Literary Review, April


Posted April 1, 2014 in Arts and Culture, Print

Screen Shot 2014-03-31 at 11.33.49 PM

 

Leaving the Sea
Ben Marcus
[Granta]

Flannery O’Connor once lamented the contemporary reader’s demand for ‘Instant Uplift’. Ben Marcus extends this critique to contemporary writers, who are ‘desperate to please us’ with their fiction. Accordingly, the fifteen stories of Marcus’s second collection are commanding, demanding, bafflingly funny – and certainly not pleasant. Rather than up-lifting, these pieces spiral downwards. Set in underground caves, in the submerged innards of a cruise liner, in the sinking awareness of our own coffins ‘slipping into holes’, the narratives are marked by a distrust of altitude and an urgent plea for depth. There is release, sometimes ecstatic release, in the bizarre hilarity of it all. Marcus often delivers wry and vividly sharp observational writing, calling out the world’s ‘shtick’, and signaling the risible absurdity humming above human desires, expectations and relationships. Intimacy entails soul-hardening compromise and inevitable ‘bulldogs of resentment’. Dark laughter may well be the only appropriate response.

Leaving the Sea finds Marcus relentlessly investigating what it means to participate in the human community. In ‘What Have You Done?’, the reader never discovers Paul’s deeds; only that those around him flinch, considering him incapable of functional human citizenship. Meanwhile, Marcus’s other protagonists often seek escape from their misshapen social fabrics. ‘Fear The Morning’, ‘The Moors’, and ‘I Can Say Many Nice Things’ all turn on a self-effacing desire ‘to be finally, once and for all, counted out’. Marcus continually defamiliarizes speech acts—presented as the crux of community building—and his trademark interest in what he calls ‘hyper-authoritative’ forms of language is present throughout. Last words, Q&As and advertising jargon sit alongside an abstract, lyrical ‘languageflower’ that both withers and blooms. The linguistic texture here is glorious. Words, thoughts and sensations become force-fields (‘feverishly quilted’) that hover ominously around the isolated bodies they cloak. Whatever redemption Marcus has kneaded into his work is difficult and desperate. The collection is masterful: raging yet considered. O’Connor’s dreaded Insta-Uplift is nowhere to be seen.

– Gillian Moore

 

Screen Shot 2014-03-31 at 11.34.26 PM

 

Impromtus: Selected Poems
Gottfried Benn (tr. Michael Hofmann)
[Faber]

Gottfried Benn (1886-1956) was a nasty piece of work. When Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, Benn welcomed the Third Reich as ‘a new vision of the birth of man’, and mocked his exiled contemporaries as ‘amateurs of civilisation’. He had hoped fascism would lead to the final marriage of art and power, but the Nazis got sick of him after a while. Bertolt Brecht called him a slime ball. And yet Benn was the most accomplished German poet since Rilke – a fact which Michael Hofmann is keen to impress upon us in this timely selection of translations.

A venereologist and clinician by trade, Benn’s pet topic was the ‘dribble of rot’. In his 1912 poem, ‘Beautiful Youth’, a team of morticians cuts open a young girl’s chest only to expose a nest of newborn rats. This gruesome brand of burlesque won’t be to everyone’s taste, but Benn certainly masters our revulsion. In another early work, we see a morgue attendant stealing a gold filling from the jaw of a cadaver, since ‘only clay should revert to clay’. This studied sense of nihilism – a ‘mixture of death and laughter’ – quietly matures throughout Benn’s career into the spectral and assimilative strength of his later work.

The monologues of the ‘40s and ‘50s are impressionistic, enigmatic – at times even tender. Hofmann’s fine flexibility as a translator preserves the richness of tone and the variety of detail that gives these works their power: ‘Schafsbröckel’ becomes the wonderful ‘daggy sheep’, while ‘Krötengewächs’ becomes ‘blebbed growth’. Where Hofmann errs, however, is his introduction. He styles Benn’s stint with National Socialism as an ‘anomalous’ interlude, and describes those who dwell upon it as ‘lazy and a little hysterical’. But the consistent and unrepentant fascism that marked Benn’s character is as crucial to an understanding of his work as it is for Pound, for Marinetti, or for Heidegger. If this vicious connoisseur of decay is to become a meaningful presence in English, he must not be domesticated.

– Conor Leahy

 

Screen Shot 2014-03-31 at 11.34.58 PM

 

Midnight in Mexico
Alfredo Corchado
[Penguin Press]

Alfredo Corchado’s pitch for this memoir was famously made for him: ‘He’s Roberto Bolaño, except he’s real’. This is misleading. Corchado’s courage as a border reporter is more impressive than Bolaño’s imaginative courage. Midnight in Mexico takes as its cue from the moment in 2007 when he was told he had 24 hours to leave Mexico or face the consequences. Like Bolaño, his eye is trained unstintingly on the horror of Mexico’s battles with itself. But Corchado does not let the horror blur into nightmare montage. For him, the lurid images and anecdotes are the crest of a wave of material causes. Media overexposure has rendered the individuals – and individual atrocities – of the drug war anonymous. Corchado’s compassion restores humanity and tragedy to our sense of the conflict. He trains his journalistic lens on his own life growing up on both sides of the border. His focus never strays from the economic phenomena that dictated the course of this life, making for an autobiographical treatment which is intimate without vanishing into the purely personal. Corchado saves his compassion for others and, in doing so, gives us a sense of what is worth saving in Mexico. His forceful vision bares the conditions not just for horror but for hope. His hope is not the belief that things will work out for the best but the conviction that they must: real hope, in other words, one that has exacted a full look at the worst.

