booklit

The tributes that followed the recent death of David Markson inspired me to pick up one of his novels, something I’d been hesitant about before. Cursory flicks in the book stores had shown that those available were little more than page after page of collected quotes, statements, and musings. There couldn’t possible hunca life katalog be a story in there. But then, literature is replete with unconventionalists - e.g. Borges, Calvino, Joyce - and sometimes you’ve got to trust their experiments to delivering on whatever they set out to achieve. To this end, I settled on This Is Not A Novel (2001), published with an unassuming cover by CB Editions, and trusted Markson to deliver.

Any initial reservations with the concept of the huncalife katalog book were quickly allayed with the opening sentences, two distinct hunca life lines that set up the premise for the book and introduces Writer, assumed hunca life to be Markson himself, as he expresses his thoughts on the creation of fiction and its many components:

Writer is pretty much tempted to quit writing.

Writer is weary unto death of making up stories.

Lord Byron died of either rheumatic fever, or typhus, or uremia, or malaria. Or was inadvertently murdered by his doctors, who had bled him incessantly.

Stephen Crane died of tuberculosis in 1900. Granted an ordinary modern life span, he would have lived well into World War II.

This morning I walked to the place where the street-cleaners dump the rubbish. My God, it was beautiful. Says a van Gogh letter.

Writer is equally tired of inventing characters.

In his tiredness, the characters — if we label Byron, Crane and van Gogh so — that inhabit the book are drawn this way, in only a brief line letting slip a fact or two, and seemingly unrelated to what has gone before. The breadth of names is impressive as Markson gives us details of writers, poets, singers, architects, jazz musicians, composers, and painters running the gamut of history. The istanbul escort common thread running through much of these references is that of death and what these artists died from, and so we learn of Thomas Mann’s death by phlebitis, Wyatt Earp’s by chronic cystitis, and of Frank Lloyd Wright’s heart attack — a few plucked from a catalogue of hundreds.

The obsession with death has purpose, and as Writer finds himself nearing the end of his life, his thoughts are on his legacy as an artist. While not explicit, the connections between the disparate facts shed their subtlety and we begin to see how people can survive beyond their lifetime, be it their works, their unsolved mysteries, or in tribute:

Among Dickens’ children: Alfred Tennyson Dickens. Henry Fielding Dickens. Edward Bulwer-Lytton Dickens. Walter Landor Dickens. Sudney Smith Dickens.

Among Walt Whitman’s brothers: George Washington Whitman. Andrew Jackson Whitman. Thomas Jefferson Whitman.

The links between the statements are wide ranging with respect to the artist and we touch on Writer’s preoccupation with madness, influences, relationships, other artistic flourishes, and what defines the longevity of an artist —

The peculiar immortality of Sulpicia. Six love poems, totaling only forty lines, and customarily tacked onto the collected works of Tibullus. For two full thousand years.

— which is no mean feat for a piece of fiction that aims to have “no intimation of story whatsoever”.

Part of the pleasure in the novel is being able to draw the imaginary lines between the proffered facts and to build up the story of Writer who, no matter how tempted he may be to quit writing, is an artist first and foremost and will write regardless. A writer, once an idea sinks its hooks into them, will wrestle with that idea to produce their art and in This Is Not A Novel Writer’s desire to produce something different (”Plotless. Characterless.”) pushes him on through more cleverly executed demonstrations of free association, his personality beginning to shine more despite the unrelated lines:

Ultimately, a work of art without even a subject, Writer wants.

There is no work of art without a subject, said Ortega.

A novel tells a story, said E.M. Forster.

If you can do it, it ain’t bragging, said Dizzy Dean.

With all the death and other assorted miseries, there’s still a streak of humour that runs through the book, which is perhaps not unexpected in such a playful piece. At one point Writer muses on Harold Bloom’s preposterous claim to the New York Times that he could read at a rate of five hundred pages per hour:

Writer’s arse.

Spectacular exhibition! Right this way, ladies and gentlemen! See Professor Bloom read the 1961 corrected and reset Random House edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses in one hour and thirty-three minutes. Not one page stinted. Unforgettable!

