part About The Crimes.” It is tough to talk about this section, and tougher still to read it. It lasts nearly 300 pages and centres on a paragraph-by-paragraph litany of the rapes and murders of the women of Santa Teresa. Bolaño avoids voyeurism and vulgarism by borrowing the clinical language of the medical report for these parts; phrases like “vaginally and anally raped” repeat endlessly, as do descriptions of blood-stained clothing, bodies abandoned near desolate highways, and the hopelessness and inadequacy of the Santa Teresa police force to cope with this endless string of abuses. Between the deaths, narratives emerge: women’s groups attempting to raise awareness (and failing); a police chief sleeping with a woman who runs an asylum; some of the men and gangs arrested for murder and what happens to them in prison; the machinations of the drug cartels; a TV “psychic” who speaks out about the killings; a “sacrophobe” who urinates and defecates in the churches of Santa Teresa; the illegal transportation of people in and out of Northern Mexico; the shameful conditions in the maquiladoras where virtually all the women work; a politician desperate to help; and intertwining all of this, with the regularity of clockwork, another paragraph will begin: “The next body was found on the 23rd of August…” Resemblances between the Santa Teresa of 2666 and the Baltimore of HBO’s The Wire exist, if one wishes to draw them out.

What makes this section so intense is the relentlessness of it, and yes, the boredom. Another murder? Another murder. Raped? Yes, raped. Again. And strangled. Again. Bolaño knows what he is doing: these women have no narrative, most of them have no name, we do not engage with them, we learn nothing about them, we are introduced to them when their bodies are discovered, we may learn some biographical details, but that’s it. These women exist on the fringes of society: in one memorable passage, a character soliloquizes on the “unwritten” of history, those who exist on the edge, whose lives are “illegible” in the discourse of history. What Bolaño is doing in 2666 is clear: he is trying to write the illegible. A recurrent image in this novel is the “abyss”, some black, nameless hole, and what lies within, clawing its way out. This motif appears time and again, most notably in a passage where Bolaño eviscerates the role of the intellectual in Argentina: endorsing the state, losing their “shadows”, playing in front of an audience who can see the nameless beast shifting in the black hole behind them. Most of these figurative passages occur earlier on in the novel; in “The Part About The Crimes” we are subjected to a brutal realism which cumulatively is as powerful as anything I have read, largely due to the repetitive, tiresome, harrowing way it is rammed into your skull.

I emerged, morally exhausted, into “The Part About Archimboldi”, where we finally learn of the obscure writer we last heard of hundreds of pages ago, back in Part 1. This, in my view, is the weakest section, as it takes us into Germany before WWII, and into the front line, where the teenage Archimboldi fights for the Nazis against the Russians. It feels only tangenitally connected to the events of Santa Teresa, and while the thematic link is strong (the ease of complicity with evil, the lack of accountability, the tyranny of pure chance), I was frankly less interested in Archimboldi than Bolaño wants me to be. However, a satisfying revelation at the close makes a beginning of tying plots together – with the caveat, of course, that Bolaño wants nothing to be tied together, nothing can be tied together, the murders in Juárez are unsolved, they continue. To call 2666 a cri-de-couer about this issue would be a gross understatement: he is “raising awareness”, yes, but more than that: condemning the inability of art and criticism to deal with reality. It is no accident that the novel opens with critics. This, for Bolaño, is the folly of contemporary critical discourse: it begins with criticism, it begins with theory – while all around people are starving, beaten and oppressed. It is reality where we must be centred, otherwise we are nothing, incapable, inadequate, an echo of an echo. For these reasons and more, 2666 is an important novel, a cry from hell, and yet for those reasons it’s hard to recommend wholeheartedly: it’s harrowing, bleak, laced with moments of black comedy, and it does not flinch for one moment from that which cannot be faced.

