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In Ichthyology, the opening story of David Vann’s collection, Legend Of A Suicide (2008), there appears a fly that gets stuck in a fishtank and, in its panic, sends off a series of ripples that highlight his predicament. It’s a visible showing from the insect and, having little consciousness, it can’t fight instinct in making its panic known. Humans differ, however, and the troubled father of Roy Fenn was not going to be found flapping helplessly in the water. Instead he took himself onto the deck of his boat and, with his .44 Magnum, shot himself. It’s an act that made its own ripples, affecting others, and the mystery around that suicide forms the basis for this book.

It’s hard not to see Roy as a loose version of Vann, whose own father commited suicide in 1980. Of the six stories making the collection, five of them are narrated by an adult Roy, casting his mind back to growing up in the empty expanses of Alaska, where life seemed to consist of nothing more than riffs on guns and fishing.

While the stories are independent of each other, they are deeply anchored in the life of Jim Fenn. The portrait painted is of an impenetrable man with “neither eyes nor ears for matters below the surface”, a weakness for women, and a history of failed investments. In Rhoda, where we meet his second wife - Roy’s stepmother - we are shown how Jim acts, storing his concerns without seeking to tackle them, when he worries that Rhoda may leave him:

“She’s not going to leave,” I said.

My father squinted looking out over the brush on either side distrustfully. “I wish I could believe that.”

“You can,” I said. “She told me she wouldn’t.”

My father stopped hiking and looked at me then as if I were someone entirely new to him. “She told you?”

“Yes.”

“But why?”

“I asked her.”

Such an inability to communicate appears again and again throughout the book and there’s no doubt this has partly led to his suicide. Without a shoulder to lean on and an ear to hear him out we rarely get a sense of his thoughts and feelings, all of which allows Roy to build up a mythology around his father that goes some way toward the overall title of the book.

In the third story, A Legend Of Good Men we drop in on Roy’s mother after his father’s death where there’s little stability in her love life —

The men she dated then were a lot like the circuses that passed through our town. They’d move in quickly and unpack everything they owned, as if they’d come to stay. They’d tempt us with brightly colored objects — floweres, balloons, remote-controlled race cars — perform tricks with their beards and hands, call us funny names like snip, my little squash plant, ding-dong, and even apple pie, and yell their stories at us day and night. Then they’d vanish, and we’d find no sign left, no mention even, as if we’d simply imagined them.

— and we see the breadth of unsuitable father figures that, like Jim Fenn, just disappear one day without a goodbye. Guns abound here, referenced in an obsessive way — “…a Browning .22-caliber rifle, a .30-.30 Winchester carbine, a .300 Winchester Magnum with scope…” — and when Roy breaks into his own house, there’s an eerie dissonance whereby he describes it as if it’s the first time he’s seen it. It’s a tactic that works well to try and understand different perspectives, something which the book parallels on the whole.

The writing in Legend Of A Suicide is almost always controlled. Vann keeps a tight rein on his prose, careful not to let it fly off too far from the polished sparsity that characterises it, and this sometimes creates a cold distance between the narration and the recounted events. However, when it comes to the Alaskan landscape, he allows himself the occasional indulgence, offering up delightful passages, such as in later story Ketchikan. where Roy returns to meet someone from his father’s past:

At thirty, I rode the Alaskan ferry past the coastline of British Columbia, past white-ringed islands, forests extending beyond the horizon, gulls and bald eagles, porpoises, whales, all in close, rode past sunsets over the open ocean, lighthouses, small fishing villages, into Alaskan waters where mountains sloped steeply upward out of fjords, and on, to the town of my childhood, strung narrowly along the waterfront, drenched perpetually on mist, the place of ghosts, I felt, the place where my dead father had first gone astray, the place where this father and his suicide and his cheating and his lies and my pity for him, also, might finally be put to rest: Ketchikan.

Interestingly, the stories that make up the book would feel of little importance if it weren’t for the centrepiece, the novella Sukkwan Island which drops the first person for third and tells us of a time where Roy and his father headed out to the wilderness for a year. Ill-equipped for the experience, but too stubborn to call an end to the endeavour, we regularly see the closed off personality of Jim Fenn break down into late night bouts of tears as he confesses his inadequacies to his son.

