Books of the year 2024

In order of being read.

Giorgio Agamben – What I saw, heard, learned…

One night, along Venice’s Zattere, watching the putrid water lap at the city’s foundations, I saw that we exist solely in the intermittence of our being, and that what we call I is just a shadow continuously bidding farewell and saying hello, barely mindful of its own dissipation. All the machinery of our body serves solely to provide that break, that inversion of breath in which dwells the I—the intercessor of its own absence, unforgettable, neither living nor speaking, but the only reason we’re given life and language.   [Translated by Alta L. Price]

This book has 72 pages. On each of the first 61 there is a single paragraph. Reading them in sequence is like springing from stone to stone to cross a river. Sometimes one gives way. 

The final 11 pages have a negative version of the title and whose content is comparable to Blanchot's A Primal Scene? in The Writing of the Disaster.

Holly Langstaff – Art and Technology in Maurice Blanchot

The unprepossessing title disguises a brilliant and beautifully written analysis of the subject, and perhaps timely given the step-change in Artificial Intelligence currently wiping out sources of income (including my own). What I learned is that Blanchot's vision of literature is much more radical than I had previously allowed, no doubt enchanted by the romanticism of Blanchot's keywords without facing up to their implications, all due to an unyielding humanism. He may have welcomed the AI-generated novel because it undoes instrumentality and exposes us to "the abyssal non-foundation of art" in which we might find "something profoundly affirmative ... where nothing is predetermined, neither by an all-powerful God nor by the teleological progress of history".

In February, I wrote about AI-generated poetry as criticised by Alice Oswald.

Wade Davis – Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest

There are hundreds of pages in this book telling the story of a generation of amateur mountaineers in the years before, during and after Great War that have a resonance similar to Max Aue's fictionalised account of the Babi Yar massacre in Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones. The reader also enters into the silence.

Thomas Bernhard – Gargoyles

At the midpoint of the year I became seriously jaded with reading. Everything was routine and a chore. I bought books assuming the author and subject matter would guarantee the old spark of new life, only to set them aside after a handful of pages. They piled up like a gambling debt. Then, in desultory scanning of bookshelves, I picked out Bernhard's second novel. It had never been a favourite but I hadn't read it for many years and fancied bathing in Prince Saurau's speech that usurps the novel halfway through (the novel should be reissued with a better translation of the German title Verstörung. I suggest 'Disturbance', in part to refer to the Prince's state of mind). Before that speech arrived, however, it became one of my favourite novels of all time (why do people use that stupid phrase?), and not just of Bernhard's, which are among the best novels of all time. Someone on Twitter puts it well: "Though his style got more refined, the melancholy and poetry of his earlier works were never matched again, not even by him." Soon after, I would read a book that helped me to appreciate why melancholy and poetry sparked new life. But first, something completely different.


Nicholas Rooney – Talking to the Wolf: the Alexander Dugin Interviews

Alexander Dugin's reputation goes before him and I began to read these interviews as a means of bypassing received opinion. Once started, I didn't stop. There are over 500 pages covering philosophy, theology and politics. His focus in theology is often on the need for a relation to eternity:

The distance between us and eternity is growing and it demands more and more effort in our life in order to return to eternity. So we go out of eternity and fall. Time is a kind of radical sin and not a kind of progress; it’s something completely opposite. We should make time something other than it is, and that is precisely why when Christ was baptised the river Jordan went in the opposite direction. So that is precisely what we need to do. We need a kind of revolution of time. We need to direct time in the opposite direction.

Eternity is also a topic for Tancredo Pavone in Gabriel Josipovici's interview-novel Infinity in which the composer speaks a fusion of profundity and bullshit. Whether 'also' should appear in that sentence is up to the reader of these conversations to decide. The question must be why I enjoyed them almost as much as Gargoyles (so not completely different after all). When Dugin turns to politics, his deeply conservative opinions do not preclude proposals for a multipolar world order. This was unexpected and hopeful, which must be why he is demonised by the unipolar West.

William Franke – Dante’s Vita nuova and the New Testament: Hermeneutics and the Poetics of Revelation

Some years ago Lee Rourke, a fellow scourge of Establishment Literary Fiction, identified the default mode of the contemporary novel as 'lyrical humanism'. As he has written for the New Humanist, I assumed this was because lyricism appeals to a residual irrational and thereby religious inclination in secular society and, contra Mallarmé, he seeks to purge literary language of anything beyond functional utility. I may have assumed too much, but reading Bernhard's Gargoyles and especially Prince Saurau's gloriously disconsolate aria, I realised that I am travelling in the opposite direction. This is not a religious turn but faithfulness to an experience that cannot be recorded by a chronicle of facts. For Dante the experience was the incarnation of eternity in time in the form of Beatrice, conveyable only in lyric. William Franke's book helped to appreciate the prose 'explanations' in the Vita Nuova alternating with the lyrics were necessary to avoid the latter becoming absorbed by a literary and rhetorical tradition rather than the voice of an individual seeking to convey a unique vision. In this way the Vita Nuova becomes a contemporary gospel, risking blasphemy in doing so. Prince Saurau's speech may be its recurrence in a secular time, hence its paradoxical glory.

I have written before about the Vita Nuova in Dante on the Beach.

Gabriel Josipovici – A Winter in Zürau and Partita

I wrote about this two-book edition in October, so all there is to do here is to reiterate the gift of the first part is its case for formal adventure in writing and of the second its enactment. It is one Josipovici has made throughout his career, but never with such focus. He makes clear that what distinguishes Kafka is that his experimentation in the Bohemian countryside was not a means to impress critics, not a noodling with sentences, not playing with genre, but a means of relating to "ultimate things" borne on a deeply felt existential anxiety.

Mark Bowles – All My Precious Madness

The blurb I contributed to this wonderful novel is deceptive in that Mark Bowles is like Thomas Bernhard only in the narrator Henry Nash's exultant anger with the social and political conditions in which we live – more or less unheard of in the British novel – and the triangular relationships, as set out by Thomas Cousineau in his book on Bernhard, in the form of Nash himself, his father and Cahun, the ghastly representative of the professional managerial class. It may be described as the Bildungsroman of a Critical Theorist, only with the rebarbative prose of that movement replaced by luxurious sentences, something else he has in common with the great Austrian.