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Having intended, at one time, to read the books of Philip Roth in order of publication, a brick wall was soon hit with second book, Letting Go, Roth’s first novel proper and still his largest to date. It just went on and on, never serving up the satisfation of progress. Now, with that reading goal abandoned, it’s open season on Roth. But where to begin? In the end, I went for The Breast (1972), a thin slice of Roth that would hopefully whet the appetite for some more. Which it has.

The Breast is the first book in a trilogy involving Professor David Kepesh and is an extended short story that pays homage to Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Where Kafka’s classic follows the experiences of the unfortunate Gregor Samsa as he, following uneasy dreams, wakes to find himself changed into a large beetle, Kepesh, thanks to a suspected “hermaphroditic explosion of chromosomes, wakes from a coma to find himself turned into a female breast.

…a mammary gland such as only could appear, one would have thought, in a dream or a Dali painting. They tell me that I am now an organism with the general shape of a football, or a dirigible; I am said to be of a spongy consistency, weighing in at one hundred and fifty-five pounds (formerly I was one hundred and sixty-two), and measuring, still, six feet in length.

Quite why Kepesh has found himself transformed is very much an irrelevance — he simply has, and how he deals with it is the subject of the book. It’s to Roth’s credit that he takes the initial idea and runs with it, ticking off the possible thoughts that someone in this predicament may encounter and doing so in a serious, contemplative manner.

 Alas, what has happened to me is like nothing anyone has ever known: beyond understanding, beyond compassion, beyond comedy, though there are those, i know, who claim to be on the brink of some conclusive scientific explanation; and those, my faithful visitors, whose compassion is deeply felt, sorrowful and kind; and there are still others — there would have to be — out in the world who cannot help but laugh. And I, at times, am one with them: I understand, I have compassion, I see the joke.

Although his situation is ridiculous and consciously invites laughter, the comedy of The Breast comes not from Kepesh but from those around him. He mutters lewd requests to his nurse who talks over him, never acknowledging his advances; his doctor tries to move his life on as if nothing has happened, and his father, a retired innkeeper now wasting his days working the phones for his brother’s business, seems almost oblivious to the changes that have come over his son:

He comes to visit me once a week and seated in a chair that is drawn up close to my nipple, he recounts the current adventures of people who were our guests when I was a boy. Remember Abrams the milliner? Remember Cohen the chiropodist? Remember Rosenheim with the card tricks and the Cadillac? Yes, yes, yes, I think so. Well, this one is dying, this one has moved to California, this one has a son who has married an Egyptian. “How do you like that?” he says, “I didn’t even know they would allow that over there.” Oh, Dad, I think to say, wonders never cease…

As one may expect, a large breast isn’t going to do much moving around and so the narrative is, for the most part, internalising punctuated with recollections of memorable scenes. Beginning with the question of ‘why me?’ Kepesh’s journey continues logically until he tries to convice himself that he’s mad, that he’s in a mental ward. The question of sexual frustration, that human desire for sex that can never be sated, is a major part of Kepesh’s struggle — being an organ incapable of orgasm is a nightmare. But the pain of adapting to the transformation seems all the more tolerable when faced with the alternative:

…having been terrified of death since I was two, I have become entrenched in my hatred of it, have taken a position against death from which I cannot retreat just because This has happened to me. Horrible as This is, my oldest and most heartless enemy, Extinction, still strikes me as even worse. Then you will say, maybe This is not so horrible after all. Well, reader, you say that, if you want to. All I know is that I have been wanting not to die for so long, that I just can’t stop doing it overnight.

All around Kepesh are people intent on staying within the blandness of life. His girlfriend isn’t sexually adventurous, his doctor ignores the magnitude of events, and his father hovers over smalltalk. When pondering his situation, Kepesh questions a “churning longing” to be  –

…utterly and blessedly helpless, to be a big brainless bag of tissue, desirable, dumb, passive, immobile, acted upon instead of acting, hanging, there, as a breast hangs and is there.

– and this nicely captures the idea of accepting the daftness of life and just getting on with it. This is what Roth is scrutinising in The Breast, and he successfully milks it for all it’s worth.

It’s unfortunate that Roberto Bolaño isn’t around to see his star in the ascendency in the English speaking world, following on from the acclaim given to recent translations, The Savage Detectives and 2666. The English translations began in 2003, the year of his death, with Chris Andrews’ translation of By Night In Chile (2000). And the translations are set to continue with more books - novels, short stories, and essays - scheduled to appear in the next year. What makes the volume of work surprising is that Bolaño turned to fiction late in his life, before passing away at fifty.

By Night In Chile is the feverish confession of Father Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix, a Chilean priest, literary critic, and poet with a shady past. Believing himself to be dying, he sets out one night to recall the major events of his life, relentlessly delivering his story as a lengthy rant wrapped up in a single paragraph. A paragraph that runs for a 130 pages. A contender, perhaps, for the longest known ‘famous last words’.