God, I felt bad. I felt sick all the time. But I kept doing it. And the thing is, even after seeing all that that did, and all it destroyed, I don’t know for sure that I’d act any differently if I had the chance again. The thing is, something about me is not right. I just can’t do the right thing and be who I’m supposed to be. Something about me won’t let me do that.

This novella is the best thing about the collection as it shows that Vann is capable, after a few reflective stories, of pacing his writing, and the drama created from its limited cast shows much to commend. What’s particularly special is that it goes some way toward ensuring that Jim Fenn, as a man, remains ungraspable. As Vann tries to unlock aspects of Fenn’s personality he does so in a way that opens up contradictions between the stories, slight differences that go some way to producing the myth behind the man rather than the other way around.

For the author it must have been a therapeutic experience to tackle the real suicide that underlies this fictional representation and the slightly maddening way that he comes at the same subject repeatedly, yet in unusual ways, ensures that the reader is given a window into the confusion. “Memories are infinitely richer than their origins” we are told at one point and in the end these private memories are what keeps the legend of Jim Fenn going, as answers are never conducive to keeping mysteries alive.

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.

The Israeli writer, Etgar Keret, is probably best known for writing short stories, a few collections of which have seen translation. Typically the stories are very short, no more than a few pages, and his collection Missing Kissinger had no less than fifty tucked away within its pages. Kneller’s Happy Campers (1998) was the longest story in another collection, The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God and Other Stories, published in the US. Either it deserves to be published as a standalone book in the UK or its publisher is milking it in these recessionary times.

The novella follows the life - well, afterlife - of Mordy, who has recently committed suicide and found himself in a world not unlike the one he’s just left (”I’d always imagine these beeping sounds, like a fuzz-buster, and people floating around in space and stuff. But now that I’m here, I don’t know, mostly it reminds me of Tel Aviv.”)

The big difference here is that the population is entirely made up of suicides, each person showing the traits of how they offed themselves. Mordy’s new friend, Uzi Gelfand, shows the scars on his head where the bullet went in and out, and the girls at the local bars (”you could tell straight off how they did it, with the scars on their wrists and everything, but there were some that looked really good.” Those without scars, “who did it with pills or poison”, are called Juliets. There’s even room for celebrity suicides, where Keret throws in a cameo for some humour:

Last night was awful. Uzi brought this friend of his, Kurt. Thinks the guy’s really cool ’cause he was the leader of some famous band and everything. But the truth is he’s a big-time prick. I mean, I’m not exactly sold on the place either, but this guy, he wouldn’t stop bitching. And once he gets going - forget it. He’ll dig into you like a bloody bat. Anything that comes up always reminds him of some song he wrote, and he’s got to recite it for you so you can tell him how cool the lyrics are. Sometimes he’ll even ask the bartender to play one of his tracks and you just wanna dig yourself a hole in the ground. It isn’t just me. Everybody hates him, except Uzi. I think there’s this thing that after you off yourself, with the way it hurts and everything -and it hurts like hell - the last thing you give a shit about is somebody with nothing on his mind except singing about how unhappy he is.

On arriving in this afterlife, Mordy has found himself working a deadbeat job in a pizza chain called Kamikaze. When not slaving away he’s doing whistlestop tours of the bars, getting drunk. So, when he hears that Desiree, his girlfriend from before he killed himself, has also taken her life he sets off in the car, with Uzi, to find her. Such is love.

Like much of the novella, the journey taken is just as strange and funny as the premise. However, below the surface there are serious stirrings, Keret’s afterlife holding a mirror up to the world we live in and highlighting its flaws. At one point during their road trip racism is briefly touched upon as Gelfand overlooks his own circumstances to pass sweeping comments upon a group of people:

The people outside looked a lot like the ones in our neighbourhood - their eyes kinda dim, and dragging their feet. The only difference was that Gelfand didn’t know them - which was enough to make him paranoid.

‘I’m not being paranoid. Don’t you get it? They’re all Arabs.’

‘So what if they’re Arabs?’ I asked.

‘So what? I dunno. Arabs - suicides - doesn’t that psych you out, even a little?’

