reminded me of walser — maybe a more worldy walser. as if instead of retreating to the madhouse, hrabal was sentenced to the purgatory of the diplomatic corps — forced propriety despite the absurd or horrific swirls of history around him. but, like walser, he recognizes the poetic gesture… poetic or romantic despite or because of the old world sexism and classism rampant (and rampant still) just before the second world war, the ripened-to-rot but still shiny weimar-type decadence… without mentioning it to spoil it, the first chapter has one of the more romantic scenes i’ve read in many a year.

the movement from charming and bawdy to dark satire and political farce to apocalyptic dream and finally into prayerful meditation — all that transition done quietly, even feigning modesty, yet this quiet hiding a great ambition. the transitions’ build-up and execution reflective of not only the change of an individual but of nation-states.

here’s a scene to wet yer whistle:

“I saw Zdenëk, the headwaiter at the Hotel Tichota, who enjoyed having a good time so much when he was off work that to get it he’d spend all the money he had with him, which was always several thousand. Then I saw his uncle, a military bandmaster now retired, who split wood on his little plot of land in the forest where he had a cottage overgrown with flowers and wild vines. This uncle had been a bandmaster at the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and still wore his uniform when he split wood, because he had written two polkas and several waltzes that still got played all the time, although no one remembered who the composer was and everyone thought he’d died a long time ago. Zdenëk and I, as we were riding along in a rented buggy on one of our days off, heard the sound of a military brass band playing one of his uncle’s waltzes, and Zdenëk stood up and signaled the driver to stop, then went over to the band and had a little talk with the bandmaster. He offered to give him all the money he had, four thousand crowns, for the soldiers to buy themselves beer, if they would do what he asked. Buses were waiting, and the whole band was getting ready to climb aboard to go to a band tattoo, so we left the buggy there and got on the first bus with them. After an hour’s drive we stopped in a forest, and soon a hundred and twenty uniformed musicians with their shiny instruments were advancing slowly down a road through the woods. Then they turned onto a footpath lined with thick bushes and pine trees that towered overhead, and Zdenëk signaled them to stop and slipped through some loose planks in a fence, disappeared into the bushes for a few moments, then came back and told them his plan. When he gave the sign, the soldiers climbed one by one through the hole in the fence into the bushes while Zdenëk, like a soldier at the front, directed them to take positions around the tiny house. They could hear the sound of an ax striking wood, and the entire band silently surrounded the chopping block and an old man in an ancient Austrian bandleader’s uniform. When Zdenëk gave the signal, the bandmaster flung his golden ceremonial baton in the air, gave a loud command, and out of the bushes rose a glistening array of brass instruments and the band began to play a clamorous polka by Zdenëk’s uncle. The old bandleader stood transfixed over the piece of wood he had just split, while the band moved forward a couple of steps, still up to their waists in pine and oak shrubs. Only the bandmaster stood in the greenery up to his knees, swinging his golden baton while the band played the polka and their instruments flashed in the sunlight. The old bandleader slowly looked around with a heavenly expression on his face, and when they finished the polka the band started right in on one of his concert waltzes, and the old bandleader sat down, put his ax across his knees, and began to cry. The bandmaster came up and touched his shoulder, the old man looked up, and the bandmaster handed him the golden baton. Now the old man got to his feet and, as he told us afterward, he thought he’d died and gone to heaven with a military band all around him, and he thought they must play military music in heaven and that God Himself was conducting the band and was now turning His own baton over to him. So the old man conducted his own pieces, and when he’d finished, Zdenëk stepped out of the bushes, shook hands with his uncle, and wished him good health. Half an hour later the band climbed back into their buses and as they were driving away they played Zdenëk a farewell ceremonial fanfare. Zdenëk stood there filled with emotion and bowed and thanked them, and finally the buses, and with them the fanfares, faded down the road through the woods, lashed by beech branches and shrubs” (159-61).

find it at the library or from the publisher or pick it up from an independent bookstore.

