Books

Dreams of Speaking - the first page is the best page.

This time last year I had all sorts of reading ambitions. I’ve never been able to shake off the notion that I should be reading a book per week. It should be possible – FFS, at one point this year I was without work for eight weeks! That’s plenty of time to wade through the Himalayas of books stacked all over Fruck HQ. But those of you who know me won’t be surprised to learn I fell short of 52 books for the year. About 37 short, fuck it. Still, that’s not as useless as it sounds. Fact is, I probably read more than ever these days – it’s just that most of it is onscreen not on the page, and nonfiction not fiction. Even so, among the few novels I read this year, some left an impression.

Of the fifteen books I read this year, there was one jawdropper. That was The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy is a genius, one of the literary lions of his generation. And in The Road, a story of heroic human endurance in an ash-choked post-apocalyptic world, he’s near the top of his game. Anyway, I’ve already reviewed The Road here, so I won’t bang on about it now.

Orhan Pamuk -- miserable self-serenader?

A few years back I started reading Orhan Pamuk's novel, The Black Book. I can't remember anything specific about The Black Book, except that it was extravagantly praised and it bored me to tears.

I'm not sure how far into the novel I got before I declared defeat. Not far. (In truth, I'm not sure I read enough for it to even constitute a 'defeat'. So perhaps it's better described as a tactical retreat.) And in retrospect, it's a little odd that I bought the book in the first place: I don't read many novels in translation. Too often, to me, novels that have passed through the extra filter of translation feel like only a facsimile of the original. Think of it this way: can you imagine William Faulkner or Cormac McCarthy (substitute your favourite author) being translated into, say, Polish or Russian by someone who's a lesser wordsmith than they are? Can you imagine their facility with language, their dialogue, their blazing originality surviving unmarred? I can't. And that's why I rarely make the effort.

That said, I do experience an occasional craving for something exotic, something from a different culture and world view than my own -- and I think this is, for the most part, a healthy hankering. And when I say 'different', I don't just mean something set in England, America, or Canada. But something really different, like from Turkey, particularly if it's set in Istanbul, one of the world's most storied cities, the pivot of so much history, both ancient and modern. I think that craving -- and the rapturous reviews excerpted on the back of The Black Book -- probably enticed me into making an exception to my normal practice by plunging into Pamuk in translation.

Read it -- assholes.

I’ve reviewed a lot of books, films, and albums, but never my favourites. I’ve always felt unequal to that task.

For the most part, I’ve reviewed works of “art” that I loathe, not love. It’s safer that way. So what if my review of Babel sucks? Maybe, due to unfairness or incapacity, I didn’t do it justice. Well, no harm done – it was godawful anyway. Its self-harm dwarfs any injury committed by my review.

But when you love a book, a film, or an album, justice must be done. If you do review it, make sure you capture the many shades, shapes, and textures of its glory. And if you can’t do that, shut the fuck up. Because it’s better to say nothing than something wholly inadequate. Such, I guess, is the chilling effect of great art on reviewing. That’s why, when it comes to my faves, I keep quiet.

Recently, though, I reread one of my favourite books, one of the few that’s seeped into my bloodstream. It’s not widely known or widely read, and to me, this seems a terrible omission. So I thought I’d defy my own good counsel, just this once, and review it here. Hopefully, I can persuade at least a couple of you to read it.

Surrender: a dangerous and beautiful bargain.

Surrender is a novel about a young boy made to bear an unbearable burden, and about the bargains he strikes to sustain himself.

Gabriel is 20 years old, and he is dying. Attended only by his Aunt Sarah, he lies in his childhood room immobile and subject to the dispiriting betrayals of a body he no longer controls. He describes his unnamed illness as a 'squalling usurper' and remarks, with a shard of black humour, that it makes even drawing breath an 'undertaking.'

Outside Gabriel's window is the small Australian town of Mulyan. There is nothing about the 'weft and fold' of the town, says Gabriel, that isn't familiar to him. Indeed, he can imagine the townsfolk, their respectful hush and the words they whisper: 'It won't be long now. They say he is dying.'

Australian author Sonya Hartnett splits Surrender down the middle, alternating the first-person narration of Gabriel with that of his childhood friend Finnigan, who still prowls the countryside, as elemental and ruthless as an old god. While Gabriel lies imprisoned in his bed, Finnigan watches as bones are discovered in an old grave on Mulyan's outskirts, a discovery that will propel him eventually, inevitably, back to Gabriel.