Father Urrutia begins his confession:

One has to be responsible, as I have always said. One has a moral obligation to take responsibility for one’s actions, and that includes one’s words and silences, yes, one’s silences, because silences rise to heaven too, and God hears them, and only God understands and judges them, so one must be very careful with one’s silences. I am responsible in every way. My silences are immaculate. Let me make that clear.

With all his talk of taking responsibility and mention of silences, we are immediately alerted that we are in conversation with an unreliable narrator and that we are going to have to tread carefully as he “rummage[s] through [his] memories to turn up the deeds that shall vindicate [him]”. Quite what those deeds are maintain interest as the narrative takes us on a dizzying journey from receiving God’s call at age thirteen through the political turmoil that affected Chile in the 1970s.

The moments recalled are extremely vivid. We spend some time with Farewell, “Chile’s greatest literary critic”, as Urrutia learns his craft and comes into contact with some figures of Chilean letters, such as Salvador Reyes and Pablo Neruda. There’s an extended piece where Opus Dei sends him to Europe to report back on the methods used to preserve dilapidated churches and finds pigeons are at the heart of the problem. The solution appears to be falconry, with many of the Old World priests adept in the art, an art which presages the impending Pinochet regime. Its delivery comes as a prose poem that, as befits Father Urrutia’s lyrical and feverish mind, lingers long and indecisive on details in a stream of consciousness, such as this example from a visit to Avignon:

Ta Gueule appeared again like a lightning bolt, or the abstract idea of a lightning bolt, and stooped on the huge flocks of starlings coming out of the west like swarms of flies, darkening the sky with their erratic fluttering, and after a few minutes the fluttering of the starlings was bloodied, scattered and bloodied, and afternoon on the outskirts of Avignon took on a deep red hue, like the colour of sunsets seen from an aeroplane, or the colour of dawns, when the passenger is woken gently by the engines whistling in his ears and lifts up the little blind and sees the horizon marked with a red line, like the planet’s femoral artery, or the planet’s aorta, gradually swelling, and I saw that swelling blood vessel in the sky over Avignon, the blood-stained flight of the starlings, Ta Gueule splashing colour like an abstract expressionist painter, ah, the peace, the harmony of nature, nowhere as evident or as unequivocal as in Avignon, and then Fr Fabrice whistled and we waited for an indefinable time, measured only by thebeating of our hearts, until our quivering warrior came to rest upon his arm.

Long sentences like this are par for the course in By Night In Chile, but are not the only means of expression. Bolaño changes the style throughout, throwing in patches of terse sentences to juxtapose the longer, recanting conversations (”And Farewell said:….And I:…”) without getting annoying, and hitting the reader with a salvo of Urrutia’s rhetorical questions. The book may be a single paragraph, but its patchwork of styles keep it engaging throughout.

Bolaño’s focus for the novel is the literary intelligentsia of Chile, as epitomised by Father Urrutia. When drafted to lecture the newly formed junta on Marxism, so that they may know their enemies better:

Was it all right? Did they learn anything? Did I teach them anything? Did I do what I had to do? Did I do what I ought to have done? Is Marxism a kind of humanism? Or a diabolical theory? If I told my literary friends what I had done, would they approve? Would some condemn my actions out of hand? Would some understand and forgive me? Is it always possible for a man to know what is good and what is bad? […] Then, before I knew it, I was asleep.

With misplaced concern - look how long his questions keep him awake! - Urrutia’s path to self-denial continues as he seeks to prove he has done nothing wrong, all the while haunted by his conscience which he fears because it tries to make him address the truth. His self-assuredness of innocence does create doubt and he constantly seeks assurance:

Farewell, I whispered. Did I do the right thing or not? And since there was no reply, I repeated the question: Did I do my duty, or did I go beyond it? And Farewell replied with another question: Was it a necessary or an unnecessary course of action? Necessary, necessary, necessary, I said.

The scorn for the literary class of Chile comes in their inactivity under Pinochet’s regime. All around them people were being tortured and killed and the writers did nothing. They never rebelled. What should have been happening by night in Chile didn’t happen.

We were bored. We read and we got bored. We intellectuals. Because you can’t read all day and all night. You can’t write all day and all night. Splendid isolation has never been our style, and back then, as now, Chilean artists and writers need to gather and talk, ideally in a pleasant setting where they could find intelligent company. Apart from the inescapable fact that many of the old crowd had left the country for reasons that were often more personal than political, the main difficulty was the curfew. Where could the artists and intellectuals meet if everywhere was shut after ten at night, for, as everyone knows, night is the most propitious time for getting together and enjoying a little unbuttoned conversation with one’s peers. Artists and writers. Strange times.