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three profiles on the bohemian’s bohemian:

james wood at the london review of books.

adam thirwell at the guardian.

mats larsson at Art Bin.

in no particular but starting it off: giancarlo’s glamour-soaked narcissus tale as lit journal advertisement… hans rickheit’s SQUIRREL MACHINE is a great gross-out dream… the beautiful ephemera of luca’s DAS DING #3… saying goodbye and anticipating saying goodbye to merce… the tumult of a chinese lifetime told in incredible locked down, long take that is wang bing’s FENGMING… the state of the disunion address of teju cole’s OPEN CITY… catching up with lewis warsh’s A FREE MAN (1991) and its inverse mirror A PLACE IN THE SUN (2010). they’re what social realism could admirably be — if those words meant something different… monica youn’s love song of j alfred IGNATZ (“and the fading//echo of the detox/mantras://helpless  helpless/helpless  helpless“)… speaking of which, 1st volume of beckett’s letters, which include the quip “T. Eliot is toilet spelt backwards” and untaken advice from his brother in the form of the question “Why can’t you write the way people want?”  …and, a year late, but RIP barry hannah you lunatic god.

& last but definitely not least: hat’s off to the erstwhile and ever OWS People’s Library, which rallied the troops and served as symbol in a way yer kindle download will never.

…

i’m happy to have a new story called “Booster Rockets” in the latest issue of FENCE magazine. here’s how it starts:

I was coming from a haircut and I was upset. I had just spent a lot of money on the haircut but I didn’t have a lot of money. It’s not because I’m vain but looking good is important to me. Anyway I was walking across Washington Square Park and I was not happy. I was pissed off. I wasn’t crying or raving or anything like that, just cranky, because I’d taken a chance on a new hair cutter and just then I thought she’d fucked it all up, not done what I wanted her to do, what I’d told her to do. A little bit later, a few days later or even the very next day, I realized it was actually a very nice haircut, that I liked what she’d done, and I kept going back to her for several more years…

pick up a copy here why not.

i’ve a review of this perec gem in Jacket2. an issue devoted to the stroll. edited by corey frost and louis bury.

An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris was written by Georges Perec during a gray Parisian weekend in October 1974. The stated intention was to “describe … that which is generally not taken note of, that which is not noticed, that which has no importance: what happens when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars, and clouds.” A nonambulatory flâneur, Perec sets himself up at a cafe in Place Saint-Sulpice to do as his directive epigraph of Life: A User’s Manualorders us to do also: “Look with all your eyes, look.”

https://jacket2.org/reviews/detour-more-traditional-paths-composition

what would happen to raskolnikov if he hadn’t killed the old woman? kurumatani seems to ask that question in this grim tale about a young japanese man who decides to opt as far out of life as he can. if not wholly unique in tone and content, a very good book on a great theme: the isolato in both the noir-y tradition of philip marlowe and the devastatingly pure refusnik ‘tude of bartleby. like his literary predecessors, our man here is an individual who rejects the prescribed ambitions of life, judging them as ultimately disappointing and petty.

reminiscent of recent down-and-out memoirs like TRAVELS WITH LIZBETH or GRAND CENTRAL WINTER this contemporary take on the autobiographical  watashi shosetsu genre, or “I-novel,” is grimly poetic and sweatily spiritual. like the tales of the marginalized burakumin of nakagami but less macho, more philosophical – something akin to the depressed soul of perec’s A MAN ASLEEP except ikushima’s no student and he has no rent money.

