His Books of the Year

This is the part of a books of the year entry you don’t read because you’re scanning to find the titles this writer has chosen. You haven't noticed his name but you'll check it once your own good judgement has been confirmed.

The first is Karl O. Knausgaard’s My Struggle, a popular one this year – you’ve registered the title already because he was chosen in that other list in that other place by that other guy – who was it? Visceral realism blah scandal in Norway blah full of profound insights blah. Oh look, there are the names of Marcel Proust and Thomas Bernhard again, the authors Knausgaard is already being compared to, neither of which you’ve read, though you keep meaning to. It makes you feel alienated and demoralised. Look, there are so many translations and editions of Proust to choose from. What was the title again? And which Thomas Bernhard novel is a good place to start?

You see there are still three paragraphs to go and you’re thinking: enough with the summaries already! You relax a little because the next choice is Enrique Vila-Matas’ Dublinesque. The title is so warm and attractive. You see that it’s set around Bloomsday, which is something you’ve wanted to attend for years. Admittedly, you tried and failed to read Ulysses for a university course, but you prefer Radio 4’s dramatisation because it cut through all the verbiage and made the book accessible. Anyway, the novel is about Dublin isn’t it? That should be enough. You had a city break there a few years back and had such a good time in the pubs. Everyone is so friendly! But what’s that he’s saying? It’s about the end of the Gutenberg Era, the end of literature as we know it? What nonsense: has he seen my shelf of Ian Rankin first editions?

You skip the third paragraph because he’s chosen Quentin Meillassoux’s The Number and the Siren, a book by a French philosopher about a French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, specifically his poem Un Coup de Dés, which you’ve never heard of let alone read. It’s in French! What if it is a revelation and not what you might expect – a momentous study of the place and meaning of poetry in post-religious society? That’s just pretentious.

The final paragraph intrigues you and is the only one that you read in full because it is the shortest and the chooser is obviously passionate about Infinity: The Story of a Moment, Gabriel Josipovici’s novel based on the life of a real composer. That sounds more your kind of thing: you like biographies.

"But why call it a novel?"

In August 1987 I cycled to a small seaside town near to my own to check its small library. These were the days when shelves lined with free-to-borrow books arose like the New World. The image is of a bright western sky. On the fiction shelves was a pristine hardback of VS Naipaul’s novel The Enigma of Arrival, published only weeks before. I had not read Naipaul and the book attracted me, perhaps only because its black spine shined new. The object seemed enough in itself. But I did read all its 318 pages and have never forgotten Naipaul’s evocation of walks over the Wiltshire countryside around Stonehenge – not because the narrative is effusive or eventful but because it is so restrained. The narrator is seen only at an oblique angle, like the Rückenfigur in one of Caspar David Friedrich's landscapes. Wanting to find out how others responded I looked for reviews and found one in a now long-defunct magazine:

[Naipaul] makes us aware that most writing hurries much too much, and so misses what is essential: that nothing seems to alter, yet everything is in flux. Though this is a book almost without incident it catches unforgettably the transformation of rural England in our time. [...] It is a moving and beautiful piece of work, unlike any other book I know.

These lines corroborated my innocent enthusiasm and helped me to recognise and articulate what I had experienced. However, the review ends with a question I hadn’t considered: “But why call it a novel?”
Last month I considered it for the first time.

With no patience for any new novel, I reread The Enigma of Arrival and the response was the same, although Naipaul’s delicate self-exposure was far more impressive and moving this time round and darkened by a better appreciation that death is the motif of his story. In 1987 I had followed Naipaul, twenty-five years later I walked beside him.

Death is also the motif of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, which I read earlier this year with equivalent pleasure and perhaps the cause of Naipaul's novel floating back into my memory. The title of the British edition – A Death in the Family – makes the motif explicit. Both books are overtly autobiographical and rely on the life of the writer to infuse their narratives with authority, an authority that itself relies on a unique encounter with time, existence and non-existence. This suggests such authority has been depleted, perhaps because fiction relies too heavily on distance. What these books possess in contrast is a pressing proximity. A novel is anchored on generic safe ground even as the writer’s imagination flies high or plumbs the depths, but now that ground is loose and barren. So why is Naipaul’s novel subtitled “A novel in five sections” and the Norwegian and German editions of My Struggle labelled a novel?

Constable cloud study, 1822

There are clear differences in each author's approach, suggesting a lack of generic clarity, which is not given to autobiography but is familiar to the novel form. Where Naipaul's focus is on his journey from colonial province to imperial centre in classic bildungsroman fashion, Knausgaard is more concerned with the density of the moment, and where Naipaul is selective and respectful in his exposure of himself and others, never mentioning that his cottage has another occupant, his wife, or that the landlord he refers to throughout is the legendary Stephen Tennant, Knausgaard is famously inclusive. “[He] seems unable to leave anything out,” James Wood complained, quoting a novella-length description of a New Year’s Eve party: “After a few hundred pages of this, I started to grumble: I understood that this was ‘My Struggle,’ but did it also have to be my struggle?” He soon turns around and acknowledges that “the banality is so extreme that it turns into its opposite, and becomes distinctive, curious in its radical transparency”.

The need for totality that brings pages about playing the guitar, about drinking tea, about wearing his Doc Martens and listening to his Walkman [...] also brings superb, lingering, celestial passages, like the one in which Knausgaard cannot sleep, and paces his apartment.

