From Out Of The City
John Kelly
[Dalkey Archive Press]
Broadcaster and occasional harmonica player with Van Morrison, John Kelly’s latest novel is set in a Dublin of the near future, the capital of a decaying police state populated by crooks, perverts and double agents. Narrated by an omniscient geriatric called Monk, it is the story of the assassination of the US President on Irish soil, and the tangled lives of several surveilled characters implicated but seemingly uninvolved in the event. Monk’s frequent reminders that what we are reading is ‘the truth’ are accompanied by knowing references to his publisher’s perhaps contradictory insistence on a narrative payoff. It is in this manner (and others) that Kelly tends to set the limits of his form, acknowledge them and, then, not exceed them. His Ireland is ‘neither utopia or dystopia, but somewhere in between’ (note: it’s fairly clear-cut fascism). Upon being broken up with (‘You mean you’re leaving leaving?’), a character is said to be ‘disappointed with his lines’. Kelly gives us the sense that in describing prison walls, one has somehow escaped them.
The novel is not without moments of indubitable wit. At times it recalls Donleavy at his best. One character’s sordid online travails are described as ‘not so much surfing the net as drifting through it on a rotting, salty raft’; later, a bureaucratic police officer registers as ‘half man, half filing-cabinet’. But other characterisations – two ‘hookers’ ‘smiling like weasels’, ‘ratboy’ protestors, and a lesbian character referring to herself as a ‘vagitarian’ ― bear the creaking, clumsy chauvinism of Martin Amis at his very worst. This isn’t to deny the author’s prosaic flair. His narration, which seems to skip effortlessly from languid reminiscence to the abrupt and immediate, is shot through with well-executed, winking meta-fictional turns. It’s clear Kelly is having fun here; just it’s not the fun of a Dizzy Gillespie (one of many on-the-nose musical references dropped throughout the novel) exploring the very possibilities of jazz trumpet, but rather that of a John Kelly, say, playing the harmonica.
– OMH-Braz
The Unloved
Deborah Levy
[Penguin]
Based on the reviews alone, you’d be forgiven for thinking Swimming Home represented a radical departure for Deborah Levy. Her earlier works always got a mention, but never without the inference that they were the weird younger siblings of the popularly and critically acclaimed novel in question. The critics must have been covering their backs for previous neglect. Republished over twenty years after it was written, The Unloved places an international cast of prosperous tourists in a château in Rouen to celebrate Christmas. All of Deborah Levy is here. The narrative is constructed around the investigation of a murder, but its resolution is somehow incidental to the sadness, sexuality and violence with which every stunning sentence is charged. (‘What are the right words to describe the kind of torture she knows the ex-military man practises on his wife?’) Indeed, while the setting of Rouen suggests touristic homage to Flaubert, the gestures the text makes to the Sadean eroticism of Desclos’s The Story of O are much more profound, not to say graphic. The body is such an important unit in Levy’s work, forever at work to express latent psychological trauma. She is certainly no Cartesian.
‘The application of physical and psychological pain makes people less secretive,’ says Inspector Blanc regarding the interrogation techniques he used during the Algerian War. It is a troubling dictum, and Levy dutifully brings it to the page. She is cruel to her characters. She tortures them and they reveal their secrets – not to the group, but to the author, to the narrator, to us. (‘O’s mouth is open. Wide open.’) This confessional aspect is perhaps where The Unloved differs from Swimming Home, a novel threaded through with a hidden narrative that finds no expression until its catastrophic closing pages. Catastrophe is all foretold here. We are inside all the characters here. All of Deborah Levy is here – all except for certain silences.
– K-Braz
The Gorgeous Nothings
Emily Dickinson
[New Directions]
Edited by Marta Werner and Jen Bervin, The Gorgeous Nothings is a facsimile reproduction of Emily Dickinson’s ‘envelope poems’. Though casting discoloured 19th-century envelopes onto the blank eternity of the white page may seem to bleach them of their ephemeral charm, it is worth remembering that Dickinson’s poetry – and the loping calligraphy in which it survived – has always been of the souvenir, most of it hand-stitched into fascicles.
What remains is a strange geometry, one that composes and decomposes poetic space, reminding us that looking is always a blink. Sometimes the poems respect the borders of the envelope, tucking themselves between seams and folds; sometimes we skip across detached flaps and torn corners. How do things look upside down? What about backwards? Or when sound spars with elliptical eye, across the cut and reconstructed throats of envelopes? All these questions share a conceptual relationship with Dickinson’s aesthetics – with irony, with beauty, with the void.