To most readers, if not all, This Is Not A Novel will contain anecdotes about some people known to them and many more that aren’t. It’s tempting to enjoy the act of looking up Markson’s references as they appear on the page to get a complete sense of who he’s bringing in to Writer’s thoughts, and from which books quotes are drawn. But to do so would break away from the ultimate goal of a book that revels in having no action “yet seducing the reader into turning pages nonetheless.”

Recalling the Dizzy Dean quote, there’s sly references to what’s been involved in producing the book —

If you find this work difficult, and wearisome to follow, take pity on me, for I have repeated these calculations seventy times. Wrote Johannes Kepler.

— and a sense of hope for its future, the fate of which, is at the mercy of posterity:

My work is not a prize composition done to be heard for the moment, but was designed to last forever. Said Thucydides.

As to what Writer is writing, that’s up to him. At various interjections he suggests what it may be, “if Writer says so”: an autobiography? An Egyptian Book of the Dead? So, if Markson decides that this is not a novel, who are we to argue with the artist? But while it’s a novel that purports not to be a novel, there’s one thing for certain — it is novel.

The American writer Robert Coover would appear to be a dot on the landscape of British literary consciousness - I don’t know how well known he is in the States - but a small number of his better known titles, such as The Public Burning, The Origin Of The Brunists, and short story collection, Pricksongs And Descants, have recently been appearing on the shelves of my local Waterstone’s.Curious to know more, but without immediately buying, I read about him online and found that he is a postmodernist of some repute and that his novel The Public Burning was the first major work of fiction to use still living people as characters (it was narrated by Richard Nixon).So, intrigued enough to wanting to sample Coover but not intrigued enough to get bogged down in a lengthy wedge of postmodern trickery, I opted for one of his novellas, Briar Rose (1996), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and a reimagining of the Sleeping Beauty tale.Although there are many variations on the Sleeping Beauty story, the common thread follows a girl on the cusp of adulthood forced to sleep for a hundred years after pricking her finger on a spindle, and who can only have the spell broken by a kiss. To this end Coover tells us the story from the point of view of three characters, told in alternating sections: Beauty, the handsome prince, and the evil fairy whose spindle is responsible for Beauty’s condition.Briar Rose opens with the story of the prince on a quest to reach a castle after hearing rumours of a sleeping princess (”for all her hundred years and more, still a child, innocent and yielding. Achingly desirable. And desiring.”). What else can he do, as is the hero’s vocation, but race to her rescue? The castle has seen better times and a briar patch has grown around it, preventing easy access. Nevertheless, in an opening tinged with sexual imagery —

He is surprised to discover how easy it is. The branches part like thighs, the silky petals caress his cheeks. His drawn sword is stained, not with blood, but with dew and pollen. Yet another inflated legend. He has undertaken this great adventure, not for the supposed reward — what is another bedridden princess? — but in order to provoke a confrontation with the awful powers of enchantment itself. To tame mystery. To make, at last his name.

— the task is there to be undertaken, despite statements that he’d had been better off searching for the Golden Fleece or “another bloody grail”.Soon we are with Beauty, high in the castle where she sleeps her century’s sleep. But it’s not without a serious of recurring dreams “each forgotten in the very dreaming of them” although some elements produce an “ambient familiarity”. Her dreams see her wandering the castle, its myriad locations amorphous and unspecific, and longing for “the one”. And tucked away in these dreams is the evil fairy, her lone companion who regales her with tales of other sleeping princesses:

Whe she woke up— What was her name? What? The princess: What was her name? Oh, I don’t know, my child. Some called her Beauty, I think. That’s it, Sleeping Beauty. Have I heard this story before? Stop interrupting. When she woke up— How did she wake up? Did a prince kiss her? Ah. No. Well, not then.

Where fairy tales are prone to a form of Chinese whispers, so too do the evil fairy’s stories take on new forms and variations with each telling while remaining true to the original. In her ever forgetful dreams Beauty is ignorant that the stories are her story, albeit garnished, and Coover takes these fantastical tales - of incest, rape, ogres…and bears! - and injects a sense of real world logic into them —

Has that smug sleeper paused to consider how she will look and smell after a hundred years, lying comatose and untended in an unchanged bed? A century of collected menses alone should stagger the lustiest of princes.