This is the insomniac passage I quote in my comparatively feeble review and is worth returning to. It also returns us to the similarities with Naipaul. Knausgaard is moved to tears by a cloud formation he sees in a book of Constable’s paintings:

I kept flicking back to the picture of the greenish clouds, every time it called forth the same emotions in me. It was as if two different forms of reflection rose and fell in my consciousness, one with its thoughts and reasoning, the other with its feelings and impressions, which, even though they were juxtaposed, excluded each other’s insights. It was a fantastic picture, it filled me with all the feelings that fantastic pictures do, but when I had to explain why, what constituted the “fantastic,” I was at a loss to do so.

The picture made my insides tremble, but for what? The picture filled me with longing, but for what? There were plenty of clouds around. There were plenty of colors around. There were enough particular historical moments. There were also plenty of combinations of all three. Contemporary art, in other words, the art which in principle ought to be of relevance to me, did not consider the feelings a work of art generated as valuable. Feelings were of inferior value, or perhaps even an undesirable by-product, a kind of waste product, or at best, malleable material, open to manipulation. Naturalistic depictions of reality had no value either, but were viewed as naïve and a stage of development that had been superseded long ago. There was not much meaning left in that. But the moment I focused my gaze on the painting again all my reasoning vanished in the surge of energy and beauty that arose in me. Yes, yes, yes, I heard. That’s where it is. That’s where I have to go. But what was it I had said yes to? Where was it I had to go? (trans. by Don Bartlett)

This experience relates back to the beginning of the book in the narrator’s childhood, when watching a news report he sees a face in the sea. He rushes to tell the nearest person, his father, who says: “Don’t give it another thought”. Now you the reader becomes the author’s nearest person and you might respond in the same way as the father or, like me, suffer an intense identification.

This latter division is probably key to the original question: why call it a novel? The experience Knausgaard describes is both very personal and fascinatingly impersonal; that is, it draws attention and resists accommodation in narrative whether autobiographical or fictional because it is what is promised by narrative or what underlies it. The lengthy descriptions of the everyday in My Struggle become necessary to frame the urgency of the questions he puts to himself, much as the longueurs of Proust's In Search of Lost Time are necessary to enable the magical phenomena of time's absence. The indulgence and disruption of habit is a constant in both. My Struggle rides high on such experiences, of which Constable's cloud study is the incarnation; profound or prosaic yet always promising or threatening a climatic event or revelation. This is why both Knausgaard and Proust differ from generic autobiography and novel: they are witnesses.

Naipaul himself ascribes the beginnings of his novel to a painting by Giorgio de Chirico called The Enigma of Arrival:

I felt that in an indirect, poetical way the title referred to something in my own experience. [...] The scene is of desolation and mystery: it speaks of the mystery of arrival. [...] And in the winter gray of the manor grounds in Wiltshire, in those first four days of mist and rain, when so little was clear to me, an idea—floating lightly above the book I was working on—came to me of a story I might one day write about that scene in the Chirico picture.

Later he expands on the content of that narrative – a man on a journey to a Mediterranean city in classical times, although he didn’t think of it as an historical story “but more as a free ride of the imagination” – and explains why it never got written. It occurred to him that the story was “an attempt to find a story for, to give coherence to, a dream or nightmare” in which he was living through his own death. This is negative equivalent of Knausgaard's bewildered affirmation before the clouds.

A dream is much like a painting in that it consists entirely of resemblance. A self-portrait is the self as experienced in a dream: oneself and another, impossible to reconcile and infinitely beguiling; an eternally evanescent memory. Yet to write out a description of a painting is not only futile but as crushingly dull as telling the story of a dream. It can never be the thing itself, the experience which makes it essential to the self is impossible to convey; “A sponge, suffering because it cannot saturate itself" as Milosz wrote, "a river, suffering because reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees”.

For the writer, whether positive or negative, the encounter demands a response. He becomes a writer to respond. Naipaul’s resort to autobiographical material in The Enigma of Arrival was characterised by Salman Rushdie as a failure of strength for fiction, to which Naipaul replied with brahminical disdain: “I think it is possible that talent has moved to other things and that real writing is occurring elsewhere, rather than in novels. You have to be very clear about the material that possesses you, and you’ve got to find the correct form for it.”

But what if that form is not open? Robert Lowell’s famous poem Epilogue comes as you would expect at the end of the confessional volume Day by Day in which his experience of manic depression is laid bare, a fact which troubles him. He asks two rhetorical questions:

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?

Before the second question appears, he compares his poetry to a garish photographic snapshot in contrast to a painter’s eye that “trembles to caress the light”. Something imagined in writing, however, is “paralyzed by fact”.  

Yet why not say what happened?

Until I re-read the poem today I had assumed this line was Lowell's decisive call for “life writing”, for attention to be paid to the everyday rather than, as it seems now, a reluctant concession, an admission of defeat. In writing of what happened one must only “Pray for the grace of accuracy / Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination”. Reading yet again, however, the comparison with the visual arts seems to express less the poet’s anxiety over the superiority of imagination than over writing itself; even if he were to produce the most exquisite work of the imagination, it would be a failure. Indeed, by referring to the “poet’s anxiety” and by reproducing paintings here I confirm this fallen state.

Paintings can of course be appreciated by anyone with vision. Whether it is a surreal harbour scene or bucolic landscape, each painting is merely there: a unique object in the world. There is no fact or fiction to decipher: a painting merely is. An abstract painting does not provoke impatience in the same way as a so-called experimental novel does precisely because it is before the viewer in the same arena as a classical landscape. The dynamic relationship of the object to what it ostensibly represents or expresses is the encounter we displace only by means of the polite discourse lamented by Knausgaard.

