Kevin Breathnach

Brian Dillon Interview

Tue, 14 May 2013 10:50:54 +0100

There are other few critics at work today more consistently interesting on as wide a range of subjects as Brian Dillon. Born in Dublin in 1969, Dillon is a regular contributor to the Dublin Review, the London Review of Books, Art Forum, frieze and Cabinet, the indefinable conceptual quarterly where he works as UK editor. Come of age under the influence of Roland Barthes, Dillon is a writer whose revelatory criticism – often quietly engaged in transcending its own form – wears the weight of its theory lightly. Since leaving academia a decade ago, Dillon’s voice has become steadily more apparent and more authoritative. He is perhaps the closest Ireland has come to producing a Susan Sontag.

Dillon is the author of five books, including In the Dark Room (2005), Nine Hypochondriac Lives (2009) and I Am Sitting in a Room (2011), a Oulipian-style study of writers’ rooms written before an audience in just 24-hours. His work does not necessarily take place within the form of the essay. Yet even his novella, Sanctuary (2009), is notable for its sense of ‘alertness’, ‘attention’ and ‘transcription’, three qualities Dillon says ‘justify the miscellaneous essayist’s way of being and working’. Dillon’s work is always essayistic, in other words, even when it’s not. And so the forthcoming publication of Objects in This Mirror, a selection of essays written over the last ten years, makes for a particularly welcome addition to his growing catalogue. With essays on contemporary art, ruin aesthetics, photography and the essay itself, Objects in This Mirror reflects a core set of Dillon’s interests. At the same time, essays on the Common Cold Unit, the Dewey Decimal System and Victorian gesture manuals work to deflect the idea that a merely core set is ever adequate.

My interview with Brian Dillon appears in the May edition of Totally Dublin.

Tao Lin: Taipei

Mon, 06 May 2013 11:12:00 +0100

In Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, a group of synthesised images is described as ‘less deceptive’ because ‘at least they proclaim themselves to be what they are: images’. No such precaution is taken by the narrative voice of Taipei. The ability of language to convey thought in never called into question; in fact, the text often removes itself from free indirect style to directly quote Paul’s apparently verbalised thought-process. ‘Paul, staring at her calmly, thought “she’s definitely drunk” and “normally I would be interested in her, to some degree, but currently I’m obsessed with Laura.”’ Taipei may well be a thematically modish novel, but formally it amounts to a near-anachronism: a unitary psychological novel, told by a reliable third-person narrator willing to spell every last detail out in neutral tones that affect an impossible objectivity. Taipei is not what you’d call a writerly text. Everything is included, processed, and diagnosed.

My review of Taipei by Tao Lin appears over at 3:AM Magazine.

Georges Perec: La Boutique obscure

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 12:00:00 +0100

Subject to a host of new translations and literary studies, the Oulipo is enjoying a spell in the fickle spotlight of current literary trends. Championed by some as the solution to that other theme of the hour (literary failure), the Ouvroir pour la littérature potentielle was established in 1960 by a group of experimental writers, each of whom had at the core of their artistic process the notion of constraint, exactitude and mathematical rigor. Georges Perec, who died in 1982, was perhaps the most prominent member of the group, widely renowned for A Void, a full-length mystery novel that eschews all use of the letter ‘e’, and Life: A User’s Manual, a masterpiece of composition whose plot follows the pattern of the famous ‘Knight’s Tour’ around a chessboard.

Consisting of 124 accounts of varying length and lucidity, La Boutique obscure is the strangely intractable result of Perec’s attempt to make faithful written records of everything he dreamt between 1968 and 1972. It is a project whose seemingly unrestrained subject matter places it in stark counterpoint to Perec’s widely celebrated Oulipian output. There, writing is forced to obey its own arbitrarily imposed laws. In La Boutique obscure, by contrast, not even the empirically observed laws of time and space are obeyed. ‘The alarm clock is unusable,’ he dreams in February 1971. Tenses merge: ‘Your party is, was a smashing success.’ The laws of mathematics are likewise ignored: ‘My boss pays me 82 francs (3x16) instead of 45 (3x15) for having served for three days as a fake subject of his experiment.’