Along the way they pick up a Juliet, who maintains there’s been a clerical error because she didn’t off herself, and by the time they meet the eponymous Kneller the story, if not strange enough, takes a turn for the surreal, introducing almost whimsical ideas that, given the circumstances, never really feel out of place. Kneller, presiding over a commune, talks of the ‘miracles’ that happen in the vicinity, of which we see a number happening, but after that the breakneck speed events take seems as if it’s rushing to the end so as to mask that there’s not much storyline to be had and the charming conceit that opens the novel shadows the latter half. In all fairness, the conclusion is satisfying, but the road there is unscenic.

While its bizarre humour had me wondering where Keret would lead off to next, and its informal, sometimes colloquial style, was for the most part engaging, the same couldn’t be said for its characters: they were sorely lacking a dimension. All singular minded and sketchy. As his short stories typically only take a few pages each, one wonders if he’s not more interested in the surreal twists of imagination he is capable of than giving his playthings substance. So, while I’m not a fully fledged happy camper, I was satisfied enough with the ride, although, like all the characters, I was happy to check out.

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.

If aliens were to read Eduardo Mendoza’s No Word From Gurb (1990) they may well determine that it suffers from ’structural simplicity’. While this is true, it makes it no different from most other things on Earth they are likely to discover, like family apartments and Ford Fiestas.

The novel, initially published in installments in the popular Spanish newspaper, El País, is told in the style of a diary and parodies the city of Barcelona in the build up to the 1992 Olympics. Each day sees a number of entries, usually little more than paragraph with a time of the day attached, as one of the two aliens in the novel writes down his observations about human life while searching for his companion, the eponymous Gurb.

Gurb, having been given the task of making contact with humans, has vanished. It’s probably something to do with how he looks:

Given that we are travelling in non-corporeal form (pure intelligence-analytical factor 4800) decide he should take on bodily appearance similar to that of local inhabitants. Reason: so as not to attract the attention of the autochthonous fauna (real and potential). Consult the Astral Earth Catalogue of Assimilable Forms (AECAF) and choose to give Gurb the appearance of human being known as Madonna.

While not attracting attention is the name of the game for these aliens, the narrator can’t help but attract it as he settles into the task of finding Gurb. He regularly takes human form to blend in although the forms he chooses (Gary Cooper, the Duke of Olivares, and His Holiness Pope Pius XII, amongst others) are never as inconspicuous as he thinks. His ignorance of human customs also draws strange looks, like when a woman, mistaking him for a down-and-out, gives him some spare change and he, out of politeness, swallows it. Or, when ordering in a restaurant: “The gentleman asks what I will have to drink. Not wishing to attract attention, I order the most common human liquid: urine.”

There’s a great deal of humour to be had with the idea of aliens trying to understand human culture and Mendoza plays it for laughs throughout, like when the narrator reads a mystery novel by a famous English lady:

The plot of her novel is very simple. An individual who, to simplify, we will call A, is found dead in the library. Another individual, B, tries to discover who killed A and why. Following a series of illogical undertakings (all that was needed was the formula 3(x2-r)n-+0 and the case would have been solved from the start), B states (wrongly) that the murderer is C. Everyone seems happy with this conclusion, including C. No idea what a butler is.

Repetition is another key to Mendoza’s humour, showcased a number of times when the narrator performs the same activity over and over, with small variations, like when he decides to scour the city looking for Gurb:

15.00 Decide to make a systematic search of the city instead of remaining in one spot. […] Set off following the ideal heliographic plan I built into my internal circuits on leaving the ship. Fall into a trench dug by the Catalan Gas Company.

15.02 Fall into a trench dug by the Catalan Hydroelectric Company.

15.03 Fall into a trench dug by the Barcelona Water Company.

15.04 Fall into a trench dug by the Calle Corcega Neighbourhood Association.

15.06 Decide to abandon the ideal heliographic plan and to walk watching where I put my feet.

While it may seem parochial, poking fun at the state of Barcelona as it (lazily) worked toward the Olympics, there’s an element of truth that can transcend any city, be it criticisms of traffic control, social problems like drugs, the constant cycle of repairs that seem to keep museums closed, or the anti-social mores of councils:

Woken by a thunderous crash. Millions (or more) years ago, the Earth was created out of a series of terrible cataclysms: the roaring oceans covered the coastline and buried whole islands, whilst gigantic mountain ranges collapsed and erupting volcanoes threw up new ones; eaethquakes shifted entire continents. To commemorate these events, every night City Hall sends machines, called refuse trucks, to reproduce that planetary chaos under its inhabitants’ windows.