While By Night In Chile is a powerful rant by Urrutia about defending his complicity in what transpired amongst Chilean writers, Bolaño’s subtext is a condemnation of such actions. During one crucial incident the priest notes that “all horrors are dulled by routine”. That may well be true, but the engaging way Bolaño maintains the narrative ensures that the horrors of silence are in no way, as the priest begins his account, immaculate.

Regular readers of this site are no doubt sick of the mention of Gilbert Adair, given that he’s the most reviewed writer here and I’ve already reviewed the brilliant The Death Of The Author this month. Bear with me, though, for there’s not much of his fiction to go before I can begin to pester with another obsession.

The thing with Adair is that there’s no real consistency to his books. After enjoying the postmodern murder mystery of The Act Of Roger Murgatroyd, he followed it with the lesser A Mysterious Affair Of Style; similarly the high of The Death Of The Author was followed by The Key Of The Tower (1997), arguably the weakest in his ouevre.

Dud or not, reading Adair’s prose is always a delight, purely for the unashamed fun he has with wordplay and subverting expectations. Reading him is always like sitting down to listen to an old friend that you don’t quite trust.

Where other Adair novels wear their literary influences on their sleeve, the obvious comparison for The Key To The Tower is not to be found in books, but movies. Hitchcock’, especially. From the off Adair sets up a scene that wouldn’t be out of place in one of Hitch’s features: two cars on a road in Brittany, both halted by a fallen tree. One of the drivers is Guy Lantern, on holiday from England in his second-hand Mini; the other, in his Rolls-Royce, is Jean-Marc Cheret, a wealthy art dealer. On deciding that the only logical choice is to swap cars and drive off to their intended destinations, meeting up three days hence, they exchange car keys and the story begins.

Cheret disappears from the picture for the novel is narrated by Guy Lantern, the man in the Mini. Continuing on, he reaches where he was headed: the small town of Saint-Malo. After a comedy of errors, Lantern meets Cheret’s wife,  Béa.

Am I, I couldn’t resist putting to myself, am I going to fall in love with her? What a fantasy! It was absurd and puerile and yet…and yet, apart from the unique set of circumstances of our meeting, the romantically corny lightning flash (fate’s patented trademark, its tired old logo) and the swapping of cars, my excuse, my sole excuse, for thinking such a thought was the fact, the indisputable fact, that we all of us lead a double life. No one can monitor our loves and lusts. No one can set police dogs sniffing around the insides of our brains. Sexual attraction is what cosmologists term a singularity. It’s the black hole of the psyche, where the priorities of the realist imperative no longer apply. In my head at least, I told myself, I could do as I pleased.

Ah, the priorities of the realist imperative need no longer apply. It’s a fitting line to throw into the narrative, as it carries a second meaning - it refers to the narrative itself, because from this point onward, what had been a suspenseful and psychological thriller, à la Hitchcock, descends into a whimsical catalogue of unbelievable events, actions, and dialogue.

The basic premise centres around Lantern becoming innocently embroiled in an illicit art trade. It’s pure parody, with knowing winks aplenty, and a range of characters so over the top - like a gangster who uses Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu as his Bible - as to undermine the initial seriousness of the book: the suspense is wrung out, the characters lose dimensions as the pages turn. Even the way in which Lantern learns of the crime he’s involved is done in that clichéd style where the criminal delights in having their misplaced genius accounted for:

Béa nodded - and again, I had the feeling that she was willing me on, wanting me to know that I was getting warm, nodding only in acknowledgement of what I had already found out but as if encouraging me on to ever further revelations, drawing each new fragment of truth out of me as, clue by clue, some general-knowledge staple - please sir, 1066 - may be drawn out of a schoolchild.

In all, The Key Of The Tower is a book of halves, strictly divided by the fall of a tree, be they plot points or the structure itself. While the notion of Adair doing Hitchcock is novel, his drive to parody the genre comes off wanting, and I have no doubt that if he’d stuck to maintaining the atmosphere and suspense then a better novel may have appeared. It now seems, however, that when Adair touches on Hitch (Alistair Farjeon in A Mysterious Affair Of Style is pretty much him in all but name) it may just be best to avoid.

But, damn him, there’s no way you can avoid him because, at his best or not, he’s just so readable as to almost forgive him. At the start of the novel there’s a long description of the Mini’s windscreen wipers, with the occasional snatch of the road ahead. While it primarily relates to Lantern’s journey through Brittany, it’s also reads as a clever portent for the reader.

And at those brief moments when the windscreen had been wiped clear, and before a brand new rash of raindrops erupted, it would come as a slight but real surprise, it would even obscurely disappoint me, that the scenery hadn’t meanwhile been shifted and that the dark mute road in front of me remained unaltered, with only an occasional signpost, preternaturally aglow in the gloom, to attest that I had made any headway.

