booklit

Reif Larsen’s The Selected Works Of T.S. Spivet (2009) caused a bit of storm last year when the American rights were snapped up for almost a million dollars. Its interesting presentation and quirky delivery were no doubt a contributing factor, and it will see release in many more countries. One of those is of course the United Kingdom, where it has recently been published by Harvill-Secker, an imprint best suited to putting it on store shelves, producing as they do a fine line in hardbacks. (See here.)

What makes this particular novel special is that the novel is illustrated throughout with a variety of sketches and diagrams - some colour, some black and white - all drawn by the author, although credited to the eponymous T.S. Spivet. Presentation-wise, it’s a work of art, although it’s unconventional breadth may see it struggle to slot in easily to some book cases.

The novel focuses on Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet, a “12 year-old genius mapmaker”, as the blurb tells us, who lives with his family on a ranch in Montana. In what seems to be a family tradition of sorts, a woman of science has married a man of the land, and TS falls down squarely on his mother’s side as far as his intellectual development goes.  The maps he makes show all manner of observations, from how his sister, Gracie, shucks corn to the distribution of McDonalds in North Dakota.

…since Neolithic times we had been marking down representations on cave walls, in the dirt, on parchments, trees, lunch plates, napkins, even on our own skin so that we could remember where we have been, where we want to be going, where we should be going. There was a deep impulse ingrained in us to take these directions, coordinates, declarations out of the mush of our heads and actualize them in the real world. Since making my first maps of shaking hands with God, I had learned that the representation was not the real thing, but in a way this dissonance was what made it so good: the distance between the map and the territory allowed us breathing room to figure out where we stood.

Life on the farm is quite slow, so it’s with much relief that the narrative receives immediate propulsion from a phonecall informing TS that he has won a prestigious Baird Fellowship from the Smithsonian. His age unbeknownst to the institution, TS takes the decision to run away to Washington to deliver a speech and it’s this journey, of one young boy heading out into the world, that forms the backbone of The Selected Works Of TS Spivet.

In the mix of a journey and of a gifted child I was reminded of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-time, a children’s book about an autistic boy who takes a journey of his own to London. Not so much for the principal similarities, but by what’s learnt about the mothers of each child. TS, on making his way to Washington, steals one of his mother’s notebooks and learns more about her, and his family, than he previously knew, his trip becoming a journey of discovery in more ways than one.

When it comes to children as narrators I admit to having a bit of a bugbear about them being precocious, moreso in the hands of new writers. I think this stems from my viewing it as daft way to impart the character with a unique trait. After all, some of the better child narrators I’ve read - Holden Caulfield in The Catcher In The Rye or Paddy Clarke - have little to recommend them, yet their delivery, innocence, and frailty makes them memorable. Where those characters had believable voices, it’s hard to accept that any twelve year old, genius or not, would come up with phrasings like this:

I was no advertising expert, but in observing my own behavior in the vicinity of McDonalds, I had mapped out a working theory about how the place penetrates my permeable barrier of aesthetic longing, in a trio of multi-sensory persuasion:

Or this:

Did the true, umbilical love that binds people together for the rest of their lives require a certain intellectual dislocution in order to push past our insistent rationalization and enter the rough, uneven space inside our hearts?

Where TS Spivet’s delivery does work, however, is in the sidebars that accompany the text. While infuriated by the volume of footnotes in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, the lines leading off from the end of paragraphs to small paragraphs or diagrams at the side of the page is effective. Typically they fill in some more detail without upsetting the narrative, but the best ones are the occasional visual gags that do highlight the world of an inquisitive mind.

At one point in the novel TS highlights five types of boredom experienced by his sister. In reading this book I may have a case for a sixth because, for all its visual flair, the novel never truly captured my imagination. Not once could I say I was there, part of Spivet’s adventure, and not once could I say I believed in him as a character, no matter his eccentricities.

The last quarter of the book does pick up the pace and the heightened vocabulary noticably takes a backseat, but it all leads to a rather jarring sentimental affair at odds with the rest of the story. Even with all the maps in this book, it would seem there’s still the capacity to get lost. I’d like to say it may be a case of Larsen going back to the drawing board, but, then, there’s nothing wrong with his drawings.

When Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio was named laureate for the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature, I was like many others in wondering who? His standing in English speaking nations, save for a couple of low profile translations in the States, was practically non-existant. And this is an author who has published over forty books since his 1963 debut. It’s been a frustrating wait, then, for publishers in the UK to rush release some backlist titles into print. No doubt translators up and down the country are soldiering away at more of his works.

