booklit

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.

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.

One of the pitfalls of reading literature in translation is that some authors see their work, if they see it all, come to the English language in a chronology all of their own. Artificial Snow (2002) was Florian Zeller’s debut novel, but it’s the last of his four to be translated and published. Reading his book, therefore, has almost been an exercise in regression. Having started with the mature and satisfying, The Fascination Of Evil, we now find ourselves back when the author, in his early twenties, was learning his trade and was style trying veer off from Kundera to a style all his own.

Artificial Snow, like Zeller’s recent novel, Julien Parme, is a coming of age novel, although it has more in common with his second, Lovers Or Something Like It, in that it deals with young Parisians caught up in the foibles of love, relationships, and their own self-importance. The last of these is exemplified when Zeller makes the decision to include himself in the novel:

Florian was a strange guy. He was twenty-one and a bit. Quite a bit. His life had been turned upside down by one incident and he’s never been the same again. When he was ten, during one of his experiments, he’d poked a piece of wire into an electric socket while holding it in his mouth. […] It was feared he’d lose the power of speech but, after intensive care, the only after-effects were a fierce desire to write books and a weird hairstyle: his hair seemed to be permanently crystallised on his head like untidy stalagmites.

Zeller, author of the novel, opens with a section titled ‘Boring prologue’ that reflects the disaffected nature of himself, which in turn sets the mood for the book itself:

Everything seemed terribly boring: getting up in the morning, going to bed at night, pretending not to pretend, shaking hands, being polite and romantic, studying and getting good marks, everything. I even found the prologue of the novel I was trying to write after a fashion tragically boring. But, then again, deleting it was even more boring.

From here we move into the narrator’s story, which begins with him missing his train on the Metro.  It’s a fine, if obvious, metaphor that foreshadows the main plot of the novel - that of relationships being like trains, where you hop on and off as life dictates. The train the narrator has missed was to take him to a party which carries some importance to him: Lou is going to be there (”In my dreams, she called me “my darling”; in reality, she didn’t call me at all…”) and he’s quite interested in getting back together with her after a brief relationship a few years before, even if it goes against all he believes in:

We’d spent a few nights together at the time and I didn’t like the idea of doing something I’d already done before. I felt that repeating things was always proof of failure. Getting back together with a girl was like admitting you hadn’t found anything better since, it was like admitting you’d reached your sexual peak somewhere between fifteen and sixteen; that sucked.

Even if the narrator would prefer not to go back, his love for Lou snowballs into obsession, so much so that he finds himself following her, maintaining a distance, and seeing his love melt when she doesn’t notice him, kisses another lover. When it looks as if all hope of reconciliation has faded, there seems only one solution: to wreak terrible acts of violence on her, to kill her. However:

The best crime, the best revenge, was to cheat on her, cheat on her as much as possible, defile her memory with fleeting moments of pleasure.

As far as story goes in Artificial Snow, there’s little of it, with Zeller preferring to relay a few events, presumably autobiographical, given his own inclusion in the novel, and to reflect on them, preferring philosophy over plot. While some of his lines are a tad simple (”making love and fucking are two very different things”) there’s still an invigorating energy running through the prose that skips past these, like them or not, and leads straight in to the next. Also, following the narration can be a little difficult at times, what with Zeller narrating in addition to his narrator, who just so happens to have a recurrent friend called Florian Zeller? Are the two Zeller’s the same? It’s foggy, but the openness of it is a welcome ponderable.

Shakespeare provides an epigraph at the start of the book, one that recurs later in the prose, saying where goes the white when melts the snow? Zeller’s snow is that of childhood, those crisp sheets of memory that we play over in our mind but can never return to. Here, the white turns to sludge, something tricky for the narrator to pull himself out from but altogether necessary for growing up. In writing Artificial Snow it seems a vessel for Zeller to grow up in. Later books show that it worked.

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.

