The Passion According to G.H.
Clarice Lispector
[Penguin]
Clarice Lispector tends to get top billing for ‘looking like Marlene Dietrich and writing like Virginia Woolf’. The formula doesn’t just linger because it’s easy to remember: it is kept on so as to shelve a deeply troubling writer somewhere at the back between ‘feminist Theory canon’ and ‘exotic South American canon’. This Penguin reissue of The Passion According to G.H. – along with another four of her works – is an opportunity to get beyond the cosmetics. Here we see the clunkiness, the points where her words miss their target and show up the futility of comment. Too many readers focus on the light-show, when the prose is actually trying to burn itself out, to reach a ‘calm happy plenitude without fulminations’.
The book narrates the encounter between a middle-class housewife and a dying cockroach. This anonymous narrator has a horror of immateriality, to the point where she finds a consoling weight even in abstract concepts (Monday is ‘compact’; Thursday is ‘transparent like the wings of an insect in the light’). The dying cockroach’s materiality, it would seem, helps her accept her own second-by-second vanishing. So far, so Unbearable Lightness of Being. Indeed that comparison could extend to the oppressive political environment in which she is speaking: her sterile efficiency flat – which she never leaves – presents modernity as a kind of semi-chosen prison. But whereas Kundera writes from an essayistic altitude, far above the seethe of noise in his characters’ heads, Lispector tracks every inch of her speaker’s scurry of thought. Those moments when her prose ignites are things to be cherished. But if Lispector has a genius, it is her capacity to write on and on until the narrative voice exhausts its own fuel, thereby hinting at a territory beyond the text in which mere being happens on and on without comment. These reissues offer us an opportunity to pass through the cracks in Lispector’s style; to move out toward the cold, dark bordering on her sentences.
– Tim Smyth
What do you Desire?
Christian Lorentzen
[Notting Hill Editions]
n+1 is magazine of politics and culture founded in Brooklyn in 2004. What do you Desire? is volume II of its essayistic hits – among them, Philip Connors on his stint at the Wall Street Journal, Alice Gregory on ‘Sotheby girls’, and Nikil Saval decrying the awfulness of office space. According to Keith Gessen, one of the magazine’s founders, n+1 is ‘like Partisan Review, except not dead’. Partisan’s sympathy with Trotsky, the intellectual in exile, foreshadowed a cultural climate in which Gessen could make a ‘highbrow cameo’ on Gossip Girl (not quite Norman Mailer’s 2005 appearance on Gilmore Girls, but still). Insisting in 1938 that ‘truly independent creation cannot but be revolutionary’, Trotsky sent the American avant-garde into mourning for the factional.
n+1 emerged as a response to the dominant East Coast political and cultural climate before and after 9/11, but these essays sometimes fall into the coma from which they want to shake us. At worst, they seem an inventory of poses – Brooklyn gentrified in Frankfurt School drag. The anthology’s prevailing mood is of anticipatory nostalgia, the wish to turn life, via some counterfeit crisis, into a souvenir of the still non-existent past. Kristin Dombek’s ‘How to Quit’ is not a portrait of addiction but of being tamely adrift amid Oxycontin, acid, Jack Daniels and Bali Shag cigarettes. What’s harrowing about Dombek’s dalliance with a ‘cokehead chef’ is the mood of kisses ‘exactly on the edge of what’s already happened and what will happen next’: Schopenhauer said boredom was ‘tame longing without any particular object’.
Emily Witt’s title essay is a profile of San Francisco pornographer Princess Donna Dolore, a 30-year old dominatrix who stages fantasies of violent and public group sex. Feeling around the border of culture’s decorum, one is struck by the slightness of Witt’s tremor. The extremity of her topic reveals the impossibility of subject: the dumbness of knowledge, of cultural overkill. At their finest, these essays conflate faddish omniscience with having no consciousness at all. The hipster is a god and a marionette.
– Joanne O’Leary
All One Breath
John Burnside
[Cape Poetry]
In 1505, Albrecht Dürer painted the world’s greatest picture of a stag beetle. The little creature is so intricately done that it seems to strut confidently away from its maker. In crawling onto the cover of John Burnside’s latest collection, All One Breath, it also presides over a neat irony: unlike Dürer, Burnside refuses to provide us with ‘finished articles / of lithogravure’, or to plunder the natural world for ‘perfect specimens’. Instead, his poems dwell upon the infidelity of faithful images, and the necessary art of garbling them.
In his opening sequence, ‘Self Portrait As Funhouse Mirror’, he describes a formative encounter with his own reflection. In the warped buckling of the funhouse mirror, he finds himself twisted into a ‘squat intruder’, a ‘little criminal’. With real wit and ingenuity, the mirror conceit is itself stretched and reconfigured, as the trauma of having to look at oneself gradually expands into the mess of having to know oneself.