Come the end of The Key Of The Tower, having barely had the rug pulled out from under itself, the scenery hasn’t shifted, the road is unaltered, and aside from a nod here and there, there’s little to recommend it. He’s right, though, that does come as a surprise.

With the recent Olympics in Beijing, and partly inspired by the way book stores used this event to cram their promotional shelves with Chinese fiction, I thought it would be good to read a book from China since I hadn’t done so since enjoying Bi Feiyu’s delightful The Moon Opera. Given that the many of the headlines, especially in the lead up to the games, centred around the world tour of the Olympic torch being regularly threatened by protestors, a book that dealt with the subject of their protests sounded good. That would be Tibet, then.

Having never stepped foot inside Tibet - I’m sure most protestors haven’t clocked up the Air Miles either - my ready image of it is probably no different to that of others: of a quiet, meditative mountainscape disturbed only by the wash of monastery bells and Buddhist chants soft on the breeze. It’s the perfect postcard, this Tibet we want to see, and perhaps always will see unless we have experience it for ourselves.

Such is the point of Ma Jian’s Stick Out Your Tongue (1987), a slim volume of short stories that, as he notes in his afterword, sought to cut through the idealism of Tibet and give the people back their humanity. Banned in China as a “vulgar and obscene book that defames the image of our Tibetan compatriots”, it led to Jian’s exile from China. In a way exile may have been welcomed, as it was China that initially drove him to Tibet:

As my bus left the crowded plains of China and ascended to the clear heights of Tibet, I felt a sense of relief. I hoped that here at last I’d find a refuge from the soulless society that China had become. I wanted to escape into a different landscape and culture, and gain a deeper insight into my Buddhist faith.

For Buddhist faith, where else but Tibet, because:

In Tibet, religion permeates every grain of earth. Man and God are inseperable, myth and legend are intertwined. People there have endured sufferings that are beyond the comprehension of the modern world. I am writing down this story now in the hope that I can start to forget it.

What’s for sure is that if Jian can begin to forget the events told here, the reader certainly won’t. Each story follows a loose progression through Tibet, with Jian mentioning the people, stories and traditions he encounters, each told in a matter-of-fact style, such as the sky burial in the opening tale:

The burial master hacks all the flesh from the corpse and slices it into small pieces. He grinds the bones into a fine powder and adds some water to form a paste. (If the bones are young and soft, he will thicken it with ground barley.) He then feeds the paste, together with the flesh, to the surrounding hawks and vultures.

By not moralising over what he sees Jian allows the reader to form their own opinions about Tibetan societies on topics such as death, poverty, incest, and more, with the author noting in his afterward, “my idyll of a simple life lived close to nature was broken when I realised how dehumanising extreme hardship can be.”

In showing this darker side of Tibet, Jian still manages to keep a fine balance, offering up descriptions of the landscape, all mist and mountains, that bring the region to life:

The mountain was silent. Hawks and vultures sat perched on the summit. In the valley below, ribbons of mist rose from Yamdrok and rolled into a single sheet that slowly covered the entire lake. The mist thickened and spread, rising and falling like the chest of a woman breathing, drifting higher and higher until it veiled the blood-red sun.

That such inhumane acts occur in this beautiful place only hammers home the effect of the stories in Stick Out Your Tongue. The question, though, is to what extent it is all true. Yes, it’s fiction, but there’s a sense of travelogue here, and the afterward readily discusses what drove Jian to Tibet. But, as the author says, his account is not without the possibility of being unreliable:

From a distance, the wastes of the high plateau had a hypnotic beauty. But after I had trudged across them for days on end, the emptiness became stupefying. I lost all sense of reality and travelled as though in a trance. In the thin mountain air, it was hard to distinguish fact from fantasy. My mind was tormented by visions of Buddhist deities and memories of home.

In one of the stories there is a young lady, the focus of many a tossed stone, and when she sensed someone watching, “and didn’t throw anything at her, she would stick out her tongue in greeting.” As a greeting it may well be, but the title of the collection comes from the feeling of being “empty and helpless, as pathetic as a patient who sticks out his tongue and begs his doctor to diagnose what’s wrong with him.” In this book, Tibet sticks out its tongue, in greeting and in illness, allowing us into its postcard world, but unable to form a definite prognosis.

Here begins my Roth odyssey. And where better to start than the beginning? So, with that obvious logic in mind, the first in an oeuvre spanning twenty-eight books (a mix of fiction and non-ficton; of standalone and series novels) is Goodbye, Columbus (1959), a novella of around one hundred pages that won the National Book Award in 1960. Bundled with it are five more short stories, each complementing the greater work in theme and style. One may assume by its length that this was Roth stepping up, stretching those muscles in search of a novel.

In reading around the book it’s interesting to note that it caused controversy in its day for the unflattering portrayal of some Jewish characters. But with Roth himself coming from a Jewish background, and the stories showing hints of autobiography, it would seem he was at least in a position to be critical about the Jewish lifestyle. Of particular delight, is that in almost fifty years it has lost none of its bite.