I was about to visit somebody I had never met. A complete stranger. My only hope was to talk this stranger into giving me a job so that I could keep on living. I had lost everything, thrown everything away. I had already been made to understand, all too well, that I was a loser. Whoever I was about to meet was probably used to being tough toward people as unworldly as me. No matter; whether it turned out to be some guy I couldn’t get anywhere with, or a woman with a heart of stone, I had no other choice; I was at the end of my rope (10).

pick it up at the library or your local independent bookstore.

a review of kurumatani and keizo hino in the quarterly conversation here.

watch the trailer of the movie based on it (in japanese) here: 
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[found this one browsing a bookstore's shelves, that encounter with chance and fuzzy curating now increasingly rare and endangered. but how else to find that book not clamoring by tweet and hype but just by consistent work on the page? o well.]

your poor fabulously wealthy man of leisure slash hipster is nursing a dying love affair while his highly sensitive instrument notes, in languorous and voluptuous detail, the grime and dazzle of his worldly world.

We took shelter inside for a moment, passing abruptly from the bluish gloom of the night to the violent and timeless white blaze of overhead fluorescent lights. I glanced casually at the only two clients in the store, a young man in an orange turtleneck and a small rasta cap who was leafing through a magazine in front of the newspaper rack, and a salaryman of indeterminate age, with wet shoes and a damp forehead, who was doubtfully considering the almost empty shelves in the refrigerated section, occasionally selecting some plastic-wrapped tray filled with stringy black seaweed or sliced mushrooms, bringing it closer to his eyes and raising his glasses to read something on the label, the product’s packaging date or place of origin, then replacing the plastic tray where he had found it. Marie was in front of the baked goods shelf, looking rather apathetically at the packages of cookies, moving arbitrarily from one shelf to another, lingering at the displays of instant soups and colorful cellophane bags of noodles. She carried her damp coat in the crook of one arm, and wearing her sunglasses again because of the excessive glare in the store, she strolled, yawning, by the shelves, watched indifferently by the dejected cashiers, who followed the nonchalant progress of her splendid starry-night silhouette sailing up and down vacant aisles (47).

as satirical of the decadent consumerist life as DEMONLOVER or LOST IN TRANSLATION or ENTER THE VOID, that is: barely or not at all…

but even if the trite subject is only mitigated slightly and rather shamelessly with a thin glaze of self awareness, toussaint transcends the shallowness with his sumptuous, gloriously paced, and perfectly elegant style. he’s at some of his best here; MAKING LOVE was a bestseller in france and the first of his, by The New Press, to be translated into english. rarer to find than the dalkey archive translations but if you’re a fan absolutely worth the tracking down.

buy it from the publisher or find it in the library or from an independent bookstore.

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using a realist, pseudo-autobiographical style very reminiscent of sebald, the main character, Julius, wanders through an up-to-date and recognizable NYC, an accomplishment in itself, observing the marathoners and skyscrapers at columbus circle, the twin towers intact in the queens museum’s diorama, conversations with cabdrivers infused with political subtext, bedbugs — and uses that general observation to describe, repeatedly and profoundly, the immigrant’s situation. maybe in fact the novel is the first since sebald to successfully tackle our moment of simultaneous globalization and alienation without resorting to parody or genre plot or any other distancing device. and for all the meandering of its narrative, this roaming belies a close-hewed line, and the book is not really a flâneur’s accounting at all but a meditative monologue on history told to the slow-hearbeat pace of a stroll’s footfall.

Farouq turned to me and said, It’s very busy, as you can see. Not only for all the people making New Year greetings but also for a lot of people calling home for the Eid. He gestured to the computer monitor behind him, and on it was a log of the calls ongoing in all twelve booths: Colombia, Egypt, Senegal, Brazil, France, Germany. It looked like fiction, that such a small group of people really could be making calls to such a wide spectrum of places. It’s been like this for the past two days, Farouq said, and this is one of the things I enjoy about working here. It’s a test case of what I believe; people can live together but still keep their own values intact. Seeing this crowd of individuals from different places, it appeals to the human side of me, and the intellectual side of me (112).