Linda Grant comes to this year’s Booker longlist following on from her longlisting for this year’s Orange Prize, an accolade she won in 2000 with her second novel, When I Lived In Modern Times. Her third novel, Still Here, flirted with the Booker back in 2002, but never made it to the shortlist. The Clothes On Their Backs (2008), her fourth novel, might yet see her take one step further to the Booker, especially in a year where, judging by the discussions on the Booker site, the field seems average.

Although Grant’s family history is lodged in a distant Russian-Polish background, The Clothes On Their Backs imagines a Jewish Hungarian one.  And the Hungarian connection is here in force, with poet and translator Georges Szirtes appearing three times over: in the dedication, the acknowledgements, and an epigraph. Call it a three piece suit, which is fitting as The Clothes On Their Backs is a novel all about clothes and what it means to wear them.

The clothes you wear are a metamorphosis. They change you from the outside in. We are all trapped with these thick calves or pendulous breasts, our sunken chests, our dropping jowls. A million imperfections mar us. …So the most you can do is put on a new dress, a different tie. We are forever turning into someone else, and should never forget that someone else is always looking.

Putting on a new dress is Vivian Kovacs, the English born child of Hungarian immigrants. When she was growing up there was a wardrobe full of hand-me-down clothes in her parents’ house. Now, thinking back, there are no family photographs showing she ever wore them. (”As far as I knew, no evidence existed that I was ever a child.”) Denying Vivien a record of her past isn’t all they are guilty of - they deny her their past too.

Because my parents never answered any questions about the past - that’s finished, it’s over and done with, here you are in England, that other place has nothing to do with you, stop bothering your head with this rubbish, no, no, no - I learned to stop asking, and eventually I forgot all about wanting to ask. Suddenly, a treasure chest had opened out and spilled all these precious objects.

The treasure chest is Vivien’s uncle, Sándor, a refugee from the Hungarian revolution who has set himself up as a slum landlord, based on Peter Rachman. Back in 1977, when she knew him, Sándor paid her to write up his memoirs, as he talked about growing up in Hungary, and the horrors faced there, the likes of which not even her father had experienced. In these recollections, her uncle deflects any responsibility to himself arguing that his actions, regardless of their immorality, were necessary. That he can face up to his actions and move on them puts him in direct opposition to Vivien’s father:

My father was terrified of change. When change was in the air anything could happen, and he already suffered from an anxiety: that any small disturbance in his circumstances would bring everything down - the flat, the wife, the job, the new daughter, London itself, then England, and he would slide down the map of the world, back to Hungary, clinging on uselessly, ridiculously, with his fingers clutching the smooth, rolling surface of the globe.

Something that could bring down everything down are events in 1977. Having escaped to England to escape fascism, the rise of the National Front provides worrying echoes of home. The uniformed goons that patrol the streets further add to the novel’s exploration of what clothes mean to the person wearing them. But, all extraneous characters aside, the novel’s main focus is the relationships between the members of the Kovacs family, and these are without doubt the most interesting parts of The Clothes On Their Back.

Sadly, Grant adds other touches to Vivien’s life - all verging on the ridiculous; all pertaining to equally doomed relationships - that detract from the story’s potential. Plus, while the flavour of her immigrants’ speech is speckled with the occasional grasp for a word, sometimes the words in their mouth come across feeling strained:

‘Vivien, I feel I am in that programme Perry Mason and you are the lawyer and I am the accused. What do you call it, cross-examination. I wish you would stop.’

But cross-examination may just be what The Clothes On Their Backs needs. The first chapter offers up many discussion points that don’t become clear until the book has unravelled its events and themes. Then, a passing mention of the London bombings, hints again at clothes and the pigeonholing of people in the interests of persecution. It’s a wardrobe of words made all the more interesting for the skeletons in its closet, although the experience for its narrator, recounted thirty years on, comes across as little more than second hand.