In Goodbye, Columbus there’s a young Negro who comes regularly to the library where Neil Klugman works and sits each time with a book of Paul Gaugin’s exotic paintings, dreaming of Tahiti (”That ain’t no place you could go, is it?”). It’s a fitting metaphor for the novella’s main focus, the summer relationship between Neil, a poor boy from Newark, and Brenda Patimkin, a spoiled girl whose father, having laboured at his business, has moved the family on up from Newark to an affluent suburb.

Neil gets invited to the local country club twice: first by his cousin, where he meets Brenda; then by Brenda herself, after asking her out. Despite their social differences, they come together - Brenda doesn’t ask many questions - and find their fondness for each other growing:

We came back to the chairs now and then and sang hesitant, clever, nervous, gentle dithyrambs about how we were beginning to feel towards one another. Actually we did not have the feelings we said we had until we spoke them - at least I didn’t; to phrase them was to invent them and own them. We whipped our strangeness and newness into a froth that resembled love, and we dared not play too long with it, talk too much of it, or it would flatten and fizzle away.

That the froth only resembled love is no doubt fitting for this coming of age story. Given the frequency with which they engage in sex in her parent’s house, it’s clear that lust is more appropriate. Regardless, it fills a summer. But all good things come to an end and the ultimate breaker in the relationship is perhaps dated for readers of a more promiscuous age, eliciting more shoulder shrug than shock. Nevertheless, one can’t forget the novella is of its own time and, riding a wave of strong writing and excellent dialogue, it does it well.

The coming of age theme is reflected by way of Brenda’s athletic brother, Ron, introduced in said pool “like a crew-cut Proteus rising from the sea.” Ron’s at that stage in life where marriage is on the mind, but he’s nostaligic, looking back to past glories. Aside from music, his favourite record is a recording of his last day at school (”‘Big Ron’s last game, and it’ll be some time before Buckeye fans forget him’”) in which a voice offers a rallying cry to the university, reflecting on growing up:

“For many this will be their last glimpse of the campus, of Columbus, for many many years. Life calls us, and anxiously if not nervously we walk out into the world and away from the pleasures of these ivied walls. But not from its memories. They will be the concomitant, if not the fundament, of our lives. We shall choose husbands and wives, we shall choose jobs and homes, we shall sire children and grandchildren, but we will not forget you, Ohio State. “

Walking out into the world echoes the other major thread running through Goodbye, Columbus: assimilation. The Patimkin’s are a Jewish family and while they try hard to maintain their traditions, they find themselves, at the same time, trying to hide their heritage. The father thinks nothing of paying thousands to have the bend in his childrens’ noses fixed. Ultimately, Neil, a lapsed Jew, can’t assimilate into this family and, like Ron’s class of ‘57, it’s time to leave. “No sense carrying dreams of Tahiti in your head, if you can’t afford the fare.”

Of the other stories, each tackles contemporary issues of post-war Jewish life, mirroring Goodbye, Columbus’ notion of assimilation. The Conversion Of The Jews, about a young boy who questions Jewish teaching, is an obvious standout for its controversial conclusion, but it’s Defender Of The Faith, about a Jewish sergeant trying to help other Jewish soldiers under his command with their army life, that feels more complete. The others are lesser players, the final, Eli, The Fanatic, proving itself predictable and an unsatisfactory ending to the whole package. But while it’s Goodbye, Columbus, it’s hello to me, this new explorer on the sea of Roth.

Love him or hate him for his outspoken views on this, that, and the other, you can’t deny that Martin Amis has a way with words. And I say this having read very little of his work, namely Time’s Arrow and his essay collection, The War Against Cliché. So, wanting to return to some more of his fiction, it was a case of boarding the Night Train (1997), knowing little of what the novel was going to be about or where it was going to take me.

But knowing little of the novel’s content is different from knowing about the novel’s story, and especially its reception; and, in this case, Night Train is one of those that split opinion. Not for the story, the themes, or shock tactics, but for Amis’ choice of narrator: an American. Of course it’s not as simple to just make your character American and tell the story. The voice must carry authenticity.

And he begins with an attention grabbing paragraph so strange that it makes the reader questions whether, from the off, he has ever heard an American speak:

I am a police. That may sound like an unusual statement - or an unusual construction. But it’s a parlance we have. Among ourselves, we would never say I am a policeman or I am a policewoman or I am a police officer. We would just say I am a police. I am a police. I am a police and my name is Detective Mike Hoolihan. And I am a woman, also.

Yes, as if it isn’t a hard enough task for a non-native to achieve an American voice, Amis makes his narrator female, too. But Mike Hoolihan isn’t all that feminine. In fact she’s rather masculine, her voice gravelled by years of smoking; and legs like “road drills on castors.”