A final word should go to Natasha Wimmer, whose wonderful translation brings this book alive. Her chief achievement is to mirror the sussurations of Bolaño’s prose: from the blank realism that opens the book, to the Proustian dreams of the final chapter; the clinical language of the medical examiner, the pervasive unease that follows you around Santa Teresa – all translated with fluidity and certainty.

Siri Hustvedt – The Sorrows Of An American

Siri Hustvedt’s 2003 novel What I Loved ranks as one of the finest and most enthralling novels I have ever had the pleasure of reading, and so it was with a mixture of excitement and trepidation that I started reading her most recent fictional work, The Sorrows of an American (2008). Thankfully I was not to be disappointed, and although The Sorrows of an American does not reverbate with the same luminosity as her previous masterwork, it is a beautiful and elegaic tale of loss, memory, isolation and family. As Viv Groskop commented in her review of this book in the Observer, it doesn’t sound as good in the re-telling, like a lot of the best fiction. The novel opens shortly after the death of Erik’s father – psychiatrist and doctor Erik and his philosopher sister Inga (American but of Norweigan heritage – like Hustvedt herself) are going through their father’s things when they come across a mysterious letter from his youth regarding a woman named Lisa and a veiled reference to a death. Their reaction to this, coupled with Erik’s reading of his father’s memoirs, form the initial layer of narrative, as we delve deeper into their family relationships and Erik’s memories and feelings of his father. At the same time as this is happening, a young single mother, Miranda, moves in next to Erik, and another prong of the novel charts his burgeoning affection for both her and her charming daughter Eglantine (Eggy), and their dealings with her unstable ex, Jeff.

Readers of Siri Hustvedt will find her mapping familiar terrain here: psychiatry and mental illness; the waxing and waning of memories and the construction of selves that it entails; and a preoccupation with art and artists are all prevalent in this work (as are characters from her other fictions: Leo, the narrator of What I Loved, makes a cameo appearance at a dinner party, bringing a lump to my throat just in the memory of that novel). Hustvedt has long been interested in neuroscience and its relation with mental illness, here brought out through the conversations between Erik, Inga and their bumbling academic friend Burton, as they explore the liminal terrain of dreams, longing and depression. Her fondness for art is, again, made clear: we are treated to depictions and analyses of Jeff’s compulsive photography exhibition; the delicately crafted dolls that Erik and Inga encounter on their trip back to their home state of Minnesota; Miranda’s graphic designs, detailing her nightmarish and unsettling dream landscapes; and more. She also deals with war: September 11th looms large in the text, and the emotional trauma it causes Inga’s teenage daughter Sonia is neatly juxtaposed with the reading’s from Erik’s father’s journal as he depicts life in South East Asia, fighting the Japanese in World War 2; the trauma (the word is worth repeating as the treatment of “trauma” is one of Hustvedt’s ongoing concerns) of these events, the way they interact with memory and the Self, folds back into Erik’s own growing sense of anxiety and depression.

But where Hustvedt is strongest is in her deft, effortless characterisation, and in the elegance and sorrow of her prose, which I felt I was both gliding over and being deeply moved by. Erik, Inga, Sonia, Miranda and Eggy – all of these characters are vibrant, alive and real: Hustvedt is one of the strongest writers of character in contemporary American fiction, and has a particular gift for writing from the male perspective, always a daunting task for any novelist, and something which (writing from the perspective of another gender) many writers would shy away from altogether. In What I Loved she pulled this off to superlative results, and while I feel that this novel ultimately stands in the shadow of its predecessor, it demonstrates again that Siri Hustvedt is a writer we should treasure.

