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.

Apostle of impassioned sincerity: My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard

“It is not every day one is sent a masterpiece to review”,  wrote Gabriel Josipovici in reviewing WG Sebald's The Emigrants; “(I suppose one is lucky if it happens more than once or twice in a lifetime)”.

I started writing reviews in the year Josipovici's review was published (1996) and had not read a book by an author entirely new to me that I believed was a masterpiece. As I read Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, I thought that this is perhaps the closest I will ever get. Such is the reach of the word masterpiece beyond craft and industry considerations, my instinct was not to review at all but to thrust the book into the hands of friends for whom reading is absolutely central to their lives (not many).

But I must write something. Reading My Struggle was often like reliving fragments of my own life – an intensity resonating in a void – and a review would mean explicating this in formal terms, and that wouldn’t be right. Yet the terms available seemed too personal, something to be shared only by handing the book over in silence. How then to recommend? This is perhaps the gift of reading: others can open doors. Josipovici spends most of his Sebald review describing a twenty-page short story rather than racing through a summary of all four:

Like all good art, the form and the style bring into being what would otherwise have remained in darkness and silence for ever, so that a mere account of what the story was ‘about’ would not have begun to do it justice.

This is good advice for any reviewer: stick to what you believe is important. My Struggle (published in the UK as A Death in the Family) is 471 pages long and is ‘about’ the relatively normal, middle-class life of a Norwegian male born in 1968, so even an extended account would say very little (almost nothing), and while Knausgaard’s ability to make the unremarkable resound means the detail is vital, it is its framing that brings the book to vivid life. 

Knausgaard has explained how his difficulty in writing led to the specific form of the book: “I was looking for language ... to tell the story about my father.” His father had left his family, began a new relationship and then became an alcoholic. Before Knausgaard had “tried to write a kind of regular, realistic but fictional work about his death. Nothing worked.” Then he found the solution: “Eventually I just started to write it as it was. I gave up all ambition, I didn’t try to be clever or anything: I just tried to write as fast as I could.” Except the book does not begin with regular memories nor, as in so many careless novels nowadays, drops the reader in medias res into a voice-world providing its own alibi. Instead it begins with a confrontational prologue about dead bodies in modern society. Death, he writes, is all around us and we even consume media in which violent death is the main attraction, yet its physical reality is repressed.

A town that does not keep its dead out of sight, that leaves people where they died, on highways and byways, in parks and car parks, is not a town but a hell. The fact that this hell reflects our life-experience in a more realistic and essentially truer way is of no consequence. We know this is how it is, but we do not want to face it. Hence the collective act of repression symbolised by the concealment of our dead. What exactly it is that is being repressed, however, is not so easy to say.

He contrasts the physical reality of bodies in basement mortuaries with their digital abstraction: “One is associated with concealment and gravity, earth and darkness, the other with openness and airiness, ether and light.” The images of death, no matter how graphic, “have no weight, no depth, no time and no place, and nor do they have any connection to the bodies that spawned them. They are nowhere and everywhere.” What is the purpose of this severe opening full of examples with which we are all familiar? Knausgaard finally includes one we're unlikely to know, a news report of a fishing boat lost off the coast of Norway in which the crew of seven drown, which he then blends seamlessly into a childhood episode because he saw news footage from a helicopter flying over the scene (with his emphasis):

I stare at the surface of the sea without listening to what the reporter says, and suddenly the outline of a face emerges. I don’t know how long it stays there, a few seconds perhaps, but long enough for it to have a huge impact on me. The moment the face disappears I go to find someone I can tell.

The only person nearby at the time is his father, a stern man, a head teacher after all, who tells him not to give it another thought. For many, not giving it another thought is no problem, and My Struggle will probably leave them nonplussed (the allusive title is likely meant for those who may regard the whole enterprise as arrogant and self-indulgent), but for Karl Ove Knausgaard it is the beginning of thought. What did he see?

Throughout the book there are variations of the face-in-the-sea incident and for Knausgaard and the reader each one has the promise and terror of an imminent revelation, which never in fact occurs (much like Roberto Bolaño's 2666, though the similarities end there). From a distance, they can appear banal. Sometimes he is able to identify windows on the experience and provide an interpretation. Looking at a book of Constable’s paintings for instance:

I didn’t need to do any more than let my eyes skim over them before I was moved to tears. So great was the impression some of the pictures made on me. Others left me cold. That was my only parameter with art, the feeling it aroused. The feeling of inexhaustibility. The feeling of beauty. The feeling of presence. All compressed into such acute moments that sometimes they could be difficult to endure.

Another is when the elderly poet Olav H. Hauge reads a poem on his driveway to a youthful Knausgaard and his mates. He finds it in music, having at one time a poster of John Lennon – “the apostle of impassioned sincerity” – over his desk. The epithet suits Knausgaard himself and Don Bartlett’s translation is especially convincing and memorable in evoking such passion and sincerity.

The immense and visceral detail describing Karl Ove’s family and friends has contributed to the news media controversy surrounding the book and will no doubt detract from the necessity of its form, as will summarising the face-in-the-sea experience as “religious” or “mystical”. Like his grand amour for a girl called Hanne, it is the everyday unknown. Also in the same movement of distraction, Proust is invoked as the main precursor, though only Boyd Tonkin has singled out the reason as Knausgaard’s “microscopically detailed account of how [the book] came to be written”. The other major influence would seem to be Thomas Bernhard, whose father also died in mysterious circumstances and who also describes each turn of his life with preternatural precision. The collective title of his great five-book memoir Gathering Evidence is a good pointer as to why, as well as Knausgaard’s expressed admiration. The author’s need to understand his father’s trajectory from family man to squalid drunk requires access to the unknowable, to the physically dead, and the only alternative he discovers is to piece together evidence of his own experience – experience of his father and of everything else – and, now as his father’s equal in age and social position – to try to pinpoint the origin of the descent. Only then might something remarkable emerge from darkness and silence. And it does.

To be of use: The Art Kettle by Sinéad Murphy

An art book is a curious item. Lifting the unusually heavy cover and flapping ahead to the large colour plates, one anticipates pleasure not only in looking at the art itself without the peculiar unease of galleries – departure lounges without destination, waiting rooms without delay – and with all the attention enabled by languid time and solitude, but also reading about the art. This is where the gift may be fully unwrapped. Except one soon rediscovers that there nothing in books quite as awkward and unsatisfying as reading about art. Embarking on paragraph setting the scene of, say, an allegorical landscape, one is impatient to turn to the particular plate to see again for oneself. The same is true when the author discusses the technical properties of the work, its critical context and its family tree. In the identical original gallery movement, however, one's eyes leave the painting to seek the caption and, a moment later, the related text one had impatiently abandoned. The next impulse is to put the book away and visit the gallery again, or perhaps abandon the subject altogether. Art appreciation sometimes appears less a process of discovery and growth than an unsatisfying, moth-like fluttering between partial illuminations. Why this oscillation in the dark?

Sinéad Murphy’s dissatisfaction with art is of a different order entirely and she has no hesitation in providing an answer: by suppressing the question of what art is for, contemporary art colludes with liberal democracy in making “social, cultural and political life free of ... unpredictable, revolutionary capacities.” Moreover, this collusion is not a failure of certain contemporary artists or movements but its very mode of being:

“the manner in which art is constituted in our society – that is, what we understand art to be and to do, and the value we attribute to what art is and does – operates primarily as a mode of control.”

The Art Kettle's case is worth setting out in as much detail as a brief review allows in order to let its unusual resistance to art show through.