As a police, Mike has worked her way up from the beat through robbery units, plainclothes assignments, and, notably, homicide for eight years (”I was a murder police.”). Nowadays, thanks to a drink problem, and subsequent illness, she’s assigned to Asset Forfeiture. But her skills in the field are very much in demand, as she finds when her superior’s daughter, Jennifer Rockwell, has seemingly committed suicide. Of course, murder is suspected:

Make no mistake, we would see it if it was there- because we want suicides to be homicide. We would infinitely prefer it. A made homicide means overtime, a clearance stat, and high fives in the squadroom. And a suicide is no damn use to anyone.

The investigation into Jennifer Rockwell (”Guys? She combed them out of her hair…”) turns up a number of suspects, notably her partner, Trader Faulkner. But the novel keeps coming round to the notion of suicide. In fact, to disprove suicide becomes the name of the game, as Mike’s boss pushes her to get the conclusion he needs:

His head vibrated, his head actually trembled to terrible imaginings. Imaginings he wanted and needed to be true. Because any outcome, yes, any at all, rape, mutilation, dismemberment, cannibalism, marathon tortures of Chinese ingenuity, of Afghan lavishness, any outcome was better than the other thing. Which was his daughter putting the .22 in her mouth and pulling the trigger.

As Jennifer would have known, through her career as an astrophysicist, the world moves in mysterious ways. How could a woman who had no grievances and no enemies take her own life? It could never make sense. Such is the relevance of chaos in human nature, allowing for interruptions in the determined universe. And Night Train takes time to call at such stations, exploring the universe; or Mike’s way of interpreting it:

Suicide is the night train, speeding your way to darkness. You won’t get there so quick, not by natural means. You buy your ticket and you climb aboard. That ticket costs everything you have. But it’s just one way. This train takes you into the night, and leaves you there. It’s the night train.

But does Amis succeed with his voice? Mostly. There are moments where his sentence structures seem alien to written English, never mind spoken. Beginning sentences with ‘too’, for example. But much of the book bears a considered authenticity. And it can be feminine, especially when discussing men:

Murders are men’s work. Men commit them, men clean up after them, men solve them, men try them. Because men like violence. Women really don’t figure that much, except as victims, and among the bereaved, of course, and as witnesses.

It’s a grim piece of work, Night Train, taking Amis’s punchy prose into the realms of noir fiction and it manages to make the crime genre a more interesting place.  In its attempt to understand people, their motivations, and the fear of not knowing, the novel goes to dark places. But that’s the nature of Night Train. Luckily, this novel is worthy of further reading, so it guarantees a return.

It’s a little early to be calling, as the cover boldly declares, Snakes & Earrings (2004) by Hitomi Kanehara a “cult classic”, but within its pages there’s enough to warrant it, one day, being recognised as such. It already has one major Japanese award to its name, the Akutagawa prize, making Kanehara, along with Risa Wataya, the youngest winners since it was launched in 1935. On the judging panel in 2003, it’s little surprise to find, was Ryu Murakami, a cult name himself and, going on the basis of his novel Piercing, Kanehara’s line in outsiders and sado-fantasy is much akin to his own.

Teling the story in Snakes & Earrings is Lui, a nineteen year old Barbie-girl (or kogal) who is bored with a life that is “little more than a pastiche of drunken moments”. One day, in a bar, unsurprisingly, she meets a punk called Ama and is immediately drawn to his forked tongue, a feature achieved through the art of body modification:

Apparently, you begin by getting your tongue pierced. You then gradually enlarge the hole by inserting bigger and bigger tongue rings. Then, when the hole has been stretched to a certain size, you tie dental floss or fishing line in tight loops running from the hole down the middle of the tongue. Finally, you cut the remaining part of the tongue that’s still connected using either a scalpel or a razor-blade. In fact some people don’t even bother going through the whole pierce-and-tie process at all - they just slice their tongue in two with a scalpel.

To Lui it’s an enticing idea and Ama takes her to Desire, “a kind of punk/alternative store in a side-street basement”, to have her tongue pierced by Shiba-san. But tongue piercing is not enough and Lui urges Shiba-san to design her a tattoo. She settles on one depicting two mythical beasts, a dragon and a kirin. The choice of these creatures runs parallel to the love triangle she gets involved in, for Ama has a tattoo of a dragon, Shiba-san the other.

As to why Lui would suddenly make these decisions about her body, there’s little explanation given. With disaffected youth, however, the most minimal of reasons is reason enough:

All I wanted was to be part of an underground world where the sun doesn’t shine, there are no love songs, and the sound of children’s laughter is never, ever heard.