— that, in turn, seems to influence the characters into becoming more logical themselves and begin to develop self-consciousness whereby they realise they are archetypes and struggle against it. The prince, for example, knowing that there isn’t a hero’s life once you are living happily ever after (”What is happily ever after, after all, but a fall into the ordinary, into human weakness, gathering despair, a fall into death?”) finds himself almost happy to be trapped in the increasingly aggressive briars (”he slashes, a branch falls; it grows back, doubly forked”).The question is who’s mind are we in, if we are in anyone but the author’s mind? Is the princess in the castle a myth that drives the prince onward? Is the prince always, but never, coming to the rescue simply an instance of wishful thinking? The questions play back and forth with each other, placing us back with the prince at the start of the book: in a tangled briar of words that seem to part easily at first but eventually keep us rapt in their embrace.

I’ve mentioned before how lovely Melville House’s Contemporary Art of the Novella series is and have been meaning for some time to read another. Bonsai (2006) by Alejandro Zambra felt like the timely choice, having recently been the focus of an article in The Nation (via The Literary Saloon) and to even the score for Chilean writers, what with Roberto Bolaño getting all the attention. According to The Nation article, “its effect on the world of Chilean literature has been entirely disproportionate to its size.”

It’s a short book, weighing in at eighty-three pages, many blank as they split chapters, allowing the content room to breathe. But within there’s a complete story, a larger story, in fact, bursting to get out. In this it could be said that it resembles the titular bonsai, all the attributes of a larger work condensed into a miniature.

As openings go, Zambra makes a bold pitch, giving away the ending and letting the reader know from the off that the journey about to be taken is a metafictional one:

In the end she dies and he remains alone, although in truth he was alone some years before her death, Emilia’s death. Let’s say that she is called or was called Emilia and that he is called, was called, and continues to be called Julio. Julio and Emilia. In the end Emilia dies and Julio does not die. The rest is literature:

Emilia and Julio are are university students that meet at a study group in preparation for their Spanish Syntax II exam and, despite initially disliking each other, their relationship quickly develops, Zambra detailing its journey, with occasional reference to previous lovers, in a beguiling mix of thick brush strokes and finely judged details.

As the opening declares, “the rest is literature:” and it’s literature that binds the couple and gives purpose to their relationship, a strange foreplay emerging whereby they working their way through Schwob and Mishima, Perec, Onetti, and Carver, amongst others, until they read Tantalia by Macedonio Fernández, a story about a couple who buy a small plant as a symbol of their love that ends in despair.

“That should have been the last time Emilia and Julio shagged,” the narrator says, but the couple continue on, having sex after reading pages of the classics (”They did terribly with Checkhov, a little better, curiously, with Kafka, but, as they say, the damage was done.”). Eventually, a shared lie between them - that they have read Proust - brings their relationship to a head:

It happened with Proust. They had postponed reading Proust, due to the unmentionable secret that linked them, separately to the reading - or to the lack of reading - of In Search Of Lost Time. They both had to pretend that their mutual read was, strictly speaking, a reread they had yearned for, so that when they arrived at one of the numerous passages that seemed particularly memorable they changed their tone of voice or gazed at each other to elicit emotion., simulating the greatest intimacy. Also, Julio, on one occasion, allowed himself to declare that he only now truly felt that he was reading Proust, and Emilia answered with a subtle and disconsolate squeeze of the hand.

In reading Proust for the first time, neither is prepared for the impact it has so their relationship breaks off, with Emilia heading to Spain - and dying! - and Julio getting on with his life. Julio’s path leads to an attempt to work for a famous writer, transcribing his latest novel and, on failing to do so, continues to transcribe the novel he imagines, based on a brief synopsis, that he would have been transcribing. In keeping with the metafictional style, he calls it Bonsai, and it bears a knowing similarity to the book we’re reading.

There’s so much more to this slight volume that comes to represent the bonsai. The authorial interjections force us to stick to the story of Emilia and Julio, with repeated messages to ignore characters for being “secondary” or observing a woman as she moves away “and begins to disappear forever from this story”, each potential thread of narrative routinely clipped so that all we have is this love story contained within the container its pages - Julio learns that “Once outside its flowerpot, the tree ceases to be a bonsai.”- that does represent the wider picture.

Caring for a bonsai is like writing, thinks Julio. Writing is like caring for a bonsai, thinks Julio.