By contrast, the poem or novel is immediately assumed to be the voice of one standing before the world, between us and its world; it is already a part of that polite discourse. As a poem, Epilogue is removed a priori from the relation enjoyed by painting; the process of understanding and interpretation is not only the foreground, it is the poem itself. (We might maintain with Eliot that “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood” but that merely begs the question.)

What recommends itself then is silence or denial, and the latter does indeed constitute the bulk of literary output: the willed infantilism of popular fiction, the prissy connoisseurship of fine prose in literary fiction, and the po-faced empiricism of reality hunger. Each is after the Lord Mayor’s Show of television, film and print journalism, such that “crime novels can be used to analyse shifts in society” is recommended without irony.

Silence has less of a profile of course, but it is present. It’s present in the 800 pages of the two books discussed here. What distinguishes them from other famous novelists’ autobiographical excursions – JM Coetzee’s Scenes from Provincial Life and Thomas Bernhard’s Gathering Evidence being two outstanding examples – is a fascination with moments that resist narrative and a preoccupation with finding a way to make them present in narrative; moments experienced before paintings, in music, in a walkable landscapes and, in Knausgaard's case, even in a TV news report. But not in writing. Writing in fact dilutes these moments – much as a metaphor dilutes – presenting to the writer not only a paradoxical inspiration but a destructive one. The task for the writer then isn’t a matter of genre but of rinsing genre. 

The common assumption in literary reception is that the novel is the noise of mastery, a story well-told and constructed with craft and good judgement. In public we can affirm this of any given work as we know others will understand as a public does. A recent example is Peter Stothard’s speech recommending a genre novel to win what used to be a literary prize. Except the encounter with a novel, a short story or a poem is not a public experience but one of solitude and silence. Hence the violence of corralling reviews, good and bad, hence the popularity of book clubs, hence the national obsession with prizes. There is a need to mitigate or sublimate seclusion, rarely to explore. What I found that day of blue, empty sky and VS Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival and this summer with Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle were such explorations, attempts to open onto the space that makes narrative possible, the singularities that inscribe themselves on a life and agitate a certain enchantment, opening the past as much as the present and future, yet which cannot be made present to the work itself. For this reason, I would answer both books are more novels than most novels, willing as they are to listen to the silence.

On his back in the dark: Winter Journal by Paul Auster

A “self-indulgent, ill-conceived, and poorly-edited disaster” is how J. Robert Lennon sums up Paul Auster’s companion piece to The Invention of Solitude from 1982, that remarkable book comprising two brief biographical pieces by a novelist still to make his name, in contrast to the new book which is, (Lennon again), “a rambling, informal collection of memories, musings, and minutiae” written by a prolific, internationally renowned bestselling author. It has to be said that Lennon’s review of Winter Journal is entirely fair and utterly misses the value of the book.

You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to you, that you are the only person in the world to whom none of these things will ever happen, and then, one by one, they all begin to happen to you, in the same way they happen to everyone else.

Winter Journal begins in the manner of the two earlier with a general statement, a valedictory welcome as it were, the first on the random event of death – his father’s – the second on the passing of the moment – his own:

He lays out a piece of paper on the table before him and writes these words with his pen. It was. It will never be again.

Actually, more than that: The Book of Memory – part two of The Invention of Solitude – is written in the third person as if to mark the passing of the moment against the guile of memoir. By becoming “He” and later “A.”, Auster enacts the implications of the statement. We can see how the peculiarity of his profession, which then included translation, prefigures the fiction he will go on to write.

Every book is an image of solitude. It is a tangible object that one can pick up, put down, open, and close, and its words represent many months, if not years, of one man’s solitude, so that with each word one reads in a book one might say to himself that he is confronting a particle of that solitude. A man sits alone in a room and writes. Whether the book speaks of loneliness or companionship, it is necessarily a product of solitude. A. sits down in his room to translate another man’s book, and it is as though he were entering that man’s solitude and making it his own. But surely that is impossible. For once a solitude has been breached, once a solitude has been taken on by another, it is no longer solitude, but a kind of companionship. Even though there is only one man in the room, there are two. A. imagines himself as a kind of ghost of that other man, who is both there and not there, and whose book is both the same and not the same as the one he is translating.

Auster writes Winter Journal in the second person and so becomes his own translator – his own ghost writer, the second man reasserting the solitude of the subject; a kind of paranormal activity we recognise from Oracle Night when Sidney Orr disappears into his study with the blue notebook and breaks his writer’s block. The proliferation of interrelated stories and digressions and the fascination with the act of writing are undoubtedly the most distinctive features of Auster’s fiction, the former attracting wide appreciation, the latter perhaps allowed as a concession to Auster’s European inheritance (The Invention of Solitude contains extracts from his translation of Mallarmé’s A Tomb for Anatole and Blanchot’s fiction; equivalents of which are disappointingly lacking in Winter Journal, the most notable memory of France here being an affair with a prostitute). The focus on the everyday and corporeal of which Lennon labels self-indulgent is then a necessary recourse for the ghost, however uncomfortable and unliterary it is.