The steady stream of misunderstandings as the alien goes about finding Gurb, making connections with humans, and even considering romance is nicely balanced against the impressions of humanity from an external point of view as he discovers concepts that don’t exist on his own world, such as class:

Amongst other categories, human beings are apparently divided into rich and poor. This is a division to which they attach huge importance, without knowing why. The fundamental difference between rich and poor seems to be this: the rich, wherever they go, do not pay, even though they acquire and consume as much as they like. The poor, on the other hand, pay through the nose.

Although the daily narrative takes us on a whistlestop tour of Barcelona, the biggest problem Mendoza has is coming to the end of the line. It’s inevitable that Gurb is found, although the way that comes to pass is a tad clumsy and fortuitous. Perhaps the formula 3(x2-r)n-+0 doesn’t work for some books, but the fun to be had with No Word From Gurb is not so much in its conclusion as it is its journey.

Bragi Ólafsson’s The Pets (2001) is the second release from Open Letter Books (Dubravka Ugrešić’s Nobody’s Home was the first) and their first piece of fiction. While it’s the first significant English translation for Ólafsson, he has been busying himself with poems, plays, short stories and novels since 1986, not to mention his stint as bass player for Icelandic band, The Sugarcubes, fronted by Björk.

At the beginning of The Pets, Emil Halldorsson, who has recently come into some money, returns home from a brief trip to London to stock up on CDs and duty free, to find his neighbour informing him that a man had visited earlier, saying he would return later. This sets up the opening chapters where we alternate between the story of Emil’s flight, and all the interesting characters one meets - and sometimes would rather not - in such circumstances, and the journey of this mysterious visitor, and the scrapes he gets into, as he prepares to visit Emil.

The mysterious visitor is Havard Knutsson, an old acquaintance (sort of) of Emil’s from many years before, when both were housesitting in London. When the knock comes at the door, Emil has just put some coffee on and is typing an email to his partner. Rather than answer the door, Emil peers out the window and is shocked to recognise Havard, who he believed was safely locked away in a Swedish institution. Not wanting to confront him, Emil’s reaction sets up the remainder of the novel:

I get down on my knees without even thinking, poke my head under the bed, and pull out a box of toys that belong to my son Halldor. I then lie down on the soft carpet, squeeze my body in under the bed, and pull the sheet down to the floor - to hide myself from the doorless entrance to the bedroom and from the window that faces the dim back garden.

Not one to be dissuaded by an unanswered door, Havard peers through the window, sees the coffee on, and breaks into Emil’s house, and turns it off. The signs are that Emil must have nipped out and can’t be long in coming back, so he decides to wait for him. As time drags by, Havard settles more into the house, playing Emil’s CDs, answering his telephone, and inviting his friends and some others from the opening chapters round for a party.

I suddenly realize very clearly the ridiculous position I am in and carry on thinking about the problems that one creates for oneself by getting to know various people. One shouldn’t let others into one’s life.

Being under the bed, with only a limited view of what’s going on in his, Emil’s narrative focuses more on the other senses. He overhears conversations and takes in smells, guessing at what’s happening or what people are talking about. Stuck in  such a position, Emil finds himself recalling the aforementioned time in London.

I had always known that Havard and I would never become very good friends but during the days we spent in London an unbridgeable rift had developed between us. I was the healthy one, the one who had interests and wanted to be constructive, even if just in terms of building a collection of CDs or books; Havard, on the other hand, didn’t seem to be interested in anything, unless it was forbidden or contained the highest percentage of alcohol.

The titular pets are crucial to the London backstory, a disastrous time that saw them meet their maker in comically inventive ways, with a little help from Havard. The lack of action in preventing such incidents mirror Emil’s current situation, revealing as he does a huge character flaw:

Why on earth don’t I do something? What is wrong with me? What reason do I have for lying here under my own bed while these two men…behave as if they are at home here; it seems as though they are at home, in my very own flat. The only reason I don’t do anything is because it is too late.

Emil’s lack of action, never being assertive, finds himself allowing others to take advantage of him. Never able to put his foot down, events transpire, and he’s left picking up the pieces in the aftermath.