‘I give myself rules in order to be completely free,’ Perec once said to account for his working methods. It is a nicely counterintuitive riff, just catchy enough as to seem completely meaningless. As La Boutique obscure will testify, however, it turns out to have been exactly right. The dreams recorded here are subject to no rules whatsoever; yet its noted anarchy enslaves the internal play of Perec’s subconscious. The earlier entries are fragmentary, varyingly nonsensical and banal. ‘Itinerary: known secret maze, doors of chest (round, armored), hallways, very long trek toward the encounter.’ By 1970 at the latest, though, Perec has become the ‘fake subject of his experiment’, dozing out full nocturnal narratives of adventure, comedy and tragedy. ‘I thought I was recording the dreams I was having,’ he writes in the preface; ‘I have realized that it was not long before I began having dreams only in order to write them.’ Where once he dreamt of ‘sleeping on the bare floor, on a mattress with no frame’, later his dreams are filled with scaffolding, structures and ornament. The stage becomes a recurring motif too, projecting the idea of something being played out for an audience. Told to dream freely for us, his sleeping mind performs as if forced. A project of this sort will always turn out great fodder for psychoanalysts and literary geneticists; what is perhaps unexpected about it is its illustration, per Foucault, that observation constitutes a more effective means of control than simple law enforcement.

This review appeared originally in the April edition of Totally Dublin.

First Book of Frags

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 10:55:00 +0100

In what is perhaps the most obviously satirical story in Dave Lordan’s new collection, First Book of Frags, a small Irish town builds its entire economy around the tourism brought in by the Cornerboy, a local street performer who, having attracted the interest of so many ‘scientists and semioticians’, has been transformed from local pariah to community hero. Where once he was subject to ridicule and abuse, now he is the subject of ‘three separate volumes, which are available for purchase exclusively in our village’. The appropriation of culture by commercial interests is a theme typical of this staunchly political collection, where issues such as suicide, addiction and accessorial guilt are addressed in a pointedly Irish context. ‘Their techniques of silencing are even further along in some respects than our own,’ says the lively old Nazi in ‘Dr Essler’s Cocaine’.

He is just one the collection’s many narrators who seem totally impervious to obvious wrongdoing. In a sense, the mystically amoral tone within which they operate is used to mimic the sort of unfeeling, spectral anti-language of the nation’s power structures (‘Public services are being replaced by pre-recorded messages,’ says one narrator). And while it is true that this alone constitutes a worthwhile and well-worked conceit, we must nevertheless resist limiting ourselves to such a singular reading. Lordan’s stories are much larger than mere satire. Contained in the particulars of contemporary injustice, Lordan sees the universal injustice of time and history. ‘Is this what keeps us from reaching out to each other and from mutual striving – the inner knowledge that we are but plankton in the churning sea of time?’ The amorality of several narrators here mirrors that of time itself.

In the beginning there was the Word, they say, and the Word was God. But Lordan’s stories are set in a world where God is long dead, where the cosmos does not speak. Whence language, then? While planning to poison a neighbour’s dog, one narrator writes of “pain so intense it almost causes speech in dogs”. In doing so, he situates the origin of language in resistance to pain, injustice, and death – to the cold, cold silence of the cosmos. Such resistance is futile, of course. Its language always breaks down. ‘Nuttin means nuttin no moare, ift ever did,’ says the narrator of ‘At Slane McGlowan’s Funeral’. ‘Any rum thing in the world can stoned for anything else that there is.’ Grounded no more in divine authority, language contorts, contradicts itself and finally collapses. And yet, however unstable, this is the language all true art must to speak. Dave Lordan speaks it with verve.

A version of this review appeared originally in the April edition of Totally Dublin.

Anthony Walsh: Echoes

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 16:24:00 +0000

And so we must ask: what does it mean for a novel of advertent failure to fail inadvertently? As Lars Iyer put it recently: “Literary writing can allow you to capitalise on failure – how strange!” The thing is, though, Walsh’s particular disguise fails to cover up his unacknowledged or accidental failures. Those do not belong to the narrator, they are his own. The curtain slips, and behind it we find no masterful wizard but a rather pedestrian young author, who has been using a lot of elaborate tricks and props to make himself seem great and powerful and good.

My speculative review of Eco’s Echoes, the beautifully failed first novel of never-before-heard-of Irish author, Anthony Walsh, appears over at The New Inquiry.