“You would like to know who you are” Auster writes as a question to both ghost and subject, with only the latter able to reveal himself. The ghost must remain elusive for as long as the book is written. Auster is aware of this problem in The Book of Memory because he cites a line from Blanchot’s fiction: “What is extraordinary begins at the moment I stop”. But here the choice is either not to write or to write too much. The proliferating memories engage yet lack the mystique and sense of possibility innate to fiction, and instead rely on the mystique of the author who writes it. As we inevitably associate what is written with the life of a flesh and blood individual suffering family bereavements and panic attacks in Brooklyn, New York, there is a need to relate it to the fiction that appears to redeem it. The reader will thereby feel most at home when reading what Lennon calls “a pointless 10-page précis of an obscure 1950s movie”, which reads very much like a plot from an Auster novel. But this is secondary to the subject of the book.

The Catch-22 of Winter Journal is outlined in The Book of Memory when Auster discusses the story of Jonah. Ordered by God to go to Nineveh to prophesy the city’s destruction, Jonah instead sailed to Tarshish, a journey that leads to what makes his story one of the most famous in the Bible. Eventually he does prophesy to the inhabitants and they save themselves with profound repentance. Thus Jonah complains that since God is merciful there was no need for him to prophesy, have his warning heeded and thereby be exposed as a false prophet. What ever Jonah does, he is condemned to isolation, trapped in the belly of the whale: “the shipwreck of the singular” as Auster describes it. So whereas The Invention of Solitude speaks of a singular life swimming in the ocean of human experience and stories, the new book is more Crusoe patrolling his island.

The shipwreck of Winter Journal is salvaged when Auster describes “the scalding, epiphanic moment of clarity that pushed [him] through a crack in the universe”, one that marks the transition between jobbing translator and cramped poet to prolific and popular storyteller. He attends the rehearsals for a dance choreographed by a friend and watches the dancers perform without the usual accompanying music:

[At] a certain point something began to open inside you, you found yourself falling through the rift between world and word, the chasm that divides human life from our capacity to understand or express the truth of human life, and for reasons that still confound you, this sudden fall through the empty, unbounded air filled you with a sensation of freedom and happiness, and by the time the performance was over, you were no longer blocked, no longer burdened by the doubts that had been weighing down on you for the past year.

While this provokes thrills by offering possibilities for our own personal release, the hyperbole prompts the readers to wish for a prolonged meditation on this experience; what doubts were these and how does it affect the writing of his novels? What is this crack in the universe and where might we squint through it? Perhaps it is fiction itself, where Winter Journal by definition cannot venture. Perhaps the clue as to why the epiphany forms only a climax to the book rather than its core is in Lennon’s summary of Winter Journal which I did not quote in full: “a rambling, informal collection of memories, musings, and minutiae presented in the second person”. The inclusion of the form as incidental, as if equivalent to the colour of the dust jacket, is surprising because it is the formal challenge that distinguishes Auster’s narrative and aligns it with another of those European inheritors unmentioned by Lennon: Samuel Beckett’s Company (1980), which John Pilling says, “gravitates more openly towards the genre of autobiography than anything before”. 

A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine.

To one on his back in the dark. This he can tell by the pressure on his hind parts and by how the dark changes when he shuts his eyes and again when he opens them again. Only a small part of what is said can be verified. As for example when he hears, You are on your back in the dark. Then he must acknowledge the truth of what is said. But by far the greater part of what is said cannot be verified. As for example when he hears, You first saw the light on such and such a day. Sometimes the two are combined as for example, You first saw the light on such and such a day and now you are on your back in the dark. A device perhaps from the incontrovertibility of the one to win credence for the other. That then is the proposition. To one on his back in the dark a voice tells of a past. With occasional allusion to a present and more rarely to a future as for example, You will end as you now are.

The connection is most explicit when Auster describes how he recalls his past during bouts of insomnia on his back in the dark: “For it is only in the darkness of solitude that the work of memory begins”. But, as The Invention of Solitude attests, the work of memory requires the distance between writing and what is written to be brought to life and, here, the second person eventually becomes a tic, employed as a device to win credence for straightforward memoir. The ghost and the subject become too cosy in each other's company. However, while Company focuses more on the veracity or otherwise of the voice in the dark and Winter Journal its sentimental revelations, both have in common the pursuit not of what is behind the writer but what lies in front of us all.

Easter Island: The Great Taboo by Nicolas Cauwe

The moai of Easter Island offer proof of the signal quality of art. For whatever reason they were constructed, with art being the first to be refused, their multiple and identical existence transfigures the known world.

What race of people carved them? Why were so many constructed? How was each statue moved to where it stands? Why were they toppled? For many decades our fascination has been diverted by such questions, perhaps in necessity. Indeed, the initial question was asked by the Dutch seafarers who first encountered the islanders, struck as they were by the lack of timber and rope. Later the question was answered by the likes of Erich Von Daniken who claimed extraterrestrials carved the stone using advanced tools before disappearing, and more serious investigators like Thor Heyerdahl who promoted the theory of the migration of traditions from South America over Polynesian colonisation. In more recent years their answers have been demoted as Easter Island has become a symbol of man-made environmental catastrophe. The trees that once covered the island are said to have been chopped down to provide rollers to move the statues from the volcanic quarry to platforms on the coast, leaving the landscape a barren steppe. The image of a man cutting down the last tree has infused modern studies with horror. In 1992 Easter Island, Earth Island confronted us with “the specter of a civilization destroyed by reckless plundering of the environment”, a specter reprojected in Collapse by Jared Diamond. The story has also featured in recent novels including Jennifer Vanderbes’ feminist potboiler Easter Island and Jeanette Winterson’s fantasy The Stone Gods (the link goes to my review). Winterston herself puts Easter Island’s demise down to “the pointless obsession with carving”. When the resources to feed it declined, internecine violence flared and an entire culture was razed. Is then Easter Island a microcosm of global disaster?