While the opening chapters are necessary in setting up Havard’s bizarre party, there’s the sense that their sequence is drawn out. At one point Havard visits an old friend who later turns up at Emil’s, a thread that soon fizzles out with little contribution to the main story. That aside, the novel is a quite an enjoyable read once the main premise comes around and we are reduced to the narrow narrative from under Emil’s bed.

There’s nothing flashy in Ólafsson’s prose, his style straightforwardly recounting events and highlighting thoughts. Where he excels is in his comic setup. Most of the seeds introduced come together in this darkly comic novel to a snappy and funny conclusion, but, let it linger, and the underlying tragedy soon reveals itself.

Try as I might, I’ve never connected with Saul Bellow’s prose. My first attempt was The Actual, his penultimate work, and his shortest. A few pages in and I was lost. Then, The Adventures Of Augie March, the novel that signalled his worth as a writer: after reading the opening page repeatedly, I knew I couldn’t continue through the whole book doing so, and abandoned it.

There’s something about Bellow, though, that makes me persist. It’s probably the perception of him as one of the best American writers, what with other writers citing him as their favourite. By not reading him, I’m surely missing out; in reading him, I’m more than likely missing the point. In order to grapple with the beast it seemed a logical idea to dismiss his better known novels as an introduction and to head back to the start, to Dangling Man (1944), under the impression that his earliest work may offer a way in to his style before it solidifies him as that great American writer.

Dangling Man is the journal of Joseph, a young man who resigned his job at a travel bureau seven months before, expecting to be drafted into the army, instead finding himself ‘dangling’ due to complications that he describes as “a sort of bureaucratic comedy trimmed out in red tape.” Rather than get a job for now - “As a 1A I could not get a suitable one, anyhow” - he opts for staying at home, living off his wife’s wage, rarely venturing out, and with little company other than his own thoughts, all jotted down.

In loneliness and bureaucracy, there are echoes of Kafka’s The Trial, and a Joseph caught up in it all confirms the nod. Bellow, however, is not so concerned with the situation of bureaucracy, instead using it as the springboard into a mildly philosophical story about destiny.

Six hundred years ago, a man was what he was born to be. Satan and the Church, representing God, did battle over him. He, by reason of his choice, partially decided the outcome. […] But, since, the stage has been reset and human beings only walk on it and, under this revision, we have, instead, history to answer to. We were important enough then for our souls to be fought over. Now, each of us is responsible for his own salvation, which is in his greatness. And that, that greatness, is the rock or hearts are abraded on.

Admittedly, as stories go, Dangling Man is short on incident, given that Joseph rarely leaves his room, but there are a number of great set pieces as the frustration of living within one’s mind - and Joseph’s mind, given his journal’s literary references and philosophial meanderings, is highly intelligent - takes its toll and cracks appear. It may not be a metamorphosis in the mould of Gregor Samsa, but the once easy-natured man he was has found himself prone to violent outbursts.

There is nothing to do but wait, or dangle, and grow more and more dispirited. It is perfectly clear to me that I am deteriorating, storing bitterness and spite which eats like acid at my endowment of generosity and good will.

In all his wanderings - physical and mental - Joseph’s problem is destiny. Unable to live up to the lofty expections of his making and “unwilling to admit that I do not know how to use my freedom” he not only seeks, but needs solace in the Army, where he need not think for himself. At the beginning, Joseph’s choice to keep a journal, in “an era of hardboiled-dom” is a seen as contrarian to the mores of society:

Do you have feelings? There are correct and incorrect ways of indicating them. Do you have an inner life? It is nobody’s business but your own. Do you have emotions? Strangle them.

The journey from individual thinker, an outcast from society, to one willing to strangle his own self is an interesting premise. Where one would expect - perhaps because it’s clichéd - to see someone fight for their individuality, Dangling Man talks of belonging. In reading it, and understanding it to a degree, and even quite enjoying bits of it, I find that I may just see the case for belonging myself - to those that praise him, that is.

It’s thanks to a slurry of comments on Chilean literature in my review of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, that I come to Ana María del Río’s Carmen’s Rust (1986). The main recommendation was to read Diamela Eltit’s Sacred Cow, who, incidentally, provides an afterword to this slim volume, but nico’s comment that del Río was also “an important writer”, in light of Chile’s transition from dictatorship to democracy, piqued my interest.