When the first books from the Canongate Myths series were launched, I wasn’t too enamoured with the choices of Jeanette Winterson and Margaret Atwood, two authors that I’d read in some capacity and never truly enjoyed. Perhaps in expecting to dislike the books there could have been no outcome other than to dislike, which was what happened. And now, coming back to the series I found myself facing off against Ali Smith, yet another whose work I’ve sampled and found not for me. So, imagine my surprise when, expecting to dislike Girl Meets Boy (2007), I found there could be another outcome.

Like all other books in the Myths Series, Girl Meets Boy takes on the challenge of selecting a well known myth and, putting the author’s spin on it, updating it. Smith’s choice is that of Iphis from Ovid’s Metamorphosis, the only story we are told that, thanks to a helpful idiot’s guide halfway through, has - if, like me, you didn’t know - a happy ending.

Girl Meets Boy’s first line (”Let me tell you about when I was a girl, our grandfather says.”)  sets out its stall in foreshadowing that there’s some loose gender definitions here. This line is recalled by Anthea, who, along with her sister Imogen, narrate the story. Anthea is the younger of the two, looked after by Imogen in a house in Inverness, left to them by their grandparents. Imogen has even gone so far as to get her sister a job at Pure, a creative consultancy charged with creating a slogan for water, where water represents the imagination:

Water is history. Water is mystery. Water is nature. Water is life. Water is archaeology. Water is civilisation. Water is where we live. Water is here and water is now. Get the message. Get it in a bottle.

This is the cry of Keith, the sisters’ knuckle-dragging boss whose opinions belong in an age darker than the projection room he’s addressing. Anthea, however, isn’t one to bottle the imagination, as her walk to work that day illustrated:

I could, if I chose, just walk to the river. I could stand up and let myself fall the whole slant of the bank. I could just let the fast old river have me, toss myself in like a stone.

Not one to go with the flow, Anthea is quick to rebel from this corporate life when she spots a boy from the window painting a slogan about water being a human right

He was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen in my life.

But he looked like a girl.

She was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen in my life.

The boy is indeed a girl, and Anthea finds herself romantically involved, much to the chagrin of her sister who, in her narrative sections, is constantly interrupted by her inner thoughts, conclealed in brackets:

(Oh my God my sister is A GAY.)

(I am not upset. I am not upset. I am not upset. I am not upset.)

The blame falls on their parents’ break up and the Spice Girls with Imogen comically gathering up all the clues that she should have noticed, such as liking the Eurovision Song Contest and Buffy The Vampire Slayer. And it’s this attitude that Smith takes on in her retelling of Iphus’ story, that in a time when single-sex relationships are accepted, it’s the attitude toward them that needs to change. Smith opts for chapter headings called ‘I’, ‘You’, ‘Us’, ‘Them’ and ‘All Together Now’ that ensure, in a book of reversals, that the happy ending remains unchanged.

While the slogans, thanks to their creative background, the girls go on to daub across the city seem like slapped on feminism, Smith’s prose throughout the book has a lightness to it that makes reading it a breeze, especially at its most playful, and when communicating its message of love:

She had the swagger of a girl. She blushed like a boy. She had a girl’s toughness. She had a boy’s gentleness. She was as meaty as a girl. She was as graceful as a boy. She was as brave and handsome and rough as a girl. She was as pretty and delicate and dainty as a boy. She turned boys’ heads like a girl. She turned girls’ heads like a boy. She made love like a boy. She made love like a girl. She was so boyish it was girlish, so girlish it was boyish, she made me want to rove the world writing our names on every tree.

And for a book that has fun written all over it, in literary allusions and puns aplenty, it proved to have one more reversal up its sleeve. Reader, I liked it.

When it comes to Jorge Luis Borges, I’m more aware of him and his contribution to letters than I am versed in him. A few short stories from Labyrinths is about as far as I’ve delved, but his legacy extends far beyond his own works and he has, in some form, appeared in the works of others. As Jorge of Burgos in Umberto Eco’s The Name Of The Rose or Zampano in Mark Z. Danielweski’s House Of Leaves. In both instances the character, like Borges, is a blind man

Borges became blind in later age and would ask people to read for him. One of the many who did just that is Alberto Manguel who, when sixteen, received the request and would read books and poetry aloud to Borges for the next four years. In With Borges (2006) Manguel reminisces over this period of his life, giving accounts of the man himself interspersed with fragments of narrative, both of which combine to provide an interesting, if slight, portrait of arguably Argentina’s greatest writer.