Nicolas Cauwe’s spectacularly illustrated new study Easter Island: The Great Taboo challenges this narrative with evidence drawn from ten years of archeological work. He argues that the moai lying incomplete in the quarry were not abandoned as previously assumed but carved deliberately to prevent further exploitation, and those on the roads between the quarry and the coast were placed there to discourage approach to the volcano. The quarry thereby became taboo, reflecting “a profound change in the religious system”. While the change has long been visible via the toppling of the moai, it has been assumed this happened much like the violence attending the English Reformation. Cauwe refutes this by demonstrating how each toppled statue does not have damage consistent with revolutionary iconoclasm. In fact, they appear to have been lain down with as much care as they were raised.

Facing pages from Easter Island: The Great Taboo

For those unfamiliar with the island’s history and theories surrounding it, The Great Taboo recounts and then revises what is familiar to those who are. For example, it looks at the competing hypotheses for deforestation: newly introduced domestic farm animals, climate change and the use of rollers, and suggests they each played a part. Cauwe's opinion is more forthright when dismissing the mystery of the rongorongo tablets that have long been assumed to be an untranslated script. He argues instead that they are stylised aids to oral storytelling whose meaning disappeared with the voices of the storytellers.

Cauwe's address of the issue of the moai themselves is more noteworthy and requires some background. In his 1774 visit, Captain Cook's naturalist George Forster asked a native what the statues were for and was told they were deified clan chiefs. The platforms or ahu contain their bones and ashes and were often constructed using moai from earlier, deconstructed ahu. The coral eyes of their moai overlook agricultural land. The reason for their ultimate abandonment we're told cannot be easily reconstructed as there were no witnesses once westerners came to interview islanders a century or more after the events; only legends remained. However, Cauwe argues that rather than being destroyed, the ahu were transformed from altars for statues to altars for the dead, much like Christian cemeteries, with the moai helping to seal the ashes; a transformation that took generations while the power of the statues diminished. According to Cauwe, this would explain why Captain Cook saw both standing and toppled statues, while in 1864 a French missionary saw only ruins. So, the archeology reveals not a populace in thrall to the command of all-powerful gods than a traditional community supplicating to ancestral spirits for good harvests.

Vermeer – View of Delft

Easter Island is now little more than a tourist destination, its sacred sites reconstructed without any religious intent, making the island's given name ironic as Christianity supplants another religion based on the continuing life of the dead. Nicolas Cauwe’s narrative, originally published in French and, from a certain stiffness of expression, apparently self translated, has none of the lyric effusions of Pierre Loti’s account of 1872 or the indulgence of other personal narratives such as Katherine Routledge’s The Mystery of Easter Island (1919) and Heyerdahl’s Aku-Aku (1958), which is perhaps inevitable given the exhaustion of Easter Island's enchantment. The stunning colour plates at least offer a glimmer of an aura now faded; a glimmer, however, that still fascinates.

In 1990, John Banville published an essay that begins by comparing James Joyce to “a great looming Easter Island effigy of the Father” before which the writer stands “gnawing his knuckles, not a son, but a survivor”. Joyce, he says, is not an artist one can use to learn one’s trade:

the methods of production are well-nigh invisible, buried so deeply inside the work that we cannot get at them without dismantling the parts. The greatness, or part of the greatness, of an Aeneid, of a View of Delft, of a Don Giovanni, of a Ulysses, rests in the fact that they are, in an essential way, closed. By this I do no mean to say that these works of art are difficult, or obscure – what could be more limpid than the light that hovers over Delft? – but that they are mysterious at their core.

He goes on to say that he thinks all great works of art have this “quality of reticence, of being somehow turned away from us gazing off, like nature itself, into another sphere of things, another reality”. With this comparison, Easter Island’s profound shift from erecting auratic monoliths to sealed necropoli bounds me to think of the modern literary novel, boxing with the shadows of looming effigies of statuesque classics, always appealing to equivalence, contemptuous of sealed necropoli, yet never convinced of its own capacities and unable to acknowledge the implications.

Banville precedes his essay with a quotation: “Every great phenomenon is followed by degeneration, especially in the domain of art” (from Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human) and, following Nicolas Cauwe’s study, we might correlate fiction, specifically anachronistic 800-page state-of-the-nation novels, to reconstructed platforms without bones, without ashes; mere fodder for tourists. While Nietzsche ascribes degeneration to “vainer natures” imitating one-in-a-million greats, the degeneration of art in our time cannot be attributed to a lack of craft mastery or objective lessons of novels demanded by those putting the dick into Dickensian, but rather to the experience of the phenomenon itself.

The experience of the moai is not an experience at all but, following Banville, a presence incommensurate with formal properties. Compare the hundreds of impassive statues staring without eyes covering a fragment of earth in a vast ocean with the overwhelming affluence of accessible art and fiction in our time, heedless of an exhausted quarry and the great taboo of modernism. Banville offers no solution except to express a condition that "half the time ... feels like drowning". But what does drowning feel like?

A Provisional Miracle: Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas

This is the sad tale of poor Samuel Riba:

He belongs to an increasingly rare breed of sophisticated, literary publishers. And every day, since the beginning of this century, he has watched in despair the spectacle of the noble branch of his trade – publishers who still read and who have always been drawn to literature – gradually, surreptitiously dying out.