– Tim Smyth

 

Screen Shot 2014-03-31 at 11.36.37 PM

 

Things to Make and Break

May-Lan Tan
[CB Editions]

Things to Make and Break is a difficult book to situate in both literary and geographical terms. Comprised of eleven stories that move between London and Los Angeles, Hong Kong and who-knows-where, the collection is all told in a tone of blank and deliberate disaffection which, though mostly well-worked, sometimes struggles to carry the text’s more heightened, surrealistic passages. Identities are forever in flux, so intermittently aligned. In ‘Candy Glass’, a transgender stuntwoman leaves LA and the lover for whom she is also double in an attempt to settle down in a small town and live ‘as a woman’, ‘where nobody knows’. She even plans to get a husband. If this desire to tie oneself down into tradition is not exactly par for the course here, the condition of disposability and drift from which the desire arises certainly is. The names are androgynous, most parents are absent, and in ‘Legendary’ the narrator’s boyfriend keeps naked photographs of ex-girlfriends in a manila envelope marked ‘tax papers’. Things to Make and Break is a discreet economy of surfaces. ‘I have no depth perception,’ notes one character. ‘Everything just looks flat.’ Skin is the most important semiotic space in these stories. Scabs are picked and scars persist. Characters get on with the quiet business of being quietly anguished.

– Kevin Breathnach

 

Screen Shot 2014-03-31 at 11.36.14 PM

 

Traveling Sprinkler
Nicholson Baker
[Blue Rider Press]

The poet Paul Chowder, first introduced in Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist, is in a curious position. Although his anthology was warmly received, the experience has soured his taste for writing poetry. Besides: ‘Nobody wants to read more than three books of poems by anyone.’ In the follow-up, Traveling Sprinkler, we find Chowder swapping Swinburne for manufactured beats and provocative song lyrics.

Through Chowder, Baker delivers many diverting and insightful observations on music. There are times, though, when all this theorising feels more like lecture notes than anything integral to the story itself. Reviews have called Sprinkler unfocused and without plot, and there is some basis to these claims. Chowder’s musical career, his dalliance with cigars and his ex-girlfriend’s women troubles all feel incidental and random; there is none of the ordering conflict that an annoyed editor’s emails represented in The Anthologist.  But these theoretical squirts of Chowder are imitative of the titular irrigation system – imitative of real life, in fact. In an interview Baker explains how this is something the form of a novel is uniquely suited to: it can hold these disparate parts together, in the same way a scattered human mind can. By recording ‘the best moment of your day’ – advice Chowder gives to a poetry class in The Anthologist – Chowder is left asking if Traveling Sprinkler ‘is in fact a book, and I think it is’.

– Eoin Tierney

  

Screen Shot 2014-03-31 at 11.35.30 PM

 

The View From the Train: Cities & Other Landscapes
Patrick Keiller
[Verso]

Just as the protagonist of Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil arrives in Tokyo by slumberous ferry, so the narrator of London, the first of Patrick Keiller’s feature film-essays, returns to the city on a cruise liner. Keiller wears his influences well and without reservation. In this collection of thirteen essays published between 1982 and 2011, he constantly revisits the same figures – Aragon, Lefebvre, Wordsworth, Poe – in an attempt to develop what he calls ‘the transformative potential of images of landscape’. He is good on the production and ideological function of certain spaces. He argues convincingly that Britain is much wealthier than its dilapidated landscape has been made to suggest. ‘People whose everyday experience is of decayed surroundings,’ he continues, ‘are more inclined to accept that there might be less money for schools and hospitals.’ Without the gently weary voice of the late-Paul Scofield, though, Keiller’s writing comes off sounding quite a bit worse. In ‘Film as Spatial Critique’, for instance, he notes that ‘film from the past that depicts urban and other architectural space of its time can offer an implicit critique of similar spaces of the present’. In the same way, Keiller’s elegant and elegiac films offer an implicit critique of his surprisingly workmanlike prose. He has no idea how to end an essay, and his arguments are often weakened by too-long lists of supporting evidence. Still, Keiller remains an interesting and important thinker nonetheless. He is perhaps more relevant today than ever. The View From the Train ain’t pretty, but it’s important we look all the same.

– Kevin Breathnach

NEWSLETTER

The key to the city. Straight to your inbox. Sign up for our newsletter.

SEARCH

National Museum 2024 – English

NEWSLETTER

The key to the city. Straight to your inbox. Sign up for our newsletter.