Umberto Eco – Foucault’s Pendulum

The renowned evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould argued that science and religion are not fundamentally incompatible as they are, as he termed it, “non-overlapping magisteria” (NOM). They inhabit different spheres of inquiry, answer fundamentally different kinds of questions. In effect, they have nothing to do with one another. Like Christopher Hitchens, I find fault with Gould’s idea, but the experience of reading Foucault’s Pendulum (1988) has led me to think that perhaps we could apply the same NOM reasoning to literature and literary critics (which would presumably, in the imperfect analogy, make a religion of fiction and a science of criticism – I leave it to you to ponder the implications). Umberto Eco is an eminent semiotician, historian and literary theorist, who has occasionally dabbled in the murky waters of fiction. The problem with this is that, inevitably, the fiction reads more like an explication of the theories than a work of art in its own right. “Look, you didn’t believe what I said in my textbook? Here is a story that totally illustrates it.” Perhaps I am being unkind – after all, The Name of the Rose is a good novel, but we can all sleep safer at night knowing that Jacques Derrida never tried his hand at fiction. Exciting stories about monks and libraries notwithstanding, Foucault’s Pendulum is a frequently tedious and hideously overwritten novel, which only survives reading because from time to time it becomes terrifically exciting. Three editors, working in a small publishing house specialising in books on the occult and arcane, become bored and jaded after reading too many absurd theories about the involved machinations of cabalist groups in the medieval period. In a spirit of mischief, they invent a program on their new-fangled “word processor” (you can tell that Eco is the kind of guy who would put the emphasis on the final syllable of “processor”) to come up with a fictional theory about these groups, to fool the naive, gullible writers who flood their office with manuscripts. There’s only one problem – the invented theory seems to actually be coming true, with sinister and deadly consequences. The text begins at its climax, with main character Casaubon (his name yanked from Middlemarch) hiding in a Parisian musem, to await some unknown spectacular, apocalyptic event at the Foucault’s Pendulum (“Foucault” refers not to theorist Michel but to physicist Léon) – the rest of the book is told in flashback, leading us back up to this event and its aftermath.

The main problem with Foucault’s Pendulum is what Eco must do in the name of satire. To functionally satirise the medieval cabalist scholars, and in a wider sense, those who scramble around life searching for patterns that may or may not actually exist, he makes the reader sit through page after page after page of pure explication of the movements of various obscure occult groups. I admire Eco’s dedication – all the groups are historically real and his research is immaculate (he is a theorist and historian, after all), and his intention is to mock those who dedicate so much time and effort to such arcana, but it becomes extremely trying to read endless paragraphs charting the possible machinations of the Knights Templar, the Rosicrucians, the Jesuits, the Jews, the Vatican, Alesteir Crowley, Freemasons, Gnostics, the Cathars, the Elders of Zion, ancient Egyptians, the Bogomils, Ordo Templi Orietis, and more (oh so many more), all in a novel which takes its own structure from the ten Sefirot of the Jewish Kabbalah and features involved discussions of the nature of the Torah. The effect of all of this is that the novel too frequently reads like a convoluted encyclopaedia entry broken by intermittent bursts of narrative, rather than an actual story, and our eyes glaze over as we desperately crave the next piece of novel. But of course, he’s “doing things with the narrative” – setting up his semiotic theory, demonstrating the folly of the pattern-seeking mind, showing how the patterns we invent becomes their own reality and other ideas familiar to any reader of postmodern theory. “Doing things”, of course the book is “doing things” – aren’t they always? In Eco’s world they are. How tedious to always be “doing things” in a book. Take your own advice, Umberto: “ma gavte la nata.”

Nor, sad to say, is this the only problem with the book – Eco’s treatment of women in the novel can only realistically be described as patronising. Take Brazilian girlfriend (she fulfils no other meaningful function) Ampora; she’s young, lithe and gorgeous, as well as a world expert on Brazilian mythology, and yet when the narrative brings push to shove, what is her role? To sweat and gyrate her (lovingly described) young body as she enters an initiate trance at a religious ceremony. Or take another of Casaubon’s squeezes and the eventual mother of his child, Lia. Although she is granted more of a voice than Ampora and actually neatly undercuts Casaubon’s crackpot ideas, all of her function in the novel is connected to domesticity, child-rearing, the body, and other hoary old notions of the feminine. It is also notable that she largely disappears from the narrative once she becomes pregnant, reappears briefly to give birth, and then promptly vanishes again, presumably looking after the child while the father rushes around with the much more important business of finding out exactly how Descartes is connected to the Rosy Cross movement, and generally otherwise “doing things”. I would list more female characters but the truth is that there are hardly any others, save for Lorenza/Sophia, whom we never truly get to know other than as an object of lust, and who eventually dies at the foot of the Pendulum, but not before having sexually aroused our narrator, of course.