Dickinson wrote over half her poems between 1861 and 1865. The later fragments prompt us to ask whether she came to distrust poetic closure, to prize the provisional instead? Or, more mundanely, did increased domestic responsibility prevent her from finalising her drafts? One wants to believe the former, but the more interesting question might be this: why tell so many stories about Emily Dickinson? What is it about her that seems to re-describe our own brokenness, or boundaries, as forms of knowledge?
– J-Braz
Echo’s Grove
Derek Mahon
[The Gallery Press]
There is almost no reason for this book to exist. Echo’s Grove is Derek Mahon’s third attempt in seven years at collecting his translations together, and although he insists that they are ‘almost like original poems’, he has gradually disbarred them from appearing in recent editions of his Collected Poems. And for good reason too – some of this stuff is very uneven. Too often there is an awkward laddishness in his diction: in Propertius we meet ‘some dickhead adept at sexy talk’, and we are told by Juvenal that ‘all anyone does now is fuck and shit’. This is probably Mahon’s idea of fun, but it still falls flat. At the other extreme, we see tags like ‘ancient fervour’ and ‘secret lore’ that would never cut it in his original compositions.
But the real problem with Echo’s Grove is the disservice it does to Mahon’s finest achievements as a translator. The austere lament of Ovid’s Ariadne, for instance, had once served as a beautiful overture to the ecological themes of Life on Earth (2008), but it is now disinfected of such a setting, and dutifully sits with other scraps of Ovid. Mahon’s Valéry is similarly yanked from the variegated seascapes of Harbour Lights (2005). The success of contemporary translation is so often contingent upon material contexts, but Echo’s Grove only serves as a sort of cemetery for its best work.
– C-Braz
Bio-Punk: Stories from the Far Side of Research
Ra Page (ed.)
[Comma Press]
The brief: fourteen authors produce short stories investigating potential effects of ongoing biological research, with a scientist writing an afterword to each story. The pitch: a ‘petri dish of fiction’, where writerly curiosity and scientific experimentation harmoniously blend to question, question, question. The concept is appealing, but the relationship often feels forced. Some afterwords come off as pedantic buzzkills. Others work nicely as essays, but are hampered by the need to rescue or politely pander to an off-the-mark story. Occasionally they click, illuminating and stretching the fiction’s reach, as with Simon Ing’s ‘The Wrestler’.
The writer/scientist friction is not always negative. The best stories gain momentum by jarring against accepted biological knowledge. Adam Marek, Annie Kirby and Sarah Schofield do well here, with genuinely compelling and provocative stories. Toby Litt’s engaging contribution meta-reflects upon typical snags in writing science: cringey terminology, laborious exposition, excessive drama. To judge by these criteria, the collection’s writing is uneven. The editor’s introduction, a capable sketch of the current bio-landscape, is sorely undermined by its dogged insistence on yoking together vaguely sciencey images with those of fiction-making. This lumpish strategy extends into the first story, and bizarre clichés reappear throughout. Perhaps it is unfair to judge this narrative brashness too harshly, though. As we are continually reminded, bio-research is disruptive, impactful and progressing rapidly. Perhaps the Quietly Literary is redundant here. Perhaps the shouty bio-punk voice is fiercely needed.
– G-Braz
Free City
João Almino
[Dalkey Archive Press]
João Almino’s fifth novel takes as its subject the construction of Brasília. It is not a tight novel. Paragraphs speed past with only commas to break them up. Speech and incident coil around one another without quotation marks; it is impossible to tell an event from the comment being made on it. This is Almino’s gift: by sacrificing superficial tightness, he creates something utterly mimetic of its subject-matter. Almino’s narrative avatar has begun a blog in order to resist the accusation of being ‘reactionary’ and to exorcise the ghost of his estranged father. While initially inviting the input of commenters, he soon starts suppressing any material running counter to his own version of events. He would prefer to tell the construction of Brasília as a picaresque loss-of-innocence story, Salman Rushdie-style, with the map of the city and the map of his own consciousness following each other’s lines exactly. Elisions and suppressions can never be complete though, and the narrator inadvertently reveals glimpses of the mass graves and police abuses on which his beloved city is built. Nor does its breathless pace allow for the satisfactions associated with the coming-of-age novel. By coding failure into its structuring principles, Free City points towards the moral failure at the foundations of the city it describes. To tell the story of a city which is not a city, one needs a novel which is not a novel: Almino’s text is precisely that novel.
– T-Braz