Both of the men in Lui’s life are extremists of a sort. Ama has a short fuse and in one early scene beats up a man, leaving him for dead, for touching Lui. Shiba-san is a sadist, pure and simple, with a preference for choking people. Being with these guys at different times is all the rush that Lui needs: be it the education of her new subculture, of sex, of pain. Although she’s still very much alive, her self-concern is so far gone that she may as well be dead. Indeed, she acts as if she is, with respect to her body:

They do say dead men tell no tales after all. In which case, surely there’s nothing more meaningless than not being able to give an opinion on anything. It makes me wonder why people fork out fortunes to pay for tombstones. I mean, for me, I’ve got absolutely no interest in my body if my mind no longer lives in it. I couldn’t care less if it was eaten by dogs.

The triangle between Lui and her men develops, with both expressing their love for her. And when events hit crisis point, she is able to move on, finding comfort in her new tattoo:

Possession can be such a hassle, and yet we are still driven by the desire to possess people and things. Maybe it appeals to the masochist and sadist in every one of us. As for me, I knew that the dragon and Kirin on my back would always be with me. They’d never betray me and I would never betray them.

In reading Snakes & Earrings it feels like Kanehara is out to shock rather than say anything. People come and go in her book, saying little of note. It’s told in a graphic style, with explicit scenes of sex, violence, and humiliation. The sad thing is, however, that what could have been an interesting eye-opener into a subculture, providing an opportunity to express why people turn to body modification, is no more than skin deep.

It has been a couple of years since I first read Italo Calvino, picking up his wonderful if on a winter’s night a traveler on a whim and being captivated by its self-referential opening sentence. In the time since I’ve had a couple of half-hearted stabs at reading more (Invisible Cities and Mr. Palomar) but I’ve never really engaged with anything else. So, picking up The Castle Of Crossed Destinies (1977), I had my fingers crossed that it would be third time lucky for a resurrection in my Calvino interest.

The book is formed from two previously published collections, one named after this book, the other named The Tavern Of Crossed Destinies. In each Calvino delivers a series of short tales inspired by the laying out of tarot cards in horizontal and vertical patterns, interpreting them into the story, and with a print of each card, as they are evoked, running down the margins. It’s a wonderful idea, but despite its innovation I was never fully hooked.

The book is told within the frame of a disparate bunch staying a night in a castle and telling their stories through tarot cards, for they are mysteriously mute. The first series are based off tales, as Calvino thankfully notes in the afterword, from Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, which I would never have guessed. As it’s a literary experiment, the first two were solidly structured, while those that followed were given up to fate. After all, what matter the cards that fall? Especially when, as Calvino expertly illustrates, each of the seventy-eight tarot cards offers up a multitude of interpretations:

The narrator, in fact, had begun arranging other cards in a new row, beside the first, on the left; he set down two cards, The Empress and the Eight of Cups. The sudden change of scene disconcerted us for a moment; but the solution quickly asserted itself, I believe, to us all, and it was that the knight had finally found what he had been seeking, a wealthy bride of high lineage, such as we saw depicted there, a crowned head, indeed, with her family shield and her insipid face - also slightly older than he, as the more malicious amongst us surely noted - in a dress all embroidered in linked rings as if to say, “Marry me, marry me.” An invitation promptly accepted, since the Cups card suggested a wedding banquet, with two rows of guests toasting the couple at the end of the festooned table.

So what this first set brings to the page is a gathering of Renaissance archetypes - the alchemist, the knight, etc. - and in the end all these stories overlap, leading to a larger number of permutations of the cards as yet untold. The second section follows suit, this time interpreting the cards as they land on the table as a palimpsest of classic tales: of Faust; of Oedipus; de Sade’s Justine. And from there, onwards, as Calvino tries to tell his story, and further still into an entertaining take on Shakespeare’s tragedies - Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth - all told from the same cards.

As an experiment, the concept works well and brings innovation to fiction, but as a work of fiction, despite the lovely translation by William Weaver, it’s a lack-lustre affair. The wow factor has gone by the end of the first collection and one can thank the fates that the author didn’t make good on his notion to pen a third installment. But it’s great to see how Calvino works his way from a single image and ascribes several meanings to it, as if he’s tossing a coin and calling tales every time.

Some books seem to capture the imagination and transcend the boundaries of fiction. Susan Hill’s The Woman In Black would appear to be one such novel, given that it’s been adapted for both stage and screen. In fact, the stage version has been playing in London for almost twenty years. There must be something about it that makes it such an enduring tale, so I decided to find out.

It begins with an elderly man, name of Arthur Kipps, listening to his stepchildren share ghost tales one Christmas Eve, as per tradition. When pressed to share his own story, he refuses. And then the narration reflects back to when Kipps was a junior solicitor and was sent to represent the firm at the funeral of a Mrs Alice Drablow, and, in the absence of heirs, to subsequently sift through her papers for information relevant to the now uninhabited property.

