39 Books: 2009

The further I get into this series, the fewer books there are on my yearly lists that I haven't already written about and among those few that I feel able to write about. For 2009 there is one outstanding exception: another book about a writer exiled in Paris. Already I've written about Anne Atik's memoir of her family's friendship with Samuel Beckett. This time it's Jean Daive's friendship with Paul Celan, published in this year by Burning Deck in Rosemarie Waldrop's translation. City Lights reissued Under the Dome in 2020.

Not that it has many other similarities to How It Was: the subjects' prodigous recall of poetry is one, their persistent enigma another. Where the latter has episodes in a clear chronology, concluding with Beckett's funeral, the former is fragmentary, oblique and non-linear: Celan burial is mentioned on page twelve and ten pages later Daive hears his name for the first time. Celan's disappearance and appearance recur. Anecdotes recur: the assertion that he will translate Daive's poetry, the lightbulb hanging low in a net shopping bag, hilarity at the words on the side of a passing van, God appearing as a ray of light under the door of a London hotel. The true picture of the past flits by, more than once.

Why do we live more forcefully in the hearts and minds of those who are close to us when we are dead rather than when we were alive?

Gabriel Josipovici's question in The Singer on the Shore is straightforward, at first, and then you notice that "we" are dead. How is this possible? You pick up a book like Under the Dome and the answer becomes clear.

39 Books: 2008

On January 19 of this year, I received a traumatic brain injury that for 16 years has limited my capacity to read. It was also the year I read two novels in which the legacy of violence presses on the form they take. Horacio Castellanos Moya's Senselessness spirals in Bernhardian sentences as the narrator responds in distress to having read testimonies of survivors of massacres in an unnamed central American country, while S. Yizhar's Khirbet Khizeh published in 1949, is a headlong account by an Israeli soldier taking part in the forced expulsion of Palestinians from their village. It helped me that both were short.

"True, it all happened a long time ago," it opens, "but it has haunted me ever since." The trouble with ghosts is that time has little meaning, so the narrator is unsure where to begin. He goes through the options only then to sweep doubts aside with Biblical expedience: "And so it happened...". David Shulman's Afterword provides examples of the original Hebrew's allusions to Biblical language and also reports that the novel was part of the Israeli high school curriculum from 1964, and was still an option in 2007. It was also dramatised for Israeli television and created a stir. Both make one wonder what the political value there is in a work that while, as Shulman says, "cuts right through the nationalist myth that ... blames everything unpalatable on the ever-available enemy" nevertheless has no effect on succeeding generations pursuing with remorseless violence the same policies of repression and ethnic cleansing.

The apparent futility of novels no matter how powerful or popular to alter the course of history reminds me of the successful Jewish writer in one of Aharon Appelfeld's novels set in 1930s Austria who, horrified at the racist mania of the culture, abandons his family and races off to Vienna to seek support for a new literary journal to engage with and counter the prevailing discourse. The futility is seen in retrospect of course, and we hear nothing of him again. Appelfeld is acute in his depiction of the delusions that take hold of people in the face of larger historical forces. The value of Appelfeld's depiction might then be counted in awareness of such delusions, which will no doubt share the same fate.

Not knowing where to begin a story offers evidence of the dissipation of time experienced in writing and reading novels, and thereby its remove from the ongoing world. That is, if we understand the novel as a by-product of the Enlightenment, of its disenchantment of the world, that nevertheless retains in its presence the residue of a relation to the eternal, to the outside of time, maybe even to the divine, and in doing so maintains an apocalyptic interruption of the everyday even and perhaps especially as the novel seeks to present it.

In When now? I discussed the issue of narrative temporality.

39 Books: 2007

When I chose the book for 2007, the constraint of the 39 Books series presented a problem: how can I write about a 350-page novel last read 17 years ago without taking several days to reread it? Answer: not at all, so I started reading. What good fortune! How well Hugo Wilcken tells the story and how pleasurably we are bound to it!

Colony opens a century ago in the bowels of a boat transporting newly convicted prisoners to a penal colony in French Guiana. It follows Sabir as dread of arrival and flashbacks from his past life merge. His crime is not given and, curiously, we don't care because of the anticipation of what's ahead.

Sabir wants to forget his previous life in France, but dreams won't let him. He plans to make a little money writing letters home for illiterate prisoners, but they gradually lose interest because "the colony absorbs you until there is no other world". Still, the fantasy of escape remains. One convict manages it by punching a jailer and stabbing a guard. Sabir imagines himself in his place but his reverie cannot extend beyond the thrust of the knife.

Meanwhile, we read Colony to escape from the world by reading a novel set in an exotic land and by becoming another. We read also because the world escapes us and we turn to novels to bring it closer. Colony is the constraint of a novel offering glimpses of escape, which is also itself. Sabir's experience is therefore the experience of reading a novel.

*

When Colony was published, my enthusiasm was picked up by fellow book blogger John Self who then promoted alongside Mark Thwaite of the now-defunct ReadySteadyBook to see how well blogs could improve the sales of "scandalously overlooked" novels such as this. According to Private Eye magazine, it didn't work very well and there were smug and bitchy comments about John and Mark by an anonymous figure. This confirmed to me that blogs had to challenge this country's relentlessly small-minded book culture rewarding corporate drones. Eventually I gave up responding to its cretinous discourse. However, John Self has long since abandoned his blog to become one of the better professional book reviewers and has unfollowed me on Twitter.