The book is not without its strengths, and they are largely the same strengths that Eco demonstrated in The Name of the Rose: that is, meticulous research, the ability to conjure up obscure and esoteric landscapes in his fiction, and a tremendous sense of suspense, which makes sections of Foucault’s Pendulum highly tense and exciting. It is telling that the most successful parts of the novel are precisely those parts which read like a novel and not like a way for Umberto Eco to show off the mountain of his learning. Ma gavte la nata, Umberto.

George Orwell – Keep The Aspidistra Flying

One of Orwell’s great social novels, Keep The Aspidistra Flying was published in 1936, and is a brutal account of working-class poverty, laced with the bitterness and blackly comic disillusionment which characterized this period of Orwell’s work. Gordon Comstock is an aspiring poet in London (with one book to his name so far, Mice, remaindered) who despises what he calls the “money-life” with every fibre of his being. All around him he sees only the relentless march of Capital and the Market, infecting with almost religious omnipotence the very depth of his being. The exchange of money and the social relationships it engenders taint every aspect of human existence, and Comstock resolves to take himself, as far as possible, out of the whole rotten system and live outside ambition, outside career prospects, outside capitalist definitions of “failure” and “success”. What Gordon realises as the novel progresses, as he trudges from his meaningless low-level job up the dingy stairs of his boarding-house to the depressing squalor of his low-rent room, is that the “noble” life of dissidence and resistance is nowhere near as romantic as he had hoped. Orwell’s book is a depiction of the poverty inhabited by so many lower-class people in the 1930s, their struggle to escape from the trap in which they find themselves – and makes serious points about how capital defines human relationships. Gordon and his affluent friend Ravelston realise that they can’t possibly talk about money or the situation of each other’s lives; it’s tainted because of the discrepancy in the amount of money they have. Gordon becomes convinced that his girlfriend Rosemary won’t sleep with him because he is too poor. And even his one great hope – his poetry – suffers as the hardship of his existence wears down his spirit and creative spark. Gradually Gordon’s world begins to unravel as he sinks – with willing bitterness – deeper and deeper into squalor and penury, with his Rosemary the only source of light and hope in his world. As even she begins to feel useless and distant from him, she perhaps is the only one who can hold the key to Gordon’s salvation.

Gordon Comstock’s pig-headed, stubborn adherence to his abstraction, leading him into beastly selfishness and arrogance, frequently made me want to throw Keep The Aspidistra Flying across the room in frustration. The disgraceful way he treats his docile and defeated sister Julia, for instance, perhaps the novel’s most truly tragic character. A woman completely defeated by life, she shuffles through a dreary existence, devoid of aspiration and hope, only seeing her brother when he borrows money from her which he never repays. Rosemary too suffers, as Gordon makes her feel guilty for his own self-justificatory cruelties. It is, in the end, through Rosemary that Gordon finally understands the true dignity and nobility of working-class existence – to live, yes, within a foul and corrupt system, but to make the best of it that one can through the ties that bind us, to make an effort and keep the aspidistra flying, through family and ultimately, through love. This is no trite happy-ever-after ending, however: as Gordon embraces his new-found maturity at the novel’s close, he realises he must throw his abortive attempts at poetry literally down the drain. The dignity of the working classes in tandem with the impossibility of true art in a society which worships only money remains Orwell’s core concern, and is starkly illustrated in this comic yet harrowing novel.