the lesson here seems to be that there is less and less frequently a typical immigration story than that each immigrant has a unique tale as bizarre as it is wholly probable. and each of these, in julius’s necessarily passing view, only half reveals its tangled provenance through scars and tics and layers of peeling disguise. cole shows again and again people who have been caught and hurled by history into their odd displaced places: a liberian in immigration prison, a dying english professor who had been in a japanese internment camp, rwandan dance clubbers, arab-european cafe leftists. these individuals are not always victims of history but are — in their singularity, in their movements unreplicated by nations of others — perhaps more uniquely aware of how history has determined their lives. and as cole’s novel superbly illustrates (and as globalization intensifies) there will arguably be fewer and fewer citizens of states and more and more castaway members of diasporas.

for these latter, in OPEN CITY, the question of belonging and authenticity as well as the proper and appropriate methods of political speech and protest are never far from mind. one of the most memorable characters in this regard is farouq — who with his somewhat naive leftism plays foil to our ever-so-increasingly unreliable (and occasionally reactionary-ish) narrator. farouq is an employee at an internet cafe in brussels and from that vantage freely comments on global politics… one of the book’s best provocations in fact is that it is a NYC book confronting the transforming moment zero of 9/11 by archly recounting a bar debate of arab intellectuals posturing resistance in brussels(!) …if it wasn’t so possible, it would be perfect satire.

Farouq’s face — all of a sudden, it seemed, but I must have been subconsciously working on the problem — resolved itself, and I saw a startling resemblance: he was the very image of Robert De Niro, specifically in De Niro’s role as the young Vito Corleone in The Godfather II… A famous Italian-American actor thirty years ago and an unknown Moroccan political philosopher in the present, but it was the same face. What a marvel that life repeated itself in these trivial ways, and it was something I noticed only because he hadn’t shaved for a day or two…

What was the meaning of De Niro’s smile? He, De Niro, smiled, but one had no idea what he was smiling about. Perhaps this is why, when I first met Farouq, I had been taken aback. I had subconsciously overinterpreted his smile, connecting his face to another’s, reading it as a face to be liked but feared. I had read his face as that of the young De Niro, as a charming psychopath, for this most trivial of reasons. And it was this face, not as inscrutable as I had once feared, that spoke now: For us, America is a version of Al-Qaeda. The statement was so general as to be without meaning. It had no power, and he said it without conviction. I did not need to contest it, and Khalil added nothing to it. “America is a version of Al-Qaeda.” It floated up with the smoke, and died. It might have meant more, weeks back, when the one speaking was still an unknown quanity. Now he had overplayed his hand, and I sensed a shift in the argument, a shift in my favor” (121-122).

.    .    .

near novel’s end julius observes a woman davening and comments on prayer. his definition of it could easily also apply to the novel in general but especially to OPEN CITY itself — an elegant, brainy, careful, and finally hopeful meditation:

I had made some tea, and I drank it as I watched the woman pray. Others are not like us, I thought to myself, their forms are different from ours. Yet I prayed, too, I would gladly face a wall and daven, if that was what had been given to me. Prayer was, I had long settled in my mind, no kind of promise, no device for getting what one wanted out of life; it was the mere practice of presence, that was all, a therapy of being present, of giving a name to the heart’s desires, the fully formed ones, the as yet formless ones (215).

.    .    .

a link to an interview with cole on PBS’ artbeat. here’s a bit:

TEJU COLE: We don’t experience our lives as plots. If I asked you to tell me what your last week was like, you’re not really gonna give me plot. You’re gonna give me sort of linked narrative. And I wanted to see how do we bring that into fiction without losing the reader. But of course, I’m not the first person to think about this. This is actually a problem that the Modernists like James Joyce and Virginia Wolfe solved pretty well. So part of my thinking was going back a little bit to re-inventing that particular wheel, which only seems innovative because most novels that are written today are being written on Jane Austen or Charles Dickens, 19th century novel.

another more expansive interview here.

pick it up from your local independent bookstore or the library.