It’s an intimate picture, depicting the close relationship between the two, Manguel admitting the influence Borges had on his understanding and appreciation of literature:

…the conversations with Borges were what, in my mind, conversations should always be: about books and about the clockwork of books, and about the discovery of writers I had not read before, and about ideas that had not occurred to me, or which I had glimpsed only in a hesitant, half-intuited way that, in Borges’s voice, glittered and dazzled in all their rich and somehow obvious splendour.

And while Manguel does talk of his experiences, much of the book is given over to the character of his mentor, a man to whom books were everything (”his world was wholly verbal: music, colour and form rarely entered it”) and, far from being a writer, was the perfect reader of the world:

For a man who loved to travel but who could not see the places he visited…he was singularly uninterested in the physical world except as representations of his readings. The sand of the Sahara or the water of the Nile, the coast of Iceland, the ruins of Greece or Rome, all of which he touched with delight and awe, simply confirmed the memory of a page of the Arabian Nights or the Bible, of Njals Saga or of Homer and Virgil.

It’s fascinating to imagine this, the imagery of man who can’t see. Yet in his head were words - passages of prose, lines of poetry; always retrievable - being constantly edited, reshaped, and rewritten. Manguel sprinkles his recollections with a few anecdotes about Borges’ capacity for recollection and composition, and how he used it to satisfy a wry sense of humour.

Amongst all the facts and stories, one of the more interesting - and surprising - aspects of Borges, Manguel notes, was his library:

For a man who called the universe a library, and who confessed that he had imagined Paradise ‘bajo la forma de una biblioteca‘, the size of his own library came as a disappointment…

But what was in it contained “the essence of Borges’s reading” - encyclopaedias, dictionaries, volumes of epic poetry, and novels by Joyce, Kipling, Chesterton - and Manguel also provides a sizeable list of those Borges rejected (e.g. Proust, Balzac, García Márquez).

Manguel finds space to talk about Borges time with Adolfo Bioy Casares (”the most important relationship in Borges’s life”) and, talking of their collaborate efforts, the Casares’ home life, and the magnitude of their conversations, in aspects of science, religion, and the arts. There’s even a funny story regarding the death of Casares’ dog that, in true Borgesian humour, complements the themes that dominate his literature.

Amongst all the names - of friends, of books - Manguel recalls more poignant moments spent discussing the other infinities of life. Like being a tiger. But at the same time hints at moments of cruelty and casual racism. Overall, though, Borges comes in for much praise - not just for his work, but for renewing the Spanish language by way of borrowings from other tongues. Interestingly, though, he is remembered as a man who had little regard, in a physical sense, for his own work. That he should go down as a reader of the world over one of its writers certainly feels apt. On whether history remembered him at all, he was indifferent:

…it was his work, his material, the stuff on which his universe was made, that was immortal, and for that reason he himself did not feel the need to seek an everlasting existence. “The number of themes, of words, of texts is limited. Therefore nothing is ever lost. If a book is lost, then someone will write it again, eventually. That should be enough immortality for anyone.”

Although, only sixty pages in length, Manguel uses each one effectively and produces a wide ranging picture of a man, his city, his loves, his hates, and his philosophy. In Borgesian terms it need never have been written at all:

“[Borges] likes to imagine a universe in which magazines and books are not necessary because every man is capable of every magazine and book, of every story and every line of verse. In this universe…every man is an artist and therefore art is no longer necessary…“

He was a man that could cheat death by being infinitely possible: in life, in literature, and in memory.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When it comes to writing a novel, there are two approaches: doing it for the art and doing it for the money. In James Meek’s novel, We Are Now Beginning Our Descent (2008), Adam Kellas is doing it for the money. And why not? His career as a warzone reporter is fraught with danger and journalists in his line of work go from one contract to the next. Writing a commercial thriller and the subsequent sales would give him the security he needs in order to sit down and write the books he really wants.