On arriving in the coastal town of Crythin Gifford Kipps finds the locals secretive, and it’s obvious they know more than they let on. Although he’s staying at a local inn, he finds himself spending most of his time at Eel Marsh House, Drablow’s creepy old home on an offshore island accessible only when the tide is recedes. And when Kipps represents the firm at Drablow’s funeral, he sights a mysterious mourner, a woman all in black, which leads the novel, and its main character, along a supernatural path culminating in a dramatic yet inevitable finale.

It’s no secret that Hill has returned to the stories of M.R. James when writing her ghost story, one of the chapters goes so far as to borrow a title. But thankfully, like the stories that open the novel, there’s little of the expected supernatural staples knowingly listed:

…of dripping stone walls in uninhabited castles and of ivy-clad monastery ruins by moonlight, of locked inner rooms and secret dungeons, dank charnel houses and overgrown graveyards, of footsteps creaking upon staircases and fingers tapping at casements, of howlings and shriekings, groanings and scuttlings and the clanking of chains…

What there is, then, is a slow burning sense of menace. Sure, there’s ghosts and some spooky goings on - and a town unwilling to speak about them - but its the pages between visitations as Kipps tries to makes sense of his predicament and try to understand why such other-wordly goings on are, well, going on. Needless to say, an explanation is given but this doesn’t weaken the story as it gives substance instead - and there’s still the question of how such things are possible. Like all good supernatural fiction, they just are.

Hill’s prose throughout maintains a gothic tone that superbly captures a post-war village distanced from the world at large where common sense comes after superstition. Characters, when asked straightforward questions, rightly pause during speech to give the needed sense of foreboding, the and descriptions are sorrow-tinged and abundant in adjectives without being unpalateble:

It was indeed a melancholy little service, with so few of us in the cold church, and I shivered as I thought once again how inexpressably sad it was that the ending of a whole human life, from birth and childhood, through adult maturity to extreme old age, should be here marked by no blood relative or heart’s friend, but only by two men connected by nothing more than business…

While The Woman In Black isn’t a groundbreaking piece of fiction - and it doesn’t set out to be - it certainly invigorates my interest in the supernatural. Its gothic atmosphere didn’t seem forced and although it was grim, in a perverse twist, I found it enjoyable. And although there’s no doubt a mountain of ghost stories out there to be read, I’m happy to start with a Hill or two.

Yukio Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea is a short novel but, due to its tight plot, brevity is not an issue. Published in 1963, seven years before he committed ritual suicide, the novel explores motivation and the factors that can cause someone to abandon their passions and resume their life embracing the dreams of another.

Noboru Kuroda, a thirteen year old on the cusp of an adult world, is part of a savage gang whose members, despite their exemplary grades at school, have rebelled against the adult world they deem hypocritical. Under the tutelage of Noboru’s friend, also thirteen, they condition themselves against sentimental feelings – a goal they call ‘objectivity’ - by killing stray cats.

Ryuji Tsukazaki, a merchant seaman, has been granted two days’ shore leave and has spent the time romancing Noboru’s widowed mother, Fusako. Noboru likes the sailor at first, his commitment to the sea and all the manly stories he has to tell. But, as Ryuji falls for Fusako, Noboru feels betrayed by the man’s burgeoning romanticism and, with the help of his gang, feels that action should be taken against the man who has replaced his father.

The first thing I noticed while reading this novel was that the characters are rich with life and history. Noboru, at thirteen, has strong feelings for his mother that manifest through voyeuristic sessions at night when, peeking into her room through a spy-hole, he watches her undress, entertain, and sleep. Ryuji, the sailor, knows he has some purpose at sea and continues his life off the land in the hope that one day he will learn his place in life. And Fusako, five years widowed, displays certain strength as she runs her own business, mixes with a richer class of citizen, while trying to raise he son as best she can.

The way the characters develop from this introduction is fast yet believable – the book, in fact, is split into two sections, Summer and Winter, to show that enough time has passed to be plausible. Noboru’s respect for Ryuji wanes as he becomes the worst thing, based on his gang’s beliefs, a man can be in this world: a father. Ryuji’s abandonment of his life’s passion is, of course, the main thread of the novel and it is a tragic decision he makes to give up the destiny waiting for him at sea in order to embrace the world of Fusako and the new direction she has planned for him.

The best thing about this novel is the language. The translator, John Nathan, has done a wonderful job and not a page passes without hitting you with a warm wash of sea-spray. Metaphors and similes are drenched with watery goodness as they add to the novel’s appeal. The prose is warm during the Summer section but as the book turns to Winter the turns of phrase become icier and tend to sting more. The dialogue is nice and realistic and doesn’t smart of stereotypical Japanese honour; the way the characters interact completely plausible.

I hadn’t heard of Mishima until I picked up this novel and, given that he had three Nobel nominations in his lifetime, I will certainly look out for more of his work. His concise prose, realistic characters, and the way his voice carries the sea makes him a rare find. If books were shells, I would hope to hear Mishima in every one.