Bonsai’s story is, to borrow a line from the book,”a common story whose only peculiarity is that nobody knows how to tell it well” and Zambra’s attempt to capture this common story is wholly successful. With prose aware of its shortcomings, that takes steps to address them - pruning its loose ends and carefully shaping its narrative - it takes that common story and reduces it to its finer points, makes of itself an artform, and contains it within a flowerpot of pages. The rest may be literature, but the whole is art.

Gilbert Adair, in the third of his Evadne Mount novels, changes tack and disposes with the cosy Christie model subverted successfully in The Act Of Roger Murgatroyd and less so in A Mysterious Affair Of Style, by opting to throw himself into the mix and tell the story of And Then There Was No One (2009) as a fictional memoir. Set in 2011, Adair has found himself at a literary festival in a Swiss town by the Reichenbach Falls, setting for Conan Doyle’s attempt at ridding himself of his popular detective character.

The influence of Sherlock Holmes plays as much a part in And Then There Was No One as that of Agatha Christie has for the triptych of Evadne Mount novels, and fans of Holmes may be interested to know that Adair reproduces, in full from his fictional new book of Sherlock Holmes stories, his take on The Giant Rat Of Sumatra, first mentioned in The Adventure Of The Sussex Vampire (cf The Casebook Of Sherlock Holmes) as “a story for which the world is not yet prepared”.

The reason for this change in the style of the novels comes late, but is worth mentioning, as Adair regularly talks about his novels, past, present, and in translation throughout:

For all my efforts to have the second novel ring as many changes on the first as was organically feasible within the generic conventions I was pastiching, there remained a stubbornly samey something about A Mysterious Affair of Style which long afterwards nagged at me. And not only at me. One reviewer, praising the book, had also expressed disappointment that I had taken an ‘if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t fix-it’ attitude to the first of the cycle, and I couldn’t help agreeing with him.

Like that novel, Adair begins by playing with the conventions of the murder mystery genre. Where the murder didn’t occur until late in A Mysterious Affair Of Style, the murder has long since been wrapped up here. The victim is Gustav Slavorigin,  a Booker Prize-winning author sent, after publishing a collection of incendiary anti-American essays, into hiding, Rushdie style, due to a contract on his head, courtesy of a rich Texan reactionary.

The prologue, seemingly extraneous to the mystery itself, fills in details that, to a first read, seem dry and dull, and in doing so recalls both the introduction to Eco’s The Name Of The Rose and the short foreword to Nabokov’s Lolita. This in itself is strange, given that Adair has mentioned in the past that Nabokov has “become something of an albatross about [his] neck”. The details of this chapter deal with the history of Slavorigin - his early days at university, with Adair, through the rise, fall, and infamy of his writing career. One notable book, and the reason Slavorigin is making a rare public pitstop, is his new thriller, A Reliable Narrator, which gives the game away without, if you catch my drift, doing so.

How to describe A Reliable Narrator? Its opening chapter resembles the concluding chapter of a whodunnit, one that just happens never actually to have been written. Thus the reader of Slavorigin’s book (I mean, the book which was written) cannot hope to comprehend the picturesque twists of this first-chapter denouement since, of the murder which has clearly taken place, the only detail to which he is made privy is the identity of the murderer, a murderer who has already been apprehended, charged, tried, found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.

The idea of a reliable narrator is played around with too, as is Adair’s playful style. Personal views come into the fray, such  as calling the forty-five minutes of literary festivals “so much hassle for so little result” and his description of a book as being “a fat, virtuosically executed novel by one of that new breed of American wunderkinder who, I would be lying if I denied it, are positively bloated with talent but who are also just too fucking pleased with themselves.” As a fictional Adair, he’s able to get away with it, even if, with reference to Slavorigin’s book:

The first-person protagonist is no canonic unreliable narrator, such a tired old cliché of postmodernism now, but a perfectly reliable narrator, except that not a single soul is prepared to rely on him.

The usual alliteration, literary and cinematic in-jokes, and postmodern trickery are present and accounted for in And Then There Was No One. The unashamed use of puns (’Google Gogol’, a delicatessen named ‘Salvador Deli’ and a few more Nabokovian references, ‘Son of Palefire’ and ‘Adair or Ardor’) adds to the fun, and I’d like to think that only Adair’s style, like a British eccentric, could get away with a metaphor like “the train tranquilly unzipped the country’s flies from Oxford to London”.