And security is what he needs, what with a divorce behind him, adding to a history of relationships which never work out and he finds difficult to get over. One such affair was with an American journalist, Astrid, during his time in Afghanistan. Yet one day, while boarding a helicopter, she jumps out as it’s taking off and he never sees her again. It’s no surprise that such a lack of closure should play on his mind. That he should let it guide him, well that’s another matter.

So when he receives an email from Astrid asking him to come and see her, he doesn’t think twice about boarding a plane, without even so much as a coat. (”He had wanted to see her for a year and now she asked to see him, and he was coming.”)

The subsequent journey fills the greater portion of the novel, although little of the journey is described. Not because it would be boring, but because Kellas is too busy wrestling with recent events to notice what’s going on. Women have left him, he’s quit his job (the book advance is a six figure sum), the war is getting to him, and in one explosive set piece, he lays waste to his best friend’s house. It’s no surprise, therefore, to hear the announcement of ‘we are now beginning our descent’ as the plane comes into New York. But for Adam Kellas, he has already begun, casting off partners, his job, and friends along the way.

That Kellas was inadequately dressed for the season marked him as a loser. The suit and shoes were plain enough warning in themselves that here was someone in themidst of their descent from security to insecurity, a man yet to settle in his new location on the bottom.

Like Kellas, Meek is no stranger to reporting from undesirable countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq. So, with the benefit of experience, the sense of place brought to the novel’s locations is impressive and feels authentic. One can almost imagine the half-buried Soviet machinery “digested by the tissue of the road” and the feeling of being there, as it happens, with other journalists pushing for stories in the face of tragedy really shines through:

A barefooted Afghan man in grimy grey clothes and a gold cap squatted in the dirt in fron of the bombed house. it was his house. The explosion had killed his wife while she was sewing clothes for a wedding, and wounded his two children, his mother and brother. He squatted near the ruins, with his long clay-stained red hands resting on his knees, and reporters came to ask him questions. He answered, although he could not meet their eyes. For hours he had a changing little group of people standing awkwardly in front of him in western clothes, taking his picture, writing down his words and filming him. The same set of questions would be asked, and the Afghan man, whose name was Jalaluddin, would answer, and when that group of journalists was halfway through, another set would arrive and get him to start again from the beginning.

The authenticity of the Afghan landscape is never in question. Meek has lived and breathed it. But there are occasions in the novel where he let’s his grip on the narrative slip and intrudes on the story. Dialogue is usually spot on but is sometimes guilty of pushing ideas rather than relaying believable statements and sentiments. And a couple of events are implausible, even if they do get the story back on track. And going off track, even if it mirrors Kellas’ descent, his mind a maelstrom of regrets, is the hardest part of reading the novel. That and regular passages of lengthy paragraphs that can be suffocating in their relentlessness.

Where it picks up - or takes off, should that be? - is when the ideas behind the novel come to the fore. At its core it’s a novel about love and friendship, and about how people are never - and never can be - who we make them out to be. Layered over this, using Kellas’ novel as its emblem, is a criticism of modern society that has dumbed down and gone in search of the dollar; that has, like Adam Kellas, been seduced by America.

It would subvert the genre by making America the enemy - not a group with America, but the American government, the American majority, and the American way…Readers would be made to believe in a limited war to save civilization…

With the current political climate involving efforts to bring “the American way” to nations such as Afghanistan and Iraq, Meek is perhaps right that culture has begun its downward flight. But We Are Now Beginning Our Descent is not the novel to combat it, being a lesser novel to Meek’s previous effort. One wonders if The People’s Act Of Love was him doing it for the money, allowing him the leisure of writing what he wants to write. And while he slips in some remarkable imagery and turns of phrase, and proves himself more than capable of penning effective set pieces, these are lost in an abundance of prose, forcing indigestion on the tissue of the page.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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