This debut from Glaswegian writer (and former classmate of mine) is an insightful and unique mixture of evocative prose-poems and autobiography. FaganThis debut from Glaswegian writer (and former classmate of mine) is an insightful and unique mixture of evocative prose-poems and autobiography. Fagan manages to distil a momentous period—leaving Glasgow to teach English in a small Japanese fishing village—into short, meaningful pieces, and captures a strong sense of sadness and alienation. There are parallels here with the Japanese haiku, the art of packing meaningful imagery into the teensiest of syllables, and vibrant portraits of nature. The experience of utterly uprooting yourself and surviving in a completely alien culture for so long is a fascinating one, and this gentle, unflinchingly honest, and original anti-memoir brings the goods....more
The Pakistan (then India)-born British-American novelist, poet, and academic returns with his first novel in twenty-eight years, the last being The TrThe Pakistan (then India)-born British-American novelist, poet, and academic returns with his first novel in twenty-eight years, the last being The Triple Mirror of the Self from 1992. The title refers to the original working name of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, and across four parts, Ghose unfurls a poetic, autofictional narrative of 1950s/1960s London, prismed through mercurial and talented Indian émigré Max. A sumptuous swirl of memory, invention, and beautifully hewn imagery, the novel is a glorious homage to the writer’s British youth, spanning his education, his lost loves, to his passion for the titular gardens, reimagined with the painterly panache in the manner of V. Woolf and the other modernist masters. Ghose truly has been an underappreciated writer, often a footnote in the saga of B.S. Johnson, but his novels form a delightful canon of wit, adventure, formal play, and a real lust for life and language. Read some Ghose in 2022, you shirker, you....more
A.I. Blyth is an esteemed translator of many stylistically complex Romanian authors, among them Cărtărescu, Tsepeneag, and Pârvulescu, a master of theA.I. Blyth is an esteemed translator of many stylistically complex Romanian authors, among them Cărtărescu, Tsepeneag, and Pârvulescu, a master of the art of inventive translation, bringing a funky froufrou to his fabulous Englishings of numerous classics. If you consider the art of translation a form of imaginative collusion between author and translator, rather than a painful exercise in precise transliteration, then Blyth is the man for you, and shares that honour with the likes of Michael Henry Heim, Barbara Wright, and David Bellos. In his first novel, an unnamed narrator limns the history of Obmanschi, a forgotten Romanian avant-garde writer whose catalogue of trivia from the Russian classics is explored in short prose fragments, plumbing the works of Gogol, Goncharov, and Dostovesky for factoids on the presence of cockroaches, books-within-books, and yellowish imagery. An erudite, Borgesian puzzle-novel, pocked with recondite oddities and lists, Card Catalogue is a strange homage to the sexy corners of literary obscurity and an eccentric paean to the Russian masters....more
In 2016, a former schoolteacher walks into a pizza place to expose a basement paedophile ring and ends up unloading into another gunman. This act is cIn 2016, a former schoolteacher walks into a pizza place to expose a basement paedophile ring and ends up unloading into another gunman. This act is co-opted as valour by the right and turned into a hellish hashtag, forcing a form of anti-fame on our protagonist in the murky, deranged world of contemporary America. An intelligent and ambitious attempt to unpick the Gordion knots of incoherent rage that have led to the upsurge in Incel-related murders and the uptake in QAnon theories, told from the perspectives of the educated and uneducated redpilled, Chon creates a grim and despairing portrait of a broken country, a “crippled America” losing limbs hour by hour, as the fundamentals of compassion, comradeship, and common purpose spin off into the blackness of space. Chon’s novel is an intense series of character studies, a work of frequent wit, caustic dialogue, and painfully observed blackly comic episodes. Released in a few months from the explosive Sagging Meniscus. ...more