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not purely fiction but located somewhere between death porn, a bipolar’s daybook, and a conceptual suicide note, levé’s novel — which is inseparable from its author’s biography — seems less a treatise on suicide than a portrait of an elegant but somehow dull faculty. (or dulled? the translator’s afterword calls levé’s aesthetic habitually “austere.”) the narrator notes moments of the pedestrian sublime or accounts for days with gestures toward the philosophical, but somehow never does his sense flare into the poignancy it seems to, despite itself, strive for. the unrelenting dark gray of depression’s long term palette, however, the book does seem to get just right.

an interview with the translator, jan steyn.

bernhard writes a devastating book, a poetry of mental illness — without romanticism but with music, true also to the horror. both an emulation of the sickness and an attendant commentary on its causes and end. we read bernhard for his musical eremitism, which takes the barest fact, the most stripped-down situation (here, a man living in the country, encountering a potential and temporary walking and talking companion) and creates a layered, bittersweet counterpoint at times as rich as bach.

But this release, of course, could only last a few days, after two or three weeks I had been back in a deep depression, but that is another story. The Swiss couple, in conjunction with Moritz and his family, had brought about a prolonged, indeed the most prolonged, period without an attack, never before had I had such a long interval between two attacks without being totally at the mercy of my sickness, in other words being almost entirely liberated from that sickness, as during the period when I went for walks with the Persian woman and that is the period under discussion here; had I not come to the country that sickness, which logically got worse with my existence in the country, could not have developed in that devastating manner, but had I stayed in the city I would no longer be existing at all, and therefore this new thought, whether I would not have done better to stay in the city and not move out to the country, is senseless (67).

here mental illness is both itself and synecdoche for the idea — and if there is a lingering romanticism it is this — that these ill, despite their illness and inability to function, perceive more accurately, more deeply, a crushing vileness, which is our inescapable condition. perhaps it’s a grandiose and deluded position, but how accurate does the following sound :

…and the frightful political conditions in our country and throughout Europe had perhaps triggered this catastrophe, because everything in politics was developing in precisely the opposite direction from what I had been convinced was correct and from what I am to this day convinced is correct. Political conditions at that point had suddenly deteriorated in a way which can only be described as dreadful and deadly. The endeavors of decades had been wiped out within a few weeks, and what had always been an unstable country had in effect collapsed within a few weeks, dim-wittedness, greed and hypocrisy were suddenly again at the helm just as in the worst times of the worst regime, and those in power were once again ruthlessly working towards the extermination of the intellect… Anyone thinking must be mistrusted and must be persecuted, that is the old slogan according to which they are once more acting in the most terrible manner. The newspapers speak a distasteful language, the distasteful language they have always spoken but which, during the past few decades, they had spoken only with lowered voices, which suddenly they no longer had any reason to do, almost without exception they were posturing like the people in order to please the people, those mind murderers. Dreams of a world of the mind had been betrayed during these weeks and thrown on the popular refuse heap. The voices of the intellect had fallen silent. Heads were ducking. There was now only brutality, vileness and infamy (61-3).

find it at the library

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How I got the job is an interesting story. Like all her hires, I was recruited. It was when my twin brother invited me to a party.

A self-help book my brother had secretly ghost-written was having a launch party in the old-fashioned pomp and gilt of the Hotel Europa downtown. Its publisher was projecting tremendous sales so had spared no expense. I’d no idea what I was walking into (my brother had called a few days prior, surprising me with an invite), and so when I arrived and saw that I’d misjudged the event’s size and glitter by several orders of magnitude, I realized it was going to be difficult to get any time at all with my brother, the epicenter of the maelstrom, whose tuxedo’d point from the mezzanine balcony I could amusedly observe drawing the aim of scheming vectors and incurring trails of vaporous gossip. Also, I was painfully underdressed. So I was both relieved and delighted when, twenty minutes later, he spotted me and instead of waving or just blowing me a kiss, immediately made his way over.

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