In reading Carmen’s Rust, I was reminded of my experience reading Ismail Kadare’s Agamemnon’s Daugher, where much passed me by due to a lack of knowledge of the subject. Reading up on Enver Hoxha’s Albania solidified my appreciation of the book, so having read this novel once, it seemed right that I understand the subtexts, and return ready to spot the allusions to the Pinochet era. Where Agamemnon’s Daughter was quite explicit, Carmen’s Rust takes a more allegorical approach, namely Pinochet in a dress.

The novel distances itself from its contemporary regime, uncomfortably setting itself in the 1950s, during another dictatorship, represented by the confines of a huge house with seemingly endless rooms, and other nooks and crannies. At the beginning, the narrator’s Aunt Malva, having been abandoned by her husband, comes to live in the upstairs of the Grandmother’s house, where the matriarchs rule supreme and the great room is often opened for “celebrations that abounded with turkeys, truffles, wine, and senators.”

It took her a week to move in. We watched as she penetrated the house like a fateful tempest of black trunks and brown paper packages tied up with strong rope - ropes that were like invisible nooses being slipped over our little heads.

Others living in the house include Carlitos, Malva’s son, nicknamed President of the Republic; the eponymous Carmen, the narrator’s half-sister - same father, different mothers -; and Meche, the maid with a dictatorial streak not unlike her mistress’. That only covers those given, to some degree, free reign to move around as, in order to save face, this bourgeoisie household hides a few secrets of its own. Tucked away in a back room is Carmen’s mother, a woman of lower social standing, stolen away and “cloistered for life”. In another room is Uncle Ascanio - “that stupid dimwit, as Aunt Malva would say” - who has never worked, probably because he’s been mentally worn down to the point of lobotomy:

Uncle Ascanio lived in what he and Grandmother called his Bird Store. In reality, his room had all the trapping, as well as the smells, of a primitive henhouse. Apparently Uncle Ascanio began by collecting baby chicks in his room - future egg-layers - with the intention of raising them to lay eggs for sale. He was never able to convince them though; and later, his mother, never one to give up, and praying upon the family’s coat-of-arms, brought him eggs arranged in a multitude of purple cartons. But the capital quickly turned rancid because Uncle Ascanio never sold anything. He just filed his nails endlessly, staring straight ahead, mesmerized by everything, as though an invisible door were about to open.

The main focus of the novel is the days when the narrator and Carmen became dissidents within the house.  While the matriarchs would oversee their activities and try to control them in every way, to ensure their way of life continues as it always has been. Where there are cracks, these are papered over with fixes, but the rebellious nature of the young ones ultimately reveals them once more. Piano lessons, for example, by the best teacher in the region see the teacher seduced by the Carmen’s burgeoning sexuality, “his ceremonious kisses deposited in deep cavities - kisses that lasted longer than the silence of a domestic servant.”

Carmen’s attentions also extend to her half-brother, a relationship which blossoms through the novel, with repeated attempts to stamp it out from the powers that be.

To spice up our lives a little in that huge house, a few games would be left sitting on top of Grandmother’s green tablecloth just after lunch, although by that time we were already making overtures under the table - rolling up napkins and playing footsie.

The problem faced when living in such an atmosphere is the danger of being watched. Here, in the Grandmother’s house, eyes are everywhere and careless actions eventually lead to unjust punishments. The shock of the novel is the utter hopelessness of whichever path one takes through such rule. Where Carmen fails to be shaped and controlled by the regime, the narrator all too readily submits, leaving neither with a happy ending.

What’s good about Carmen’s Rust is how little the author has to offer to get her story across. Small details reveal larger implications and what goes unsaid tends to give away more than anything that can be said. The cover of the book, in declaring this economy, also makes note of the “searing humour”, which failed to materialise, although such humour is no doubt reserved for those better able to recognise the brutal absurdity of the novel’s situations.

In his heart, the narrator carries the memories of Carmen, a source of delight in bringing back those days, but also a painful reminder that he is no longer with her. (”She was my love, my only love, my ever-deepening, hellish sadness. She was everything to me.”). The psychological cost of having loved and lost remains with him, and in never letting her memory die out, he opens it up, airs it - to remember once more, to let it rust.