Shameless socialite and inveterate schmoozer Marvin Cohen returns with a series of paeans to living, loving and partygoing. Compiled from various publShameless socialite and inveterate schmoozer Marvin Cohen returns with a series of paeans to living, loving and partygoing. Compiled from various published and unpublished writings on the theme over Cohen’s seven decades of writing, this collection is a sparkling bacchanal of wit and strange, swingin’ sentence structure and logical loop-de-loops familar to fans of the Marv. In ‘The Dullest Party Imaginable’ all attempts to revivify a lumpen unhappening fall flat, in ‘Being Fabulous’ the narrator ponders the merits of showiness over weirdness, and in the sublime ‘Josephine’s Literary Choice’ a bookworm enrobed in books has her revenge over an envious unliterary lover. Each tale here has Marv’s trademark Marvellousness, his precision for off-kilter metaphors and non sequiturs, and warm-hearted joie de vivre. The collection ends with an interview by Justine de Lacy from 1980, a fitting snapshot of the man whose incorrigible personality is hewn through every charming clause in this essential new collection. ...more
I was struck by what an honest account of Theroux fandom this was. It immediately put me in mind of Roger Lewis's tMy email to Moore re: A Fan's Notes
I was struck by what an honest account of Theroux fandom this was. It immediately put me in mind of Roger Lewis's tempestuous bios of Peter Sellers and Anthony Burgess, where a granular probing of the men themselves leads to huge internal conflicts on their subjects.
I also found admirable this honesty, as Theroux is an author hostile to hostile remarks on his work, although eager to sling barbs around willy-nilly, so the very carefully considered, and no doubt possibly painful or problematical for you to write, insights into the contradictions and contrarianisms of AT were refreshing. At no point either was any personal animus towards AT based on your relations apparent, as it is in Theroux's baroque unspoolings of revenge. The tone is entirely of someone desperately seeking another Darconville, watching an author unable to control the monstrous range of his vast talent alongside his own monstrous rage. Your compassion for what Theroux could have achieved is well-felt. You also demonstrate, in your factoid-packed homages (as in 'The Brothers Theroux') a more controlled attitude to trivia, which serves as an elegant rebuke.
There's a tendency to invoke the Peter Cook fallacy, that Theroux somehow squandered his genius, that he was engulfed by his own encyclopaedic enthusiasms (I'm more fond of the factoid books than you, although I would swap them all for another novel), but as you make clear, the eccentric, utterly unique approach of Theroux gives him his Therouvianity, or Therouxitude, and your praise sings sweetly on the prose.
The book is a fabulous burrowing into the personal shortcomings that have hindered Theroux ( I find the Menippean mayhem, the wildly comic monsterings of people hilarious, but you correctly identify when this biliousness drifts from art to mere pettiness), and really works as a partial biography, along with a robust critical rogering of his oeuvre. I thoroughly enjoyed the whole experience....more
In equal turns marvellous and exasperating, Summer concludes Smith’s triumphant seasonal quartet in frustrating fashion. Precocious teens and pre-teenIn equal turns marvellous and exasperating, Summer concludes Smith’s triumphant seasonal quartet in frustrating fashion. Precocious teens and pre-teens are a constant fixture in Smith’s novels, and in Summer the reader is served a plump platter of teens having endless, zingy, meaningful and poetic discourses on the nature of words and Einstein and the climate and immigration and so on and so on. These discourses also spill over into the adult conversation where a series of Ali Smiths discourse with other Ali Smiths in the style of Ali Smith on the literary and philosophical associations that occur to Ali Smith. The cumulative effect of these dialogues forced this reader reflect on how irritating and self-indulgent the hyper-educated can appear when compelled to out-smart, out-observe, and out-poeticise the other, making these characters a frequently frustrating bunch around which to congregate one’s eyeballs. The novel is something of a thematic mishmash—a pile-up of zeitgeist concerns explored in chatty, digressive scenes, with a powerful narrative set among British internment camps in the centre that provides a stark contrast to the singular vileness of modern Britannia....more