39 Books: 2006

My choice for 2003 began with indecision, as I couldn't imagine writing about Robert Antelme's The Human Race. Instead I wondered if I could say something about Timothy Hyman's Sienese Painting. While I have little or no feeling for art, I am drawn to reading about it. The book's focus is on the school of painters based in the city-republic between 1278 and 1477 who created what one critic called "an art born amidst city streets". And yet the book reports that in these two hundred years at least half of all commissioned paintings were images of the Madonna and "the development of Sienese painting could be told through her image alone". So while there was a cult of the city, which we can imagine happening in our own time, the sacred image remains alien. As art does not have any meaningful presence in civic life now despite earnest attempts at public art, the Sienese example is more evidence that the fate of art follows that of theology.

This may be why I have little or no feeling, as art with or without devotion is equally distant. That said, very occasionally such distance has come to life. The reason for the earliest instance is easily explained: in 1994 Don Van Vliet's exhibition Stand Up To Be Discontinued was shown at Brighton Art Gallery, just half a mile from where I lived, so it's memorable because the paintings were by Captain Beefheart. His titles were wonderful: Cross Poked Shadow of a Crow. 

Less easily explained is Andrzej Jackowski's Reveries of Dispossession shown in the same gallery later that year. I was moved without knowing why, or even knowing I was moved in the first place, by the size of each painting in comparison to the relatively sparse figurative content. There was something in particular about the wall of green in Hide and Seek.

Hide and Seek is 5ft x 5ft

Many years later I recognised similarities with when I turned around in the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery and nearly bumped into the plinth containing the Wilton Diptych, a devotional laptop with its walls of gold.

There are two others, both the size of dinner trays: Der Friedhofstor in the Bremen Kunsthalle and Winter Landscape in the Towner art gallery in Eastbourne, both by Caspar David Friedrich and both seen by chance and without expectation. Both also present apparent barriers to a church building, a gate and a mist; walls of a kind. 

Postcard of Der Friedhofstor

In 2006, I borrowed the large-format edition of Joseph Leo Koerner's Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape and in 2009 bought the compact second edition. Despite rational protest, looking at book reproductions provokes the same reaction as looking at paintings in galleries. The first image in the book is Trees and Bushes in the Snow from 1828: 

An unremarkable scene, as Koerner acknowledges:

Neither is it itself a superior specimen of a thicket, nor does it shape a space before itself which could be a setting for other, more remarkable, presences. The alders stand lifeless, their dull brown branches composed in random, broken configurations. The snow that highlights and surrounds the thicket is itself sullied variously by withered crab grass, clods of grey soil and dry leaves trapped since autumn among the alder stems. You do not stand before a ‘landscape’, since the thicket blocks any wider prospect of its setting; nor do the snow and alders, pushed up against the picture plane, quite constitute the monumentality of a ‘scene’, for they provide no habitat for an event.

The thicket is "pure foreground, like a net woven over an abyss", and yet the "tiny patch of pale blue sky at the upper right ... offers a vision of transcendence, hence the formal caesura between the detailed and mundane foreground (the finite) and the boundless, horizonless distance (the infinite)". 

 

About Winter Landscape, he writes:

Friedrich raises a spired building, a church, baseless and in pure silhouette, above the lost horizon. Rhyming visually with the grove that encloses the crucifix, and rising to precisely the height of the tallest fir, the structure of the church clarifies the symmetry and order of the natural world, both in this canvas and in all of Friedrich’s works where the holy is indicated as potentiality.

If the holy was for Friedrich lost in the horizon, today, never mind the holy, the horizon is lost. I sensed its loss in the final example. 

In the same exhibition at the Towner, I saw a painting by George Shaw, but one that was not from his series Scenes from the Passion, which I'd seen only online. They are small, acrylic depictions of the council estate in which he grew up, and have the same effect on me as Caspar David Friedrich's paintings. I am from the same generation and background as Shaw, and not Friedrich's, obviously, so perhaps that element can be played down if not discarded. But anyone who grew up in those times and from that background will recognise the brutalist school enclosures and hollow thud of footballs bouncing off garage doors.

The sash of sunlight in Ash Wednesday: 7am, 2004-5 is in the tradition of Trees and Bushes in the Snow and Winter Landscape, lacking only Friedrich's Rückenfigur, which in our case is perhaps the painting itself.

39 Books: 2005

Four years later, browsing in Waterstones, I picked a book from a table and read "What will we do to disappear?" – the epigram to Enrique Vila-Matas's novel Montano's Malady. It's a line taken from Maurice Blanchot's Infinite Conversation, so I had to buy it. Later that year, when as part of the Warwick Prize for Writing jury I championed the novel, another member complained that it was "writing about writing". Instead of correcting this to writing about not writing, I responded rather weakly by saying that writing is as much a part of life as anything else. I should have pointed out it was also part of the title for the prize.

Placing writing in the foreground is the reason why Vila-Matas has not won a literary prize in this country while winning almost every one on the European mainland, because literary prizes in this country are routinely awarded to happy recyclers, genre jugglers, barkers for bookshops, and handed to them by prize juries invariably loaded with centrist dullards who display their literary perspicacity to the world (well, The Guardian) by pointing to an author's genitals. British literature cannot and will not open the wound of the negative.

Anyway, this year's choice is not about writing but giving up writing. The narrator, Marcelo, says he wrote one book and then stopped writing until he began keeping a notebook of writers who stopped writing; "writers of the No", those who who, like Bartleby the Scrivener, develop "the negative impulse or attraction towards nothingness".

The incongruity of Enrique Vila-Matas writing about not writing is, of course, that he himself has never stopped writing. He has followed Marguerite Duras' advice given to him as a young man: "You must write, don’t do anything but write", advice she received from Raymond Queneau. However, the incongruity may be deceptive. In following the advice, Vila-Matas becomes a Bartleby himself, a copyist, but he is unusual in that he seeks a way out by witnessing himself acting within the history of the novel. He is aware that each generation has to find for itself the possibility of literature, hence the complaints from budding prize jury members, such as this reviewer who thinks the book should not be called a novel and "more like literary criticism". By writing about the condition of the copyist, he opens onto that empty space, that silence on the other side of writing into which Bartlebys disappear. One becomes a real writer by not writing, by not being "like" in Alice Oswald's sense. 