When Burnside turns to nature, however, he sees only a dark harmony of death and regeneration. There are dead animals at seemingly every step: he finds a dying goldfinch in the grass; he flees in terror from a rotting sheep; at one point he repeatedly loiters near a dead coyote because he is so moved by it. Here Burnside’s weakness is his lack of restraint. He tends to describe similar ideas in similar terms, and his brand of high solemnity can often topple into self-parody (‘if moths know anything of love // it has nothing to do with the beautiful doom / we long for’). Yet one cannot deny this collection its moments of brilliance. Perhaps its finest lyric is ‘At My Father’s Funeral’, in which the poet imagines the body of his abusive parent returning from the grave, ‘like that flaw in the sway of the world / where mastery fails / and a hinge in the mind / swings open’. It may not be as good as Dürer’s beetle, but contemporary lyric poetry is seldom better.
– Conor Leahy
Utopia or Bust
Benjamin Kunkel
[Verso]
With Utopia or Bust, it is tempting to read Benjamin Kunkel as an unexpected response to David Foster Wallace’s much-cited rallying cry for new literary types whose work affirms ‘single-entendre principles’. In his major novel, Indecision, Kunkel mapped the post-Gen-X trajectory from egoistic relativism towards a muddy – but genuinely expansive – advocacy of democratic social justice. Utopia or Bust sees Kunkel depart from fiction altogether, offering instead a series of thorough and earnest essays on the work of six key Marxian theorists: David Harvey, Fredric Jameson, Robert Brenner, David Graeber, Slavoj Zizek and Boris Groys. As in Indecision, Kunkel acknowledges idealistic social commitments as splayed, imperfect acts, constantly anticipating and investigating potential areas of naiveté and ineffectuality within these thinkers’ radical visions of collectivist economics.
Kunkel is a skilled exegete, his writing precise and thoughtful. The collection capably introduces several Marxian critiques of capitalism, moving through knotty concepts of financial spatio-temporality (Harvey), full employment (Brenner), and virtual credit (Graeber). But you can tell Kunkel is still most comfortable with cultural politics. The pieces on Jameson and Groys stand out as informed reflections on the tensions between vulgar and complex Marxism that flag the circular dangers of oversophisticated critical thinking. The essays in Utopia or Bust focus on capitalist crisis; the implied alternative communist utopia remains sketchy and evasive. Still, Kunkel’s gestures towards a society organized around structural ideals – rather than capital – are expedient, compelling, and occasionally deeply convincing.
– Gillian Moore
Journey to Karabakh
Aka Morchiladze
[Dalkey Archive Press]
Written and set in 1992 after paramilitary groups had overthrown the country’s first democratically elected president, Journey to Karabakh is narrated with myopic disaffection by a 24-year-old Tblisian called Gio. He falls platonically in love with Yana, who is made to disappear as a matter of course when his father discovers she is a prostitute: ‘In this great city of ours people care more about society’s rules than about a child’s life, or happiness, or the love between a girl and a boy.’ Gio’s narrative can be read as an unconscious response to entrapment. Between misogynist friends, an extortionist father and corrupt military rule, what escape is there if not through love? In all its infinite possibilities, fiction: allegorized here, in the romantic quest tradition, as an ill-fated trip to buy weed.
Replete with Lada, autistic savant best friend, automatic weapons, and an interchangeable cast of Azerbaijani and Armenian militiamen, the hero’s journey comes straight out of the Hollywood playbook, at times threatening to confirm the reader’s cardboard images of distant Eurasia. But as Gio grows increasingly alienated from reality, his narrative comes to underpin such regional clichés with a good dose of irony. Traumatized into a sort of enlightened hysteria, he enacts a blackly comic caricature of the very Georgian machismo implicitly critiqued throughout. In reading a Russian journalist take this facade at face value, we realise Journey to Karabakh has warned us against doing likewise.
-Jamie Leptien
The Dept. of Speculation
Jenny Offill
[Knopf]
This is an uneven novel about an uneven marriage, one that invites comparison with Adler and Hardwick just a little too persistently for its own good. Its form is one fracture, its tone of indirectness. New events are introduced after the fact: they are not described, merely reacted to. Half-way in, we switch quietly from first- to third-person narration. ‘I’ becomes ‘she’ becomes ‘the wife’ in this novel played out in and around the twin theatres of the subject and object pronoun. ‘Us? the wife thinks. Did he just say us?’ Offill has read her influences carefully and arrives at the page with instructions. (Remember: maintain a distant languidness of style; finish sad fragments with a short self-ironizing throwaway; quote learned lines elusively.) You sense she has the formula right, and yet The Dept. of Speculation fails, and it fails because Offill is not a good enough writer. There is no charisma to her languidness, nothing retained from her throwaways. She demonstrates little of the aphoristic sensibility one needs to operate within the novel’s fracturing; very few of her sentences surprise us at all. ‘Everyone there won’t do something,’ is about as close as we get; elsewhere, the text is strewn with cliché. ‘In Paris,’ we read, ‘even the subways are required to be beautiful.’ Granted, the comment is made from Brooklyn; but, on the page, no distance – not geographical, nor narrative – should be considered safe.
– Kevin Breathnach