Each breath an act of valour.

The sun's blotted out, the trees are bare and burnt, and everything’s swathed in ashes. This is the setting of Cormac McCarthy's The Road – post-nuclear-war America, or at least what used to be America. What's left is a charnel house. Barren earth, ash-choked rivers, corpse-littered landscape.

The story starts several years after the apocalypse. Already everything’s slumped into horrific, gut-churning violence. Those unlucky enough to survive creep, starving, through a hellish landscape, hiding from the cannibals that stalk the countryside, and battling just to see the next day, and the next. Amid this panoply of horrors, the smallest act of endurance is the rawest act of bravery.

McCarthy’s protagonists are a father and his young son. (They’re never identified by name.) Cold and starving, they travel the road south, heading for the coast. They sleep huddled together beneath a tarpaulin or in derelict houses. They scavenge food wherever they can. The father coughs blood and clutches a pistol. Two bullets left.

Yeah, but...

In 1859 John Brown and 21 other abolitionists, including three of his sons, raided the munitions factory at Harper's Ferry. Brown intended Harper's Ferry to be the first salvo in a slave insurrection that would destroy the slaveholding American South. In the minds of many, Harper's Ferry precipitated the great conflagration that was the American Civil War.

In Cloudsplitter the story of John Brown is told by his third son, Owen Brown—the self-confessed betrayer of his father, his brothers, and his companions on that day in 1859. Cloudsplitter is Owen Brown's account of his father's implacable war against slavery; it is also Owen's expiation, his admission of guilt, and a document of his twisted love for his father.

There's a down side to being abducted and used for sex by strange women. No, really. There is.

A few weeks back I posted something about the novel I was reading: The Book of Revelation. In the interim I've been snowed under with work and, let me be honest, a shitload of internet surfing and other assorted fritterings of my life force. During this time – let's call it the 'World Cup hiatus' – The Book of Revelation has sat at my bedside unregarded. 

As chance would have it, on Friday I received an invite via Beat to a media screening of, you guessed it, The Book of Revelation. I hadn't even realised that it was being made into a film. Anyway, at the negligible cost of a 300-word film review, I'm going to watch it on Friday morning – provided, that is, I can brave the solariumed Chapel St hordes en route to the Como.

So with my latest indenturement (contract) at the salt mines (place of employment) completed, and the film of the book I haven't been reading beckoning, I sat my arse down in my beanbag and finished the fucker.

Bitterly disappointed, Hirohito returned his special Magic Criticism Deflecting Gown to the store.

Most people's impression of modern Japan is illuminated by the glow of Tokyo's inner-city technology district: the glamorous neon signs of Akihabara, or the outrageous fashion and impossible cool of Harajuku.

If it can be argued that the rise of technology has liberated information and communication from the hands of propagandists and the controllers of thought, why is it that in the world's capital for technological development there is a gag around the mouths of its citizenry when it comes to discussing the past?

World War II is a subject that cannot fail to arise when teaching adult students the English language. Japan is country that is still riven by the occupation after the war: a conflict between its traditional national identity and the forces of cultural imperialism.

The only certainty is there is nothing certain.

If uncertainty is a postmodern strategy, we notice that Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 constantly raises expectations that it refuses to fulfil. Discuss the ways this approach operates in the novel.

When Oedipa is discussing with Roseman the logistics involved in executing Pierce Inverarity's will, Roseman asks:
‘But aren't you even interested?'
‘In what?'
‘In what you might find out.'
As things developed, she was to have all manner of revelations.
(Pynchon, 2000, p.12)

She does indeed have revelations, but they only reveal further layers of a vast indecipherable mystery. There is an expectation that Oedipa will discover some ultimate meaningbehind Inverarity's estate, WASTE and the post horn and what seems to be the wizard behind the curtain: Tristero. But this never happens. What Pynchon does is use the promise of resolution as bait toget us through the book. As the novel unfolds (or folds in on itself) only more uncertainties are revealed.

There are many reasons for this. Mainly that Lot 49 is an allegory for America in the 1960s. It is a representation of the fads, the confusion, the paranoia, and the drugs that engulfed America in the 60s. Lot 49 , like the conspiracy theories surroundingthe assassination of JFK, underground terrorist groups the Weathermen, the Manson Family, the CIA and radical ideas on the consciousness expanding agendas of Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey, never really delivers all it promised.