"It is well known that God keeps quiet, is a master of silence, hears all the pianos in the world, is a consummate writer of the No, and for that reason He is transcendent."

Vila-Matas' unofficial trilogy of Bartleby & Co, Montano's Malady, and Dublinesque may constitute a negative theology of literature, something of which I knew nothing in 2005 and only a little more now, though of course knowledge in this field is of questionable value.

39 Books: 2004

Bought for an eye-watering £13 in the LRB Bookshop three months before this blog began, Once Again for Thucydides is another example in this series of how a book of under 100 pages can be worth as much as any number of maximalist breeze blocks.

But do I really want to make such claims? Literature is not a cattle auction. If I leave the paragraph untouched, it is to let us sense in it the essential lack in the literary experience.

In what was Yugoslavia, a traveller stays in a hotel on the edge of a sink-hole "at the foot of which, Dante is said to have entered into the Inferno". Over eight pages, he describes his surroundings: the light, the noises, the architecture, people milling about a railway station, the natural landscape, with particular attention given to birds:

In the alley leading down to the sink-hole was a rooster with a glowworm in its beak. I freed the glowworm which sat stunned a while before finally raising its head. In a garden near the hole, a turkey in a wire cage raised its head in the same way. Then, finally, near the sea on this Sunday evening, a palm frond suddered like a thousand birds.       [Translated by Tess Lewis]

Another chapter focuses on the work of an elderly shoeshiner in Split, another notes the variety of hats worn by passers-by in Skopje. In Epopee of Loading a Cargo Ship there are four pages describing passengers and cargo waiting on the quayside in the hour before a ferry leaves Dubrovnik: "It was the setting for a Hamsun novel" the traveller says: "But how much more beautiful, real, and expansive that the scenery should unfold over the hour without being contained in a novel." Indeed. An epopee is an epic poem. Hence Thucydides; epics of the everyday.

If, as Blanchot says, Proust came to think of his novel as having the essence of a sphere engorged with the impurities of "novelistic density" in which the famous instants pass from the centre to the surface to reveal pure time in "joyful flashes of lightning", Handke removes the density and in doing so exposes us to a time outside of the human, to which we are nevertheless subject. Reading Once Again for Thucydides, the circumference of the sphere begins to dissolve.

39 Books: 2003

This year I read Robert Antelme's The Human Race for the first time. I was nonplussed. The strange title, closer to popular sociology than memoir, should have been a warning. This was not quite the horror story one imagines of memoirs from those who survived Nazi concentration camps, which are no doubt read with a certain kind of pleasure – not quite Schadenfreude but the least amount of pleasure given by any kind of leisure reading. In fact, it was rather tedious. This is why I put it on the shelf and didn't return to it for another nine years, by which time my copy had been affected by damp.

"I went outside to take a piss" is the very first line and, I would argue, outstanding, if we judge first lines not by whether it grabs our attention but whether it embodies the entire book. "A steam floated above the urinals at all hours", it continues. The basic human need and its presence as floating steam is a sign of the human race and how, as Antelme's narrative testifies, weakness and fragility is the foundation of community. The inmates are joined together by their fraternal incapacity; a help that doesn't help, to adapt Kafka's line.

Antelme was deported to Buchenwald as a French Resistance fighter and then transferred to Gandersheim work camp where there was no gas chamber and no crematorium. Tedium is therefore experienced as the moments of recognisable horror, or moments of reprieve from horror, are enfolded into the routine of everyday camp life, except the very last moment of horror, which the reader will not forget. I now think it's one of the most especial and valuable reading experience of these 39 years. Sarah Kofman called the book sublime.

There is a rich secondary literature on The Human Race, notably essays from Maurice Blanchot and Georges Perec, both collected in On Robert Antelme's The Human Race, and from Marguerite Duras in La Douleur, which includes a memoir of her husband's extraordinary repatriation and recovery. But digressions into other books is outside of the constraint of this series, so I want instead to think about the first lines of Antelme's Foreword:

During the first days after our return, I think we were all prey to a genuine delirium. We wanted at last to speak, to be heard. We were told that by itself our physical appearance was eloquent enough; but we had only just returned, with us we brought back our memory of our experience, an experience that was still very much alive, and we felt a frantic desire to describe it such as it had been.

Our return. Our experience. He speaks as one of many from within a harrowing solitude. But what if one has a need to speak, a wish to be heard, and yet nothing to say, no volume above zero, or that there is only one person to whom one feels the need to speak, but who is not there to hear? Might that be the beginning of literature, or rather its end?

39 Books: 2002

The quiet joy of short, constrained memoirs. I borrowed a copy of this book in 2002 and then found a copy in a remaindered shop for £5.

Anne Atik got to know Beckett in the late 1950s through the artist Avigdor Arikha, later her husband. Beckett's circle of friends included as many painters as writers. On their nights drinking on the Boulevard Montparnasse, the trio would try to avoid Giacometti because he repeated the same anecdote much too often. Beckett’s visual memory was striking, we’re told that "he remembered paintings of Old Masters … their composition and colour, the impact each one had had". The German Diaries arriving in September will no doubt confirm this.