Midnight Classics, as far as I can tell, was an imprint of Serpent’s Tail reserved for publishing forgotten works of pulpy noir and psychedelic fiction. A number of titles were put out in the late 1990s, each boldy declaring that the book was ‘a Midnight Classic back in print’, and all written by authors long forgotten. Names like Gavin Lambert, Stewart Meyer, Rudolph Wurlitzer, and David Goodis. Another was Horace McCoy, probably the best known of the lot.

McCoy’s name has already appeared on booklit where, after a tentative treading of the toes in American noir, with James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, it was suggested in the comments that next up should be McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1935). Never one to knock back a recommendation (although always one to never get round to reading it) I bumped it up the list, while all the other titles waiting their turn muttered and cursed under their breath.

With horses in the title, I’d long assumed, wrongly so, that the novel was a western of some description. Instead, the novel’s milieu is quite the reverse of the open range, and a new one on me, the claustrophobic world of the dance marathon. Popular in the 1920s and 1930s, these shindigs brought kids disillusioned by the Depression together to dance, for hours on end, chasing the carrot of prize money dangled before them.

One hundred and forty-four couples entered the marathon dance but sixty-one dropped out for the first week. The rules were you danced for an hour and fifty minutes, then you had a ten-minute rest period in which you could sleep if you wanted to. But in those ten minutes you also had to shave or bathe or get your feet fixed or whatever was necessary.

Although mostly flashbacks, the novel begins in the here and now, by outlining its outcome, that of the sentencing of Robert Syverton for the murder of Gloria Beatty. It’s clear to Syverton that the judge means to make an example of him, especially given that the best line of defense he has is that he was “only doing her a personal favour”:

The Prosecuting Attorney was wrong when he told the jury she died in agony, friendless, alone except for her brutal murderer, out there in that black night on the edge of the Pacific. He was as wrong as a man can be. She did not die in agony. She was relaxed and comfortable and she was smiling. It was the first time I had ever seen her smile. How could she have been in agony then? And she wasn’t friendless.

I was her very best friend. I was her only friend. So how could she have been friendless?

Robert and Gloria have come their separate ways to Hollywood, chasing the same dream. Opportunities, however, are few on the ground, and they enter the marathon dance:

‘Free food and free bed as long as you last and a thousand dollars if you win.’

‘The free food part of it sounds good,’ I said.

‘That’s not the big thing,’ she said. ‘A lot of producers and directors go to those marathon dances. There’s always the chance they might pick you out and give you a part in a picture…What do you say?’

‘Me?’ I said…’Oh, I don’t dance very well…’

‘You don’t have to. All you have to do is keep moving.’

During the dance tempers fray, exhaustion sets in, and the contestents find themselves exploited more and more in the name of entertainment. Robert dreams of being back outside, away from the confines of the ballroom, but in writing the desperate situation of this small dance McCoy holds up a mirror to the America of the time, where life itself is punishing and people try to scrape a living against all the odds. The whole narrative is studied with throwaway lines from Gloria, with nothing to live for, wishing she were dead.

‘It’s peculiar to me,’ she said, ‘that everybody pays so much attention to living and so little to dying. Why are these high-powered scientists always screwing around trying to prolong life instead of finding pleasant ways to end it? There must be a hell of a lot of people in the world like me - who want to die but haven’t got the guts - ‘

Even though we know the outcome, McCoy still manages to build up tension in his story. The continued sapping of the dancers’ will through exploitative tasks and the sheer exhaustion they feel builds up crests of conflict that see the dancers regularly whittled down. To this slow burn plot kindling is added, where chapters are preceded by snippets of the judge’s sentence, each in a typeface a little larger than before, serving well the build up of tension.

Loose on description, heavy on dialogue, the novel sets a fair pace, without being a marathon itself, and when its end comes the death of Gloria is treated unsentimentaly, as befits the hardboiled genre. The ending is powerful, for what it is, and I daresay it’s one that will stick in the mind for a long time to come, but there’s the feeling that there could have been more, that McCoy could perhaps have explored the existentialist nature of his narrator, if even just for a few pages here and there, just to get a little deeper inside Syverton’s head. At the same time, the casual enquiry of the book’s title, in context, carries all the weight needed, and it’s the unanswerable nature of the whydunnit that ensures the book’s durability.