There are fewer and fewer “genuine writers and talented readers” to make it worthwhile, a decline Riba ascribes to “the golden calf of the gothic novel”, which created “the stupid myth of the passive reader”. Riba dreams of the return of readers with a capacity for “intelligent emotion, a desire to understand the other and to approach a language distinct to the one of our daily tyrannies”, but he knows it is unlikely to be realised. The younger publishers are keen instead to exploit the “the ‘new language of the digital revolution’, so useful for covering up a lack of imagination and talent”. Yes, it's time for Riba to retire.




Actually, he finds it liberating to be free of the “vampire tales and other nonsense now in fashion” and “no longer to waste hours reading so much rubbish: manuscripts with conventional plots, stories that need a conflict in order to be anything”. Only he regrets not having resolved his lifelong obsession, to uncover an authentic literary genius. He believes the writer is still out there: “in the shadows: in solitude, in doubt, in question”.

There is a dream he can realise however, and that is one he had while seriously ill, caused by years of alcohol abuse. He dreamed of Dublin, “a city he had never been to, but which in the dream he knew perfectly well, as if he'd lived there in another life”. That other life is, of course, reading. He has absorbed James Joyce’s Ulysses as a vampire absorbs another's lifeblood, just as Joyce absorbed Homer. As is only natural for someone who has a “remarkable tendency to read his life as a literary text”, Riba decides to hold a funeral for the Gutenberg age of print in the very same chapel that in episode six of Ulysses saw the funeral of Paddy Dignam. If literature is dying, then a funeral must follow. Literary interconnections fabricate his story: Gutenberg’s funeral aligns itself to Dignam's as it was itself aligned to Odysseus’ descent into the underworld.

Riba is fascinated by the stranger wearing a macintosh encountered by Bloom at the funeral, perhaps because he too often sees mysterious strangers: a man wearing a Nehru jacket staring at him from the street outside his parents’ home, who Riba then spies again on his taxi ride home. What does he signify? Is there a connection? Perhaps his fascination with Ulysses agitates excessive awareness. He wonders if Nabokov is right that the man in the macintosh is Joyce himself, a portrait of the author as friend to the dead. To distract himself, Riba reads a newspaper and happens upon an article featuring comments by Claudio Magris, an author he has published, who argues that Odysseus’ circular journey home was replaced halfway through the twentieth century “by a rectilinear journey: a sort of pilgrimage, a journey always moving forward, towards an impossible point in infinity, like a straight line advancing hesitantly into nothingness”. The correspondence is clear as Riba is himself on his way home in the taxi, reiterating Joyce's achievement in applying Homeric reach to the absolutely mundane, this time taking it further towards that nothingness; his own.

Not that Riba is entirely happy with this literary web spinning, aware perhaps that it is the intellectual equivalent of alcohol ingestion; an induced reverie with damaging consequences. But then it follows that if the everyday of the reader proffers literary correspondences, adding a certain portentous grandeur to ordinary life, the end of literature will mean life disrobed and destitute, leaving him to endure what we might call enchantment hunger (which someone ought to use for a title). When Riba sees a strange suitcase in his Dublin hotel room, he recognises it is an appropriate incident for a novel, but he doesn’t want to be written by novelist of some cheap, conventional fiction. At the funeral, he sees a young man nearby who looks remarkably like a young Samuel Beckett, the “direct and essential heir” of Joyce. Riba now becomes obsessed with him. Could this stranger be the authentic genius to bring Riba and the Gutenberg age back to life?

Of course, following Nabokov, the Beckett figure could be Vila-Matas himself, this millionaire of books and stories (to adapt Borges’ description of Joyce), and thereby Riba’s undiscovered genius. This would certainly deliver a redemptive twist to his sad tale and give his apocalyptic sensibility not only a splendid fictional veneer but necessity. Dublinesque – which is translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey and Ann McLean – is so lightly ironic in this way that it may be dismissed as the densely woven floss of literary candy; it shares not only the title of Philip Larkin’s poem describing a funeral procession but also its sentimental grace. Yet such fairy-tale simplicity and lightness veils the precise patterning of a novel in which every gossamery sentence describing every ghostly event is thread OuLiPo-like through the eyes of a thousand literary needles. Sometimes I wonder if deployment of such dazzling skill is merely that, with too much knowing producing only a warm, colourful rug over the frozen sea rather than a glistening axe. But this is Joyce land, not Kafka.

When Borges introduced the great writer to an Argentine audience in 1925, he characterised himself as a traveller and Ulysses as a new land, confessing to not having cleared a path through all of its pages. In the meantime, he said “let us admire the provisional miracle”. In solitude, in doubt, in question, I suggest we do the same with Dublinesque.

Infinity: The Story of a Moment by Gabriel Josipovici

The composer Tancredo Pavone is sure of his quest: “The centre of the sound is the heart of the sound. One must always strive to reach the heart of the sound ... If one can reach that one is a true musician. Otherwise one is an artisan.” He compares himself to Indian sādhus, itinerant monks who make pilgrimages to holy sites by rolling all the way, often thousands of miles: “It did not matter to them how long it took to reach their destination. It did not matter if it took them a year or five years or a whole lifetime. They took the cloth from around their shoulders and held it in their hands stretched out above their heads as they rolled to stop themselves falling into ditches. It gave them equilibrium.” Composing music is then an impersonal demand, a spiritual endeavour, a life’s journey, anything but a career.