But it was poetry that sustained their friendship. Despite the amount of alcohol consumed, Arikha and Beckett could recite reams of verse, generally in the original language: Yeats (usually 'The Tower'), Shakespeare, Goethe, Hölderlin, the Psalms ('the greatest poems in the world'), Dante, and many others. When the drinking was over and Beckett visited the couple’s flat of an evening, they’d listen to music and discuss writers. They would swap books. A page of Beckett’s copy of Le Rime di Messer Francesco Petrarca is reprinted to show the first owner’s annotation. Descriptions of his recitations indicate how much the poetry meant to him:

Sam did not dissect, define, analyse, deconstruct or elaborate on why he found a poem great. […] His impressions or reactions came through his body, […] he’d raise a hand or look at you intensely; or lift or lower his head when repeating the lines.

How It Was consists mostly of notes made after these special evenings with reflections. Anne Atik daren’t have made notes in his presence; it wasn’t that Beckett was irascible, she says, just that she respected him too much. Sometimes, however, there was nothing to note. He’d sit for hours without saying a word: "sinking into his private world with its demons, or so we imagined."

The large format of the book allows close-up study of letters and manuscripts by Beckett, as well as moving sketch portraits by Arikha. Beckett’s other life, the one upon which the couple didn’t intrude, appears only in reprints of postcards sent from abroad when he’s working on the production of a play, or from Tangiers escaping attention. The limited perspective allows us to enjoy Beckett’s company as he reads and talks about books: he thought Kafka’s prose "Hochdeutsch" when his subject "called for a more disjointed style". He didn’t like Rilke very much. He didn’t like Pound because he had been rude to him as a young writer. He thought Saul Bellow’s Herzog was "excellent" and loved Walter Jackson Bate’s biography of Samuel Johnson so much that begged to be allowed to keep Atik’s copy. More than once we’re told he thought King Lear couldn’t be staged and that he almost wrote a play based on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 71. He couldn’t get on with Bach or Jane Austen. It goes on.

Atik speculates that the certainties underpinning the worlds of Bach and Austen contribute to Beckett’s distaste. The work for them was too easy. Finding the form was all important. It shouldn’t be a given. From December 1977:

All writing is a sin against speechlessness. Trying to find a form for that silence. Only a few, Yeats, Goethe, those who lived for a long time, could go on to do it, but they had recourse to known forms and fictions. So one finds oneself going back to vielles competénces – how to escape that. [sic] One can never get over the fact, never rid oneself of the old dream of giving a form to speechlessness.

Later he concludes (without concluding):

The logical thing to do would be to look out of the window at the void. Mallarmé was near to it in the livre blanc. But one can’t get over one’s dream.

39 Books: 2001

In 1995 I found this hardback edition in the British History section of a Brighton bookshop six years after the French original was cited by Gabriel Josipovici as one of his books of the year: "a beautifully controlled examination of the effect on [Roubaud] of his wife's death and of the failure of his literary ambitions". I read it for the second time in 2001 and have gone on reading it ever since.

The bookshop worker who misshelved the book can be forgiven because The Great Fire of the London is not the correct title. It is the first 'branch' of a six-book series with The Great Fire of the London as the overall title. Only the first three have been translated. The proper cover title for the first branch is Destruction. For those who can read French, there is a combined edition of over 2,000 pages.

What concerns me here, though admittedly not at all back then, is the subtitle: "a story with interpolations and bifurcations". Throughout the main body of the novel there are pointers to entries placed toward the end of the book related to the current content. While I tend to ignore this and read one page after another, in the translator's Afterword, Dominic Di Bernardi says the book prefigures the "hypertext interactivity of web reading" and "their vast possibilities for the flexible interlinkage of written text, sound, and image", all of which offers "the necessary tools for a revolution in text-based culture". He explains that Roubaud was fascinated, along with other members of the OuLiPo group, with the possibility of escaping romantic notions of authorial mastery by creating "stories whose progress is strictly determined by a reader-user's choices between alternatives". Roubaud calls it "tree fiction". If his examples are medieval manuscripts, Di Bernardi lists more recent precursors: Borges' Garden of Forking Paths, Perec's Life: A User's Manual, Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch, Julián Ríos's Larva, two novels by Milorad Pavic, and Michel Butor's Boomerang. In English, we can add BS Johnson's The Unfortunates.

What this indicates, decades on from such projections into the digital wonderland in which we now frolic, is that any revolution in text-based culture has run into sand. Are such books still being written and published? No doubt there are online text-based works with an almost infinite number of routes through, around and within them via hyperlinked branches, but video games seem more suited to this and vastly more engaging. However, since the advent of e-readers, another possibility has emerged. My experience of using a tablet to read ebooks is that each individual work, no matter what genre – essay, novel, academic monograph, even poetry – disappears as a unique work, becoming indistinguishable from all the other files. One loses sight of the author's name first of all, then the title, and then what one had read previously, as the user-interface discourages the back and forth of paper, and then one loses sight of discrete works at all. Everything becomes a river out of which one cannot step.

This has prompted a longing for one of those large, hugely expensive tablets as a desire not to consume more but to take more control over what I consume. This reminded me that for all the convenience it has over a real book, an ink pen and a paper notebook, as well as in purely commercial terms given that the ebooks can often be downloaded for no cost, the form nevertheless appeals to the promise of value however cashed out: as escapism, social cachet, utile knowledge. This helped me to appreciate what Maurice Blanchot means at the beginning of The Infinite Conversation when he speaks of 'the absence of the book', by which he says does not mean developments in the audiovisual means of communication:

If one ceased publishing books in favor of communication by voice, image, or machine, this would in no way change the reality of what is called the "book"; on the contrary, language, like speech, would thereby affirm all the more its predominance and its certitude of a possible truth. In other words, the Book always indicates an order that submits to unity, a system of notions in which are affirmed the primacy of speech over writing, of thought over language, and the promise of a communication that would one day be immediate and transparent.  [Translated by Susan Hanson]

Instead he suggests we need to abandon these principles so that "we might go beyond, that is, to the limit, in order to attempt to break the circle, the circle of circles: the totality of the concepts that founds history" and in which "writing ... supposes a radical change of epoch" by going in a direction "in which it is not possible to maintain oneself alone". Roubaud's The Great Fire of London begins as a means of smothering grief, an abandonment of personal hope, destruction of the idea of literary achievement, but whose completion must always be held in abeyance.