The citation of Le Clézio, by the Swedish Academy, described him as “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization”- a soup of intrigue, hinting at so much while retaining a cryptic aura. Having looked at the rereleased titles, Terra Amata (1968) seemed to best fit the citation. In fact, it doesn’t so much fit as describe it.

Terra Amata concerns itself with life on earth. It’s the story of Chancelade, looking at his unremarkable life and capturing all the detail and adventures he overlooked.

You’d never done playing all the games there were. A prisoner on the flat face of the earth, standing on your two legs with the sun beating down on your head and the rain falling drop by drop, you had all these extraordinary adventures without really knowing where you were going. A pawn - you were no more than a pawn on the giant chess-board, a disc that the expert invisible hand moved about in order to win the incomprehensible game.

The narrative drops by special points in Chancelade’s life, following from young boy to old man, then pushing beyond. We see the young Chancelade playing in the garden, God to a number of beetles. (”When the boy realized that he was the potato-bugs’ god, with absolute power of life and death over them, he decided to act.”) and teaching them a lesson. We experience his father’s death, follow his sexual development, witness him becoming a father, and ache with his old age.

Le Clézio’s delivery is a hyperreal tour de force, lush and dense, designed to obverload the senses. His focus is on the minute, regularly picking up on grains of sand, pebbles on beaches, and insects in their nests, inverting the microscopic worlds they inhabit to cosmic concerns. Questions of life and death occur, Chancelade occasionaly wrestling with his own mortality, echoes of which appear in the cigarettes he regularly smokes:

It was a perfect action, beautiful as a play. A tragic action. It had a beginning, when the spurting flame met the cigarette. A development, with unity of time, place and action. And when the cigarette was finished, the same hand that had lit it put it swiftly to death, crushing it against the side o the ashtray. And it was really rather as if you were dead yourself, extinguished, suffocated in your own ash, your inside quietly spilling out of your skin of torn paper.

What’s interesting about Le Clézio’s prose is that he is able to capture a new slant on looking at things. In life, everything is an adventure to be embraced full on. He sees objects strewn around as potential communiques between other entities - between men, animals, and the inanimate forces of nature. There’s a language in everything, and we see Chancelade explore this idea in some brief, yet tedious, episodes of Morse code, sign language, and a babelian stew of words.

While much is made of our time on earth, and how little we fully appreciate it, Le Clézio goes beyond humanity, exploring tens of thousands of years ahead to an enjoyable section in a museum, speculating about how we will be remembered, surprisingly quashing humankind’s achievements in favour of guesswork from archaeological digs, much like the conjecture about the real Terra Amata site in France.

Maldec man seems to have lived in communities, in tall concrete houses divided into rooms. His was essentially a working and fetishist civilization. Wars were frequent and deadly, as is proved by certain burial-places recently discovered. These wars were probably due to to racial or religious differences. The civiliation of Maldec man was also ritual, nationalist, and based on the family. It thus belongs to the polymorphic pre-desertic period, which lasted about 5,000 years. It may be that Maldec man was contemporary with the beginning of the great drought which occurred at that time and which caused his civilization to disappear.

Terra Amata, while living up to the aforementioned citation, is perhaps overlong. At just over two hundred pages, it easily feels like three or four hundred. The detail Le Clézio plunges into is often startling and wondrous, but there’s the feeling that he’s retreading the same ideas on occasion, just presenting them differently. There’s a metafictional thread running through the novel, especially evident in the prologue and epilogue, which brought to mind Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler, but doesn’t really bring much to the story itself.

Where Terra Amata succeeds is in holding up a candle to the possibilities of nature, to the potential of life. You may as well use it since you are going to lose it anyway, is the message. Big questions are asked, with no answers forthcoming. Who needs answer, though, when the possibilities are endless? So endless that…

… on the other side of infinity there may be a world just like this one only as if reflected in an enormous mirror: a world where light is black and ants are white and the earth is soft and the sea hard as a slab of marble. A world where the sun is a sooty dot in the sky and volcanoes belch torrents of muddy ice. A world in which you start by dying and end by being born, with the clock-hands all turning frantically backwards. And somewhere in the middle of a big town built downwards into the earth there lives a man perhaps with eyes that look inwards into his head. And perhaps this man has a strange name that can only be said by stopping speaking. Edalecnahc.