Pavone’s journey began in the early years of the 20th Century when he beat a piano with his fists and feet, continuing when his aristocratic parents declined to stop him. This is real musicianship, he announces, not notes and counterpoint but “the patrimony of hands and feet”. As a young man free from the need to earn a living he moved to Monte Carlo, dancing, romancing and writing waltzes, before moving on to other cities: “London was where I experimented with women and Vienna was where I experimented with notes”. In Vienna he studied composition and discovered that “thinking is the worst thing for a musician”. He says Schoenberg, who thought he had advanced the cause of German music by a hundred years, was a disaster for music: “the language of music is not the sonata and it is not the tone row ... it is the same kind of language as weeping, sobbing, shrieking and laughing”. Perhaps this indicates Pavone hasn't grown up, or has grown up but recognises what has been lost as a result. If so, that doesn't undermine what he says but strangely enhances our engagement, as if he's onto something.

It was only when he visited Africa with an ethnologist friend and stood before a granite slab sacred to the Ife of north western Africa that he recognised that this Dionysian inclination had a deeper purpose. Standing before the slab it was:

as if at every moment you are going either to be crushed or swept away, but you also feel as if you are in touch with the secret pulse of the universe. It is an extraordinary sensation ... a compressing into the moment of everything that has ever been and ever will be. It is this that I look for in each sound I imagine ... it is this that is at the heart of every note.

The same occurs when he listens to great trumpets played in a temple in Nepal. To cynical Western ears it sounds like Pavone is off his trolley, and he did indeed spend the Second World War with his wife in a sanatorium in Switzerland – “I thought, Europe is a madhouse, so the only way to stay sane is to enter a madhouse”. Still seeking the heart of the note, he sat at his piano and hit the same key over and over, eventually completing a piece called Six Sixty-Six in which the pianist has to play the same note with the same intensity six hundred and sixty-six times: “The world is there to be transformed. The human being is there to be transformed. When a note is played 600 and 66 times, it is transformed.” His wife left him.

Pavone also claims to have cured fellow patients by forming a choir and teaching them to make animal noises rather than merely sing: “Why are the sounds of twenty-eight animals all barking and braying and mooing and hooting in concert any less beautiful than Bach’s B Minor Mass or the last movement of the Ninth Symphony? Tell me that, Massimo, he said, tell me that and I will give you a doctorate in music.”

Massimo is an artisan, Pavone’s manservant. He manages Pavone’s household, he chauffeurs him around the Italian countryside and cleans and presses each one of his one hundred suits even if it had been worn only once. He is also the only other person allowed in his study and, as a result, becomes Pavone’s captive audience. Massimo’s dedication is such that he is apparently able to remember each of Pavone’s monologues, even if he has no interest in or knowledge of their subject. Infinity: The Story of a Moment comprises transcripts of Massimo’s answers to an interviewer’s questions about the late composer, beginning with awkward silences and patient prompting, then soaring to trace the arc of his master’s remarkable life.


Gabriel Josipovici’s new novel is “loosely based” on the life of the composer Giacinto Scelsi and incorporates fragments of his writings. It must be read as a 21st Century revision of Thomas Mann’s 1947 novel Doctor Faustus, the story of the modernist composer Adrian Leverkühn itself loosely based on Arnold Schoenberg, as told by his childhood friend, the humanist Serenus Zeitblom. Where Mann framed the composer’s genius as part of a Faustian bargain, as if Schoenberg’s tone row can be regarded only as a devilish alternative to the Western tradition, Josipovici offers a far more open, Eastern, comic attitude. When Zeitblom complains that the alternative to culture is barbarism, Leverkühn replies: “barbarism is the antithesis of culture only within a structure of thought that provides us the concept. Outside of that structure the antithesis may be something quite different or not even an antithesis at all” (translation John E. Woods). In Pavone’s view, Western music is, if not barbarous, then very immature, nothing but “delayed gratification ending in consummation and exhaustion ... The music of adolescent masturbators.” Instead, his music has sought that “something quite different”:

Our music has ... returned to its ancient roots. It has escaped from the puerile imitation of sexual congress, caress arousal, delay, frenzy, extinction, which was the pattern of Romantic music and the reason for its enormous popularity among the repressed middle classes of Germany and Austria, who imagined that it was leading them up to an aesthetic heaven. Well, he said, they had their climax twice over, first in the First World War and then in the Second World War. That should have been enough for them. But not at all. Look at their books. Look at the music they flock to listen to in the concert halls, this so-called intellectual elite. Caress, arousal, delay, frenzy, extinction. All the same. No change.

While we may snigger at Pavone’s arrogance, his dedication to seeking a different music – transformative rather than transcendent – has its equivalent in Massimo’s dedication to his employer and the novelist's to both. Something quite different finds its way. Massimo pays utmost attention and does not impose any opinion; he waits and lets the human person come forth. And come forth he does, in all his absurdity, arrogance, desperation, loneliness and magnificence. Even as we dismiss him, we admire Pavone's excessive commitment just as we admire Massimo's self-restraint, and recognise what art and the world lacks. He is infinitely quotable on the subject:

One cannot think one's way through artistic problems, he said, one has to go about it in a different way. Bach did not think, he said, he danced. Mozart did not think, he sang. Stravinsky did not think, he prayed.

Pavone did not think then, he listened. But Infinity should not be limited to a repository of wisdom about art. The form is its wisdom. The author does not seek to assert a resolution but calmly follows the course of a life, allowing a space to be cleared in which that life can be seen and felt as one moment, with the individual’s failings as prominent and as vital as his triumphs. There is also the moment of Massimo's interview quietly revealing that the gifts of patience and dedication are affordable in all walks of life. Infinity is a literary production in the spirit of Pavone the artist, Massimo the artisan and his unnamed interviewer.