For those interested, Dalkey Archive has a casebook in electronic form on The Great Fire of London apparently for free.

39 Books: 2000

In 1998 my friend John Harris mentioned that he was travelling to the US so I asked if he could pick up a copy of the new translation of Peter Handke's My Year in the No-man's Bay, not available over here. He was the first to tell me about this new website called Amazon. This is also how I bought this year's book.

If buying books not published in the UK had then the minor thrill of the exotic, it is now routine. Sometimes I buy the US edition even if there is a British one, such as when the British edition of Vila-Matas' Montano's Malady deleted a key word from the title. 

But now the routine is a problem, with highly recommended books, new and old, appearing on social media like a stampede of cupcakes. Even if the books are put through one's highly developed filter, it is still impossible to keep up, leading to bingeing or starvation reading patterns, equally unhappy. Reading Infernal Incipits: The Poetics of the New, the second chapter of Teodolinda Barolini's The Undivine Comedy, it's not difficult to regard this as the modern reader's contrapasso, the concept that a soul's punishment in Hell corresponds to the sin it committed on earth. 

The chapter is especially illuminating on Dante's invention of the terza rima rhyming scheme. She observes how it mimics the unceasing forward motion of the pilgrim's journey while also including recurrent backward glances, which means it also mimics our existence in time, our "essential middleness" between beginning and ending. Our desire, however, as experienced in sickening after the next book, and the one after that, and the pang of longing for the perceived joy of books read long ago, is precisely for some kind of beginning or end. Contrapasso becomes "less a theological device, as it is usually considered, than, in Dante's hands, a narrative stroke of genius" as the reader is driven to descend alongside the pilgrim to see who the next soul is and the diabolical punishment meted out to it. In this way we have an innate desire for newness and as such act like the damned in Canto 3 who have the paradoxical desire to cross the Acheron into Hell:

they are eager for the river crossing
because celestial justice spurs them on,
so that their fear is turned into desire.

Is our desire for the next book really fear instead; the fear of not keeping up? Proof may appear in the lamentably regular use on social media of "I confess, I haven't read [insert book title]". Perhaps we wish, albeit subconsciously, to be like the angels in Paradiso who:

since they first were gladdened by
the face of God, from which no thing is hidden,
have never turned their vision from that face,

so that their sight is never intercepted
by a new object, and they have no need
to recollect an interrupted concept.

Contra Borges, Heaven could be the absence of the book. However, Heaven could also be Hell: as Barolini points out, while for Dante on his journey there are ever new sufferers and sufferings, for the sinners it is "as for the angels, but for opposite reasons, and with opposite results – there is no difference, nothing is ever new."

Notes

1: I have written about Dante's Vita Nuova in what I like to think is one of the best posts on this blog: Dante on the Beach.

2: Columbia University's Digital Dante website is a remarkable resource, containing not only Teodolinda Barolini's commentary on the Commedia but also film of her Dante Course.

39 Books: 1999

I've always preferred the Serpent's Tail edition of Pessoa's Book of Disquiet over the others published around the same time, such as from Quartet Encounters and Carcanet, the latter with a fussy variant on the title: The Book of Disquietude. But this one is the most pleasurable to hold and read. It's curious how the production values of a book can affect one's experience of its content, or at least the perception of the experience. Isn't the first translation of a poem one reads always the one held deep within despite knowing better?

By the time I read this edition I had completed an MA in (what else?) Modern European Literature and was working full-time after abandoning a PhD. But fascination with the subject would never leave me and while I wrote a few essays and reviews for one of the early ezines, my reading was a desultory drift in spare time. In 100 Days, which partly inspired this 39 Books series, Gabriel Josipovici says he didn't feel cut out for writing the PhD he had begun, but much of the ideas for it were later incorporated into his first book of criticism The World and the Book. It would take a few years before I found my equivalent, albeit paltry in comparison. (Referring to Josipovici is relevant to The Book of Disquiet, as you'll see.)

Despite my preference for this edition, I cannot find the passage that opens the one edited by Richard Zenith and which Pessoa had marked 'opening passage':

I was born in a time when the majority of young people had lost faith in God, for the same reason their elders had had it – without knowing why.

Replace 'God' with 'Literature' and the condition I found myself in between abandoning working towards recognised and socially valuable qualifications and casting around during the evenings and weekends begins to make sense. Did I read such books without knowing why? Yes, indeed, as the agitated partisanship of my early work displays. The self-conscious despair and self-pity of Bernardo Soares would then have naturally appealed, dovetailing with a distracted, haphazard intellectual life. 

Against the universal acclaim it has received, Gabriel Josipovici is a dissenting voice on The Book of Disquiet. In his TLS review of the Penguin edition in 2001, he says "while I recognize Pessoa's greatness as a poet" and despite The Book of Disquiet displaying all of the themes of his greatest poetry – "a concern with solitude, with anonymity, with boredom, with the dreamlike nature of life" – all we find here is "Pessoa the solitary and depressive individual".

Unfinished works, or works whose authors felt would have to be released into the world despite their failure to find an adequate form for them, abound in Romantic and post-Romantic literature, from Keats's Hyperion to Schoenberg's Moses und Aron, from Kafka's Castle to Wittgenstein's Investigations. All are fascinating and magnificent works, in spite or perhaps because of their lack of completion. So what is it that makes The Book of Disquiet so unlike these works?