One of the more interesting ploys in the novel is how, as a memoir, Adair manages to introduce his sleuth, the Dowager Duchess of Crime, Evadne Mount, into real events. As the last novel was set in the 1940s and this novel is seventy years hence, and she should be the one dropping dead, he pulls it off well, and humorously, too, introducing her into a book that she should never be written, as per a Q&A session after his reading of The Giant Rat Of Sumatra:

‘You wrote two pastiches of Agatha Christie, The Act of Roger Murgatroyd and A Mysterious Affair of Style? Will there be a third?’ Me: ‘Absolutely not. I have had my fill of cardboard characters and preposterous plotlines. What I desire to write now is something more personal, a work of genuine depth and ambition.

Amongst the answers at that session there are some interesting insights that, if we believe the reliable narrator, into Adair that show And Then There Was No One as being that personal work, bringing with it a few questions of its own:

‘I read a book, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Les Enfants terribles, Death in Venice, or whatever, I like it, I rewrite it. I am in short a pasticheur. Less by opportunism, though, than by superstition. I long ago discovered that I could embark on a new work of fiction only if its premise had already been legitimised by one of the writers in my personal Pantheon. Each of my novels is thus a palimpsest. Scrape away at its surface and you will find, underneath, another novel, usually a classic. I offer no apology for this.’

Apologies are not in order as Adair has produced his best novel since 1992’s The Death Of The Author. His funniest, too. It has more conceptual twists and turns than the labyrinth in Eco’s The Name Of The Rose, another novel that owes a debt to Sherlock Holmes, and probably why the Italian writer was also due to attend the same literary festival. In fact, in Eco’s essay, Travels In Hyperreality, he says that ‘once the “total fake” is admitted, in order to be enjoyed it must seem totally real’, and this is what Adair does with this novel, giving us a reliable narrator, so reliable that we can believe his every word, only to have the rug pulled out from under us, to see it for what it is, yet still believe.

There’s something about the blurb  for Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s new novel, The Mirror In The Well (2008), that just makes it all the more tempting. How could anyone not want to read a book that declares “this novel will shock and offend some readers”, even if just to prove that it’ll take more than words scattered across pages to vex them, thank you very much. The obvious concern is that if its ability to shock and offend are its main strength then, as a reading experience, these traits may be its weakness. Thankfully, this isn’t the case and The Mirror In The Well is a strong, memorable piece of writing.

The Mirror In The Well, Marcom’s fourth novel, coming fast on the heels of an acclaimed trilogy about the consequences of the Armenian Genocide, is an erotic tour de force journaling the crests and troughs of an affair between an American woman and her foreign lover, told with an unashamed explicit vocabulary that proves sensual in its own unique way.

Told from both sides of the affair - the woman in the third person, the man in the second; both remaining unnamed throughout - The Mirror In The Well opens with their first arranged meeting, having chanced upon each other at a party. His marriage “one of habit and bitter convenience and notasked questions” and hers, at fourteen years, isn’t going anywhere, especially in the bedroom:

…you fucked her twice and not the once she had been lucky to get once every two weeks or month up until this today - the one if she’d been a good and obedient girl and wife and office-worker and citizen.

On their first night together, performing cunnilingus, the man triggers in the woman a previously unknown sexual power (”teaches her the unteaching of the limits…that he can bring her to the inside of outness and that she can arrive outward with him”) that leads to a prolonged relationship explicit in both action and the language used to describe it.

While the pages that follow feature frequent sex, any accusations of pornography can be dispelled. Yes, the language used can be harsh, featuring regular vulgarisms that some may blush at, but The Mirror In The Well is not a book to titillate, using this sexual awakening to explore layers of identity, sexuality, power, and love:

But perhaps as you make her you do make her fall in. The girl falls in to love, as if love were, what exactly?, the underground stone palace where the lover has hidden the beloved? the deepest well where the serpent lives? And you expect it, demand it: Stop fucking your husband, you tell her, I can’t bear it (fall in to love with me). She stares at you; she is silent and dark looking in the eyes. I love you, you say, and thrust this inside her like your cock: love me back love me back love me only in this possession.