While Terra Amata can be reduced to two words - carpe diem - it works because it carries with it the force of infinite experiences. Le Clézio may be an “author of new departures” but he’s also the author of new arrivals on my book shelves.

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.

At the beginning of Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler there is a passage on the various types of books we meet in our lives, such as those we haven’t read, those we needn’t read, and those we plan to read. One of the more obscure categories is books that fill you with sudden, inexplicable curiosity, not easily justified, and it’s to this category that I assign Ferenc Karinthy’s Metropole (1970), published in English for the first time. Well, perhaps not inexplicable, as its strange premise and eye candy cover help justify the curiosity.

That strange premise sees a linguist, Budai, heading to a conference in Helsinki where he is due to make a presentation, only to wake from the airplane, still hazy, finding himself hustled onto a bus and shuttled to a large hotel. Only then does he realise that he’s not in Helsinki. As to where he is, well that’s a different story, because nobody seems to speak his language, or any of the others his linguistic background allows him.

…he was without friends, acquaintances, indeed documents, and to all intents and purposes, utterly on his own, in an unknown city of whose very name he was ignorant, where no one spoke any language that he could understand even though he knew a great many languages, and where he had yet to find anyone with whom he might exchange a word or two.

One person with whom he has an exchange is the beautiful blonde elevator-operator, although verbally it doesn’t amount to much. Her name is Epepe - although it may be Bebe, Tetete, Egyegye, or Tchetche, he finds it hard to make her out. Budai finds himself drawn to her, not just for her beauty, but because in this indifferent world, Epepe is the only one that seems to acknowledge him, even if their interactions are brief and ultimately frustrating:

They had got round to greeting each other by now and there were occasional signs that she was showing some interest in him too. Twice she addressed Budai as he was about to get out and he smiled and shrugged to show he had not understood. The crowd in that narrow space gave no time for explanations and he was quickly swept away by the others getting off.

Even though he keeps coming back to Epepe, Budai regularly ventures beyond the hotel, into the unnamed metropolis itself:

….the street was no less crowded than the hall, its tide of humanity swirling, flooding, and lurching this way and that. Everyone was in a hurry, panting, elbowing and fighting to get through; one elderly woman in a headscarf kicked him as hard as she could on the ankle and he received a good many more blows on his shoulders and ribs. The traffic in the roadway was equally packed, the cars nose to tail, now stopping, now starting, making absolutely no allowance for pedestrians, as if they were stuck in some eternal bottleneck, engines continually reving, horns furiously blaring…

While this “never-ending rush hour” conjures images of a dystopian cityscape, Karinthy still brings humour to its bleakness, notably through Budai’s explorations. There are queues everywhere and while citizens may find themselves lining up for their everyday rations, they also wait their turn to sit on park benches and, in one comic scene, Budai, takes in a brothel, hoping to communicate there, and finds hordes of men knocking at the door, hurrying him up.

Added to the bleakly comic tone is an undercurrent of melancholia which haunts the novel. Each page, simmers with frustration and helplessness. When Budai thinks he may have a solution, an array of problems announce themselves, his troubles continually cascading into further torment. Nowhere is this more felt than in a huge centrepiece chapter that shows all Budai’s attempts to understand the language spoken around him.

There’s little dialogue throughout the book - indeed, when the local dialect is described as “a language without discernible inflections, a continual jabbering” - there’s little need for it, although Karinthy does allow some of the nonsense (’Chetchenche glubglubb? Guluglulubb?‘), if only to knowlingly frustrate the reader too. And the large passages of text unbroken by dialogue mirror the daunting nature of the city, a mass of bricks unending.

Like anything that could elicit comparisons to Kafka, there’s an element of horror amongst the absurdity, notably as Budai observes a fight breaking out a subway station:

Could it be that they themselves could not understand each other, that the people who lived here employed various provincial dialects, possibly even quite different languages? In a particularly feverish moment it even occurred to him that each one of them might be speaking his own language, that there were as many languages as there were people.

If it isn’t Hell, it’s certainly a private hell for Budai, and while certain events echo the Hungarian revolution, there are other hints that, beyond the narrative’s veil, there could be more autobiographical elements at work, perhaps even a cameo from the author’s father, the writer and translator, Frigyes Karinthy.

Originally published under the name Epepe, for the aforementioned elevator-operator, a bold and appropriate decision has been made to change the title to reflect the larger scope of the novel’s setting. In doing this we find the city is our anchor, rather than the girl, and in this city that Budai deems “an equation without known quantities”, Metropole more than adds up to the sum of its parts.