One answer, he believes, is the book's lack of shape. The works such as those mentioned above "have always given the readers the sense that their incompleteness was their shape, that the struggle to build a mighty cathedral, followed by the acceptance that all we had was a ruin, was somehow what they were about" while Pessoa/Soares "seems curiously satisfied with its fragmentary status, curiously uninterested in reaching out for more".

In his book-length study, Thomas Cousineau's also compares the book to other fragmentary or unfinished greats by using one of Pessoa's poems, as written by one of his famous heteronyms, in which a vase lies shattered on the ground:

What is most striking [in the poem] is the way that an initial impression of loss...coexists with the implication that the dropping of the vase has led not only to loss but also to a reshaping of space into a pattern. [...] What had hitherto been just an ordinary vase has now—thanks to its being “smashed into more pieces than there was china in the vase”—become the scattered parts of a sheltering pattern. [...] We may think of The Book itself as also having resulted from a comparable kind of shattering.

But he then notes that Pessoa "frequently stressed the fundamental importance of construction to the value of a literary work. He claimed, for example, that the structure of the Pindaric Ode is not merely a literary convention, but, rather, an axiom of the human spirit". We might see doubts about the book's incompletion more generally in the very number of editions with their own selections and organisations, culminating in 2017 with the sumptuous The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition, also published by Serpent's Tail, with its handsome cover and cloth bookmark. Without knowing why, we still value the intact vase above all.

39 Books: 1998

I said I'd come back to "not writing". 

A few months ago I watched Unstuck in Time, a long but captivating documentary on the life of Kurt Vonnegut and his friendship with the film's maker, Robert Weide. In his final years, Vonnegut moved to the country and stopped writing. His neighbour was the novelist John Irving who said first thing in the morning he'd often find Vonnegut sat on his porch. He claimed to have been there for only a few minutes, but numerous dog-ends on the slats at his feet suggested otherwise. Weide asks: "What happens when a writer stops writing?"

The question had been on my mind long before I heard it asked, prompted by wondering what Maurice Blanchot did when he stopped writing, at least stopped writing for publication. He died in 2003 after living quietly in this location, as discovered by the poet David Wheatley.

For a writer who was heavily involved in Parisian journalism before the war, then writing for many years in solitude and isolation in a stone cottage in the medieval village of Èze, and in the late fifties back in Paris to oppose the rule of Charles de Gaulle, becoming an anonymous force in the May '68 revolt, it seems unlikely that he would stop. But if he wrote anything new and unpublished, it wasn't found after he died among the manuscripts of previous works "salvaged from a rubbish bin" after his death. 

When Philip Roth announced that he would write no more, I felt that partly explained why I never valued his work, as it suggests a literary professional at work rather than those I valued who wrote as an existential necessity: "as long as I live I live writing" as Thomas Bernhard said. No doubt this is an overly romantic demand. The book for this year reveals that the opposite – the need not to write – can also be an imperative.

After Jorge Semprun was liberated from the Buchenwald concentration camp he stopped working on the book he was trying to write because "the two things I had thought would bind me to life – writing, pleasure – were instead what estranged me from it, day after day, constantly returning me to the memory of death". To remain alive, he had to stop: "while writing depends on memory, staying alive can depend on forgetting."

Written much later, Ecriture ou la vie is the narrative describing his liberation, which would be more faithfully translated as Writing or Life. It crashes forward like waves crawling up a beach only to be drawn back by the undertow of terrible memories. 

One of the happier ones comes soon after liberation when he bonds with an American soldier over their shared love of German literature who then uses his authority to insist on a private tour of the Goethehaus in nearby Weimar. The elderly guardian is very unhappy with their presence and talks proudly of showing the Führer around the building. The soldier shoves him up against a wall and locks him out so they can continue in peace. Going back to my entry for 1989, I wonder if the old man was the father of Grete Kirchner, Kafka's brief infatuation 33 years before. It's a remarkable possibility.

Of course, Kafka is another example of someone who felt an existential need to write but who also questioned its value. Unlike Vonnegut and Roth, however, he never stopped writing. So, to ask again: "What happens when a writer stops writing?". The question hangs before us like fog over the edge of a cliff. The writer is the one who runs.

39 Books: 1997

I found this ghastly 60-page Grove Press hardback edition in a second-hand bookshop, its large typeface and generous spacing very similar to Beckett's late works (Barbara Bray, Beckett's translator, also translated this). Such productions are rare now, and perhaps were when it was published in 1986. Fitzcarraldo's edition of Jon Fosse's A Shining and Carcanet's edition of Gabriel Josipovici's Everything Passes, both under 60 pages, are notable exceptions.

With such short works the reader is naturally suspicious, naturally perceiving a lack, as if the weight of pages and density of typeface promise a fulfilment these spare productions proleptically withdraw. It may then be appropriate that the story of The Malady of Death is that of a man, an unidentified 'you' addressed by the narration, seeking to end a lack by paying an unidentified woman (declared not to be a sex worker) to sleep in a bed in his presence.

You say you want to try, for several days perhaps.
Perhaps for several weeks.
Perhaps even for your whole life.
Try what? she asks.
Loving, you answer.

The narration proceeds from there, in a circle, around the bed. This is a cold echo of the Albertine Asleep passage in The Captive in which Marcel watches his mistress in bed and in that state realises the possibility of love as he no longer needed to live on the surface of himself. In Duras's novel, the woman says love for him is an impossibility. He asks why she accepted his deal. She says it's because she saw he was suffering from the malady of death. 

You ask: Why is the malady of death fatal? She answers: Because whoever has it doesn't know he's a carrier, of death. And also because he's likely to die without any life to die to, and without even knowing that's what he's doing.

