Amis rivals Dickens

The Sharp Side points out the weakness in Ronan Bennett's otherwise welcome response to Martin Amis' non-literary opinions. It takes issue when Bennett commends Ian McEwan's "truthful, moving and humbling" words about the human imagination.

But McEwan's point of view ... also illustrated the limitations of anguished humanism. The hijackers were bad people because they did not consider the humanity of the people they killed. The same criticism could be made of the RAF pilots who drop bombs on Iraq and Afghanistan, but you would never find McEwan making it.

Indeed, and look what happens to public figures who do make it. The Sharp Side ends with a (to me) shocking revelation about Charles Dickens's response the Indian mutiny. Again, Kafka is proved right to recognise "a heartlessness behind [Dickens'] sentimentally overflowing style".

A Kafka challenge

The quotation below is apparently from Kafka. But I can't find it.

If it could have been otherwise it would have been otherwise.

Does anyone out there know where it comes from? Please either leave a comment or email me (at the address just above the blogroll below). Many thanks in advance.

Into the unknown

Foolishly, he'd assumed he'd get a job at Saint-Laurent as a gardener. Such stupid faith in your hopes and dreams is one of the dangers of prison life. The past is dead, the future stolen away, the present an endless desert - so you retreat into a fantasy world, where finally you're in control. Among the lifers he's known, Sabir has seen the syndrome time and time again. You lose yourself in grandiose plans, unrealisable dreams, until life becomes a mirage. And escape can be the worst dream of all.

Of course, it's ironic that, as we read of Sabir's realism about escape from a South American prison colony, we are ourselves seeking a form of escape. The novel is the dream.

Hugo Wilcken's Colony is a compelling flight into the unknown. In this it has the same relentless quality as Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Yet, unlike that novel, Colony also begins to unravel the dream.


By using what might be, in other hands, a generic tale of prison life and intrigue between guards and inmates, Wilcken has dramatised - Beckett-like - the threat lurking within the uncanny power of storytelling. It's a terrific read.

I had wanted to write a full review because the novel deserves attention, but that would involve outlining the plot. While this usually isn't a problem with the books I tend to review, in this case it might spoil your own discovery. So instead, just read it.

I will write more about this novel in the distant future.

Handke update

FSG is to reissue Michael Roloff's 1972 translation of Peter Handke's The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick. That novel was made into a film and, should anyone be casting for a biopic, I've just noticed the ideal candidate to play the author.

For the record, I read less than half of Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, the most recent novel to be translated, before giving up. I hope the as-yet-untranslated and, above all, shorter novels he's published since counters the career trajectory Ellis Sharp recognises in other fine writers, because "excruciating tosh" is about right in this case.

Everything comes good

The excellent new blog Scarecrow Comment ("Literature can never be the same for me again") and the more established Tales from the Reading Room ("It was quite the most extraordinary piece of writing I had encountered in a long time") have both just read my favourite fiction of last year.

UPDATE: The latter has now posted a fuller appreciation.

Much thicker in the middle

Toby Lichtig reviews Adam Thirlwell's new novel Miss Herbert and apparently quotes the author's description: "It has recurring characters; with a theme, and variations . . . It just has no plot, no fiction, and no finale." "In other words" says Lichtig "it is a book of literary criticism, which makes us wonder why Thirlwell couldn't come right out and say it."

I write "apparently quotes" because, from Philip Hensher's review, it's clear that the novel is full of such statements:

Thirlwell's manner is full of phatic gestures, ones intended to announce an approaching weightiness that never quite arrives. "To begin again, at the beginning." "In my opinion that is enough." "This book is about…" (repeatedly). Over and over again we are told, by a writer perhaps too young to remember Anne Elk, that "I have a theory…"

Yet, if it is classed as a novel, statements like these become problematic; one can attribute them to the narrator, yet not so readily to the author. In novels, the author cannot come right out and say anything without immediately having it taken away by the novel. This theory does not belong to me.

Beyond painting

Painting lives only through the slide towards the unknown in oneself.

My pictures are also an annihilation.

I am a watered down being.

I am on the side of weakness.

The artist has no role. He is absent.

Painting doesn’t interest me.

I paint the impossibility of painting.

What I paint is beyond painting.





Spurious posts a selection of lines spoken by Bram van Velde (1895-1981) taken from this remarkable and genuinely sad book.

Bard celebrates Blanchot

On the evening of Thursday, November 15th, the French Studies Program at Bard College in the Hudson Valley (two hours north of New York City) presents an evening to celebrate the centenary of Maurice Blanchot.

Beginning at 7pm with "A Brief Introduction to Maurice Blanchot" by Éric Trudel, the programme of events includes George Quasha on publishing Blanchot in America, Pierre Joris reading from his translation of The Unavowable Community (a new edition would be nice guys!), Charlotte Mandell reading from her translation of A Voice from Elsewhere and the poet Robert Kelly reading P. Adams Sitney's essay On Blanchot.

In intervals between readings, Bard's Conservatory of Music will provided music referenced in A Voice from Elsewhere: some Schumann and a movement from Messiaen's Quatuor pour la fin du temps.