One last time Massimo drives Pavone into the Roman countryside and places him wrapped in a blanket at the edge of a wood to listen to the cicadas. He tells Massimo how their song is as powerful as any noise emerging from a Buddhist temple in Nepal or Tibet.

What is it saying? Now, it is saying, and eternity. If you can hear the now, he said, you can hear eternity. That is what I have tried to do, he said, to write a music of now which would be a music of eternity. Then he was silent for a long time.

Divinity hunger: A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven by Karl O. Knausgaard

Before I had even finished Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle, I had ordered a copy of his 2008 novel A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven, an act more to do with wanting to remain in his company once the first was read than curiosity about what a novel by the author of a six-volume autobiography was like. The good news is that A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven fascinates like My Struggle. There is no bad news.

The novel begins in 1551 when late at night by a stream in a forest an 11-year-old boy Antinous Bellori stumbles upon two angels eating fish. Though terrified, he studies them: "Their faces are white and skull-like, their eye sockets deep, cheekbones high, lips bloodless. They have long, fair hair, thin necks, slender wrists, claw-like fingers. And they're shaking. One of them has hands that shake" (translated by James Anderson).







Bellori himself is so affected by what he sees that he spends the rest of his life studying the subject and takes six years to write On the Nature of Angels. On reading this far one may assume such a long novel would focus on Bellori's life and times, his struggle to publish an heretical thesis and to avoid burning at the stake. But no. The focus is instead a repetition of Bellori's investigation into the fundamental question: why have angels become mere animals, living in remote locations and avoiding contact with humans?

Bellori thereby disappears from the foreground and for over 400 pages is replaced by retellings of the stories of Cain and Abel, Noah and the flood and Lot and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, each narrated as if the characters where protagonists in a standard historical novel. They live in an indeterminate pre-modern time with the same hopes and fears as ours. Noah's sister Anna has a strained marriage to a man who owns a farm next to a fjord that turns out to be no more than a hut in a field. Yet angels and the threat of apocalypse are as present to them as dolphins and terrorism are to us. The prose follows the easy-reading pace of 500-page novels and Knausgaard is vulnerable to criticism for stamping out generic passages from a stencil:

"You've made it nice here," said his father, looking around.
"It's good enough for me at any rate," said Cain.
A shiver went through him.

Yet such prose in the context of biblical stories has the odd effect of naturalising events we would otherwise place at a distance. When Abel announces an expedition to the Garden of Eden, it is as supernatural as the North Pole. And when he is attacked by angels resisting his approach, they may as well be polar bears. Reading the novel late into the night I wondered if this is what genre fans enjoy in large volumes of speculative fiction, science fiction and fantasy: imaginary worlds presented in unadorned prose to evoke – albeit temporarily – an enchantment of the current, prosaic one. But the worlds and ideas they generate are weightless in comparison to this: our culture is founded on Bible stories. Every event becomes vitally real to us as they were for generations of Jews and Christians.

In Knausgaard's retelling, the space between a world with God and his angels and one without is recognised and felt in a manner that affects not only how we perceive the current world but how we perceive our perspective. Enthusiastic claims that "science fiction has emerged as the literature best able to articulate the relentless pace of social change" is faint mitigation when teleology is limited to this and the lives of characters in an exciting story. In A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven, the presence and degradation of angels becomes a question of the absence of meaning in the modern world, an absence over which Knausgaard's writing keeps watch. 

In a coda to the novel, the narrator following up Bellori's thesis reveals himself to be a young Norwegian man called Henrik Vankel who has isolated himself on a small island after an unspecified breakdown on shore. He describes a relationship with his father in terms with which readers of My Struggle will be very familiar. He is also fascinated by Bellori's book and why, after many years of intense work, he suddenly abandoned writing. His speculative answer emerges from an unforgettable interpretation of Giotto's Lamentation as seen through Bellori's eyes. He saw what the death of Jesus meant for the angels in the painting.

Christ never wrote, is an entry in one of Bellori's notebooks. It would have contravened the fundamental meaning of incarnation. The divine became a body: arms and legs, head and belly, heart and lungs. The divine lived in a specific place at a specific time. There was no universality about it, only a singularity. And that was where the meaning lay. That the meaning of Jesus' life lay in every single unique moment that he had been here was something churchmen didn't understand, they who had raised that bloody, crucified body into the language, and dissolved it in philosophy's abstractions. But the people understood. The hysterical medieval worship of relics was an expression of it: God was here, among us, like us. Not all the time, just once. And at that moment, when Pontius Pilate was procurator in Jerusalem and Augustus emperor in Rome, he'd set foot there, laid his head there, placed his hand there.

In this passage we can appreciate Vankel's turn to solitude in nature and Knausgaard's need to write the six-volume My Struggle: gathering evidence of the divine, right here, right now.

Transformation

You write about Bellow's transformation from a minor to a major writer—“that readiness to follow where instinct seems to lead, which is perhaps what distinguishes the major from the minor writer”—Mr Pavone is similarly instinctual. He is earthy. From where do you date your own transformation?

Jason Rotstein asks Gabriel Josipovici about this and his new novel Infinity: The Story of a Moment based on the life of the composer Giacinto Scelsi.

My review of Infinity is now up.