I recognised that the inability to feel even the deprivation of life also follows another famous work, though it was only later through Maurice Blanchot's chapter on the novel in The Unavowable Community that I learned Duras had translated and staged the story, Henry James' The Beast in the Jungle. John Marcher tells May Bartram that the deepest thing within him was "the sense of being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible", which turns out to be standing over May's grave. The escape from the beast would have been to love her: "No passion had ever touched him, for this was what passion meant."

We read these three stories, so very different from one another in form and style, in the same way, from afar. It would be straightforward to stand back further and write essays about sexual politics, of repression and otherness using these works as examples, and The Malady of Death in particular given its overt focus on sexuality, and yet in its anonymity, the univeralism of the address to 'you', each one of us is implicated, removed from passion, seeking what is outside of us in the work. As readers each one of us is the one "to whom nothing on earth was to have happened". We are all Marcherites now.

39 Books: 1996

It's a commonplace that in reading novels one can escape the ravages of time. In 1994, I borrowed my student housemate's innocent-looking hardback edition of Nicholson Baker's The Fermata in which Arno Strine writes about how he can actually stop time. The title refers to the sign in music scores, as seen on the cover, indicating "a pause of unspecified length on a note or rest".

What he does with the superpower divided critical opinion, with Victoria Glendinning calling it "a repellent book" and another an "unlikely masterpiece" (I side with the latter). Adam Mars-Jones was his usual considered self with his criticism of the treatment of Baker's theme, which he says is "the innocence of male sexual desire", which must be the reason for my housemate's purchase, as he has made a significant career out of the psychology of mating. 

Two years later, I bought a second-hand paperback with the cover quote "The funniest book about sex ever written". While this is the obvious 'about', I did wonder why nobody had noted that it was also a metafiction on the ethics of fiction as an artefact of the imagination.* Freud said the imagination doesn't know 'no' and, in the 'fold', neither does Arno Strine. We tend to think of fiction as 'exploring' a subject and ethics arises as  as immanent to fiction: the questioning of Paul West's choice in The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg to describe the execution of those who plotted to assassinate Hitler, as discussed in JM Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello, or Karl Ove Knausgaard violating the privacy of his family in his autofictional series. But what The Fermata does is something very different: the imagination is embodied in a plot device and becomes real without being realistic; it is beyond realism. This would explain why Adam Mars-Jones complains that is a "protracted refusal to engage with sexual consequence" and why "Baker almost takes pride in elaborating his theme more or less indefinitely, without actually exploring it". The book is the embodiment of the theme and we inhabit it.

Twenty-eight years later, writing this series means I don't have time to read again all 303 pages of The Fermata, and while that may appear to be a cop-out, I am reminded of the fuss I make about titles – see the entries for 1985 and 1986 – and how we often remember the titles of novels without remembering much of the detail and instead hold in our memory not a detail but the idea of the work, its unexposed kernal, promised by the overt content.

* Incidentally, I had a similarly solitary reaction to Robert Altman's 1993 film Short Cuts, which I remember talking about as we walked out of the Duke of York's in Brighton, going through each separate 'cut' noting the evidence of how they were all underlined by the same theme, and yet never heard the same analysis anywhere else.

39 Books: 1995

Looking over the list of books read over a decade, it becomes clear that each book came too early or too late, or not at all; unless, of course, not yet. Untimely medications. Of the first, Robert Pinget's Be Brave applies. Again, lightness rather than heaviness, when there was hope, the illusion thereof. All too early.

Pinget was a friend of Beckett's who, in their correspondence, told him "Don't lose heart, plug yourself into despair and sing it for us". Be Brave was published in French soon after Beckett's death, and then a few years later in a translation by Barbara Wright by Red Dust of New York alongside Théo or the New Era. Together they add up to 62 pages. Be Brave is divided into 138 numbered entries in a notebook kept by Monsieur Songe (Mr Dream) as a commentary on his struggles with writing something substantial. The book exists on the threshold before its birth:

33

Possible development.
No more table, no more bed, no more house.
A street corner. Deserted. It's Sunday.
He's sitting on the ground, huddled up against a wall.
Someone passes by and gives him a couple of sous.
A conversation starts up.
A conversation starts up...
Come on, be brave...

Kafka said he life was a hesitation before birth, which in The Judgement becomes a death. Monsieur  Songe and his creator is aware of the paradox.

117

In the end he himself will become the worm that feeds on his carcass.
Could be said more elegantly, but elegance in this case...

Things improve when he remembers previous 'deaths' in the echoes of the plot of The Inquistory, Pinget's 400-page, punctuation-free question and answer novel (a paperback I own but have read only part because, again, it was too soon, too late, or perhaps, at least I hope, not yet. But what does it mean for a book to be on time? How do we know why, or even if, a book has any meaning or worth for us, and if that meaning or worth is not merely an epiphenomenon determined by the fleeting circumstances of our self-absorbed day that we project back onto the book?).

There is despair in Be Brave, but also singing. But that is said too soon; this is not clutching public approval from the jaws of private grief. Perhaps singing depends on despair, and so despair is released into the world within the Trojan Horse of singing, and silence would therefore be ideal. "Could there be a muse of silence?" Monsieur Songe wonders. If there is, he realises, it is a game lost in advance.

39 Books: 1994

Given that my undergraduate degree was in Philosophy, it may seem odd that this the first book of philosophy in the series. Many will say it is not a book of philosophy at all. That would explain why I gorged on Nick Land's The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism because it was the polar opposite to the guidebook on the syllabus, which we had to buy for an excruciating £13. Looking into Jonathan Dancy's Introduction to Contemporary Epistemology (I'm hesitant to call it reading) I knew philosophy wasn't for me.