Where the serpent recalls the Garden of Eden, The Mirror In The Well is not without other such Biblical allusions, such as the lover of “the girl who thinks that a man is a christ” being a blue-eyed carpenter from overseas. And it’s the traditions of the Bible that the couple fulfil in their liaisons:

…when you are together and naked then all of your human ancestry speaks in your cock and cunt; culture and caste is obliterated and made fine: a man; a woman: and in love, loving each other timelessly, across time and culture and his cock in her cunt and she is happy and he is happy to have stuck it in her: a man and in woman: open: the communion the old books spoke of.

Having written three books on her Armenian ancestry, it shouldn’t be a surprise that ancestry is important here, too, with the woman Janus-like looking back to her parents and considering her sons. And, when she deems to “pull open the labia of her cunt, invite the world, her lover, inside” there are hints that the woman is perhaps representative of America, her family’s adopted nation, one indiscriminately built on a history of immigration.

Indeed, America is a theme of The Mirror In The Well, with Marcom asking  “is there any where on earth as lonely as this country?” and answering “that we know everything, but we don’t wish to look at it”. In daring to look, the novel breaks out of “this Protestant modern theatre and its roles” and does so in an exhilarating fashion, her style one minute reducing the rush of sex to little more than chemical reaction before upping the ante to herald it in lush swathes of prose-poetry reminiscent of Clarice Lispector’s The Hour Of The Star.

There’s a thread of metafiction running through the book too, with the narrator constantly referring to “this book” or “this scene” - even certain pages. In doing this, we are reminded that this is only a story, it’s fabulist nature making the woman into an everywoman, a female cypher who comes to terms with the very nature of her femininity:

The lover has taught her to love her cunt because the cunt is her center, the cunt is pleasure, the cunt knows and knew him, picked him from a cavalcade of other men.

Of course, the harsh language and the range of sex acts described, may shock and offend but that is only a small part of the wider picture. In The Mirror In The Well the universal is told via the dot of a relationship, getting to the heart of sexual power and reflecting this back for all to see.

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.

My knowledge of Paul Auster and his work is due to the fact that his reputation precedes him. Despite his serious tone, his works are playful and metaphysical; they have a postmodern sensibility. The only novel of his I’ve read is Oracle Night and its thanks to this that I was able to get a slight foothold on Travels In The Scriptorium, as this one is strictly for Auster fans, being a meditation on all that has gone before - for reader, for writer.

An old man - dubbed Mr. Blank - wakes every day in a spartan room with no knowledge of the day before. Basic objects are labelled (lamp, wall, desk) and, tucked into the ceiling, a camera takes a new snap every second. He doesn’t know if he’s locked in - the fear of this being true makes him not want to know.

Then a woman named Anna comes to visit, talking of medication and treatment, helping him with washing and dressing. Yet there’s a depth to her actions that suggest she’s more than just a carer - she cares. And so Mr Blank’s day unfolds, receiving visits and reading from a manuscript on his desk, as he tries to work out who he is and why he is there.

Travels In The Scriptorium is told in the style of a report based off the photos from the secret camera and the sounds from a microphone, also secret. The prose therefore is clinical and distant (”From the look of disgust that comes over his face as he scans these sentences, we can be fairly confident that Mr. Blank has not lost the ability to read.”) offering us every movement and expression; every word spoken, muttered, sighed.

Tucked into the novel is another novel, in the form of a manuscript on Mr. Blank’s desk. It’s about a man locked in a room writing a manuscript that will be used against him. And so, since Auster was presumably sitting in a room writing about Mr. Blank writing about another in similar circumstances what we have here is a the literary equivalent of matryoshka dolls. From what I can gather the people who pay visits to Mr. Blank are characters from previous novels, bitter about the way he used them on “missions”:

I might be ridiculous, Flood says, with anger rising in his voice, but you, Mr. Blank…you’re cruel…cruel and indifferent to the pain of others. You play with people’s lives and take no responsibility for what you’ve done. I’m not going to sit here and bore you with my troubles, but I blame you for what’s happened to me. I most sincerely blame you, and I despise you for it.

To the casual reader, like me, Travels In The Scriptorium is probably best left until more familiarity with Auster’s work is assured. There’s so much here that passed me by. But, at the same time, it brings a voice to characters left to their damaged lives once the author has moved on to other works and perhaps shows an insight into Auster’s feelings about writing:

I’m sick of these goddamned shoes. If anything, I’d rather take the other one off, too.

It’s an engaging read but I feel that more travels will be required, however, before I can truly make sense of this issue from Auster’s scriptorium.