Things were made more difficult because the associated literary modules suggested to me that I had no real interest in Literature either, apart from one anyway. Rereading the book thirty years on has been painfully instructive even if I still revel in the fevered departure from the po-faced poise of academic prose. As Nick Land says of critical distance: "it is remarkable how degraded a discourse can become when it is marked by the obsessive reiteration of the abstract ego, mixing arrogance with pallid humility."

There is not a single sentence [in this book] which is other than a gratuitousness and a confusion; a cry at least half lamed and smothered in irony. Each appeal that is made to the name ‘Bataille’ shudders between a pretension and a joke. Bataille. I know nothing about him. His obsessions disturb me, his ignorances numb me, I find his thought incomprehensible, the abrasion of his writing shears uselessly across my inarticulacy. In response I mumble, as a resistance to anxiety, maddening myself with words. Locked in a cell with my own hollow ravings…but at least it is not that…(and even now I lie)…

The echoes of Dostoevsky's underground man are unmistakable (and I wrote about other echoes of Dostoevsky's underground man in contemporary literature only recently). The pain comes from recognising the dilettantism of my reading then and how I missed the direction I could have taken much earlier had I followed the clues.

The heart of literature is the death of God, the violent absence of the good, and thus of everything that protects, consolidates, or guarantees the interests of the individual personality. The death of God is the ultimate transgression, the release of humanity from itself, back into the blind infernal extravagance of the sun.

The book also raises the issue of secondary literature. The distinction between genres is clear: there is literature and there are books about literature. But where is the border between one and the other? How does one cross it, or, perhaps instead, how does one not cross it?

39 Books: 1993

I've written about Gert Hofmann's novels a few times, most recently Veilchenfeld (Our Philosopher in the US edition), but not his short stories. In the year Hofmann died aged only 62, I bought and read Balzac's Horse and other stories in the wonderful Minerva paperback imprint. They confused and disappointed me. Later, I lost the book along with many others.

On a whim last year I searched for a replacement copy and found the Secker & Warburg hardback was cheaper than the paperback. As soon as I read the first few lines the confusion and disappointment was turned on myself; how could I have been so wrong, so ignorant? The reason I felt so differently in 1993 is the same reason for my confusion and disappointment seven years earlier reading other Faber-published novels that didn't have the weight and philosophical perspective of the one that instigated this deep dive into reading: Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being. I was looking for heaviness and Hofmann is lightness; "limpid, neutral, hyperrealist" in Ian Bamford's words. The second story in the collection – 'Casanova and the Extra' – is a Burlesque companion to The Judgement.

An advert for Minerva paperbacks from 1990. Hofmann's Parable of the Blind at bottom left, Peter Handke's great novel Repetition on the row above. Those were the days.

Even after a stroke at aged 57, brought on, his son Michael says, by writing a novel each year for ten years, Hofmann didn't stop writing. He was unable to read and edited his final novel verbally, responding to drafts read aloud by his wife. 

Not writing is the condition of the two writers in 'Arno', the fifth story in Balzac's Horse. The title character has given up writing "from inside" and turned to writing an obituary of his new neighbour, an elderly poet, Herr Quasener, and imagines him sitting in the dark at the back of his room with his life's work, which, according to the local librarian, is no longer in demand: "Nobody here...still buys literary works or thinks about them, everyone despises them or ignores them." 

The story ends with Arno and his mother peering into the darkness of the neighbour's room wondering if Herr Quasener has died, in effect delaying the end of 'literary works' with the obituary waiting in Arno's bottom drawer and the story suggesting otherwise by its mere existence. Wallace Stevens observed a similar thing: "Yet the absence of the imagination had / Itself to be imagined." As did Maurice Blanchot: "Not to write—what a long way there is to go before arriving at that point, and it is never sure." And, already cited, Franz Kafka: "I am a writer, which is actually true even when I am not writing."

I will come back to "not writing".

39 Books: 1992

Poetry is a notable absence in my book lists. I assumed at this time that because novels excited my attention, poetry should do too. Under this assumption I bought and read Wallace Stevens' Collected Poems in this chunky Faber edition, adding an ugly plastic cover.*

Many of Stevens' lines still go around my head like song lyrics – slogans from an inert revolution – and there are many I reread in the glorious Collected Poetry & Prose edition published by the Library of America, but poetry is a foreign language I read without the inwardness of a native. A sign of this appeared when, in my student years, I detected something Heideggerian in Stevens' poetry and was smug when subsequently I discovered Frank Kermode's essay Dwelling Poetically in Connecticut.

Always this movement away. I am drawn to what others write about poetry – Geoffrey Hartman's essay on Wordsworth was a highlight last year – just as I like reading art criticism without having a great interest in looking at the paintings themselves. Perhaps it is the longue durée of narrative that I miss, which would explain why Dante is a major exception. This year was also the first time I read the whole of the Divine Comedy, as I took a course studying it after we'd read through the Odyssey, and the Aeneid.** 

A preference for long-form narrative would not explain why Paul Celan's poetry is also an exception. Except I think there is a connection between Dante's expansion and Celan's compression. It is not novels I am drawn to but those works that push literature to its limits, and not merely for the sake of it, as I suspect many Anglophone so-called experimental novelists do, in which length and complexity are assumed to be an unquestionable good, but those that subject writing to what is outside its generic boundaries. My distance from poetry is then an intolerance of generic safety; that old story. This may also explain why I am drawn to metafiction, itself an intolerable genre.

* My father did his engineering apprenticeship at a company that built steam engines. It was called Wallis & Steevens. No doubt he made notes towards a supreme traction...

** Alongside me in this tutorial group was someone who later became very famous in the UK and in his first TV appearance mentioned reading classical poetry. Unfortunately, I can't find the clip.