Lee Rourke Interview

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 10:38:08 +0000

To go back to Derrida, you mention him in the endnotes as the influence for ‘every time you sign an invoice…’, but to me the most Derridean poem in the collection is ‘words (unspoken)’, which seems to echo Derrida’s thoughts on his own mother’s senescence while also drawing on his conceptions of speech and writing and traces. Was this something you were conscious of?

Yes, completely. I think out of everything in Varroa Destructor, ‘words (unspoken)’ is the one that means the most to me on a human level (even though I try to be kind of anti-humanist in my approach). I’ve read Derrida’s accounts of the way he architectured the memory of his mother. They’re very moving accounts. Again, we have the traces and the blurring of memory. A very poignant thing happened with my mother before she died. She had throat cancer. She had a tracheotomy; her voice box was removed. She could no longer speak, and so from that moment until the day she died she wrote everything down. I kept her notepad, and what haunts me are her very last words: they are indecipherable. She was so weak and out of her mind on morphine that, although the thoughts were there in her mind, the actual act of writing and language failed her. I’ve never been able to decipher what her last words were.

My interview with Lee Rourke appears in March edition of Totally Dublin.

Alejandro Zambra: Ways of Going Home

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 13:28:00 +0000

Alejandro Zambra’s third translated novel, Ways of Going Home, switches between two narratives. One is told by a writer resembling Zambra, who is currently at work on a novel about his life growing up in Chile. This work-in-progress is presented to us as the secondary narrative. The spectre of Pinochet hangs over the entire work; its characters sense something like remorse at their own belatedness with regards to the dictatorship. “While the country was falling to pieces, we were learning to talk, to walk, to fold napkins in the shape of boats,” writes the narrator. “While the novel was happening, we played hide-and-seek.”

This distinction informs the novel in structural terms. Now that the dictatorship has passed, it has become inappropriate to portray everyday life in the terms of the traditional, unified novel. Zambra turns to narratives within narratives, the use of doppelgängers and the suggestion of pseudonymity in an attempt to turn his work into a sort of literary hide-and-seek. “The book was her disguise,” he writes, “a precious mask.” And yet, these tricks have grown old, too. Zambra’s meta-narrative seems knowingly fatigued. Little is concealed. No thrill comes upon seeing Las Maninas hanging in the narrator’s childhood home. That we all know the terrain too well is one of this novel’s many small tragedies. “Perhaps we long for the time when we could be lost,” says the narrator. “The time when all the streets were new.”

This review appeared originally in the March edition of Totally Dublin.

Amy Sackville: Orkney

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 13:18:23 +0000

A professor of 19th-century literature marries his silver-haired student who, some forty years his junior, has enchanted him like so many wild-eyed women of Romantic poetry. They go on their honeymoon to Orkney, where the sea acts as a dark, consuming force upon the pair. What is immediately striking about Orkney is its use of language. Sackville is a skilled stylist, writing in that portentous lyrical mode that is commonly referred to as ‘painterly’; indeed, by casting its scenes in the vocabulary of the visual arts, the novel asks to be read as such. “I will have no drowning, I said, however picturesque.”

With this frame of reference in place, paintings become everywhere apparent. “Her view is encompassed by mine,” says the narrator; “it is not merely the sea that I see, it is the sea that she is seeing.” This image, which to my mind recalls Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, asks us to consider the perspective of the narrator’s wife in our reading of the text. And so, when the narrator describes something as “raven, sable, pitch” and she responds “black and cold”, we start to see the narrator’s prose as excessively ornate. The perspective of the narrator’s wife subverts his beautiful but fragile lyricism; deconstruction is always already at work within the text. When she indisputably contradicts his first memories of her, it feels as if the image the narrator maintains of his wife as some mysterious enchantress is merely a projection brought on by too much book-reading. And then, just as we are about to cry Bovary, the narrator is proved right. This is not to say that no narrative subversion took place. Instead it means that, in accordance with its epigraph by Hélène Cixous, Orkney is: “…the portrait of a story attacked from all sides, that attacks itself and in the end gets away.” Sackville’s triumph is to realise that a beauty that admits itself as fragile is much less fragile for it.

This review appeared originally in the March edition of Totally Dublin.

Deborah Levy: Swimming Home & Black Vodka

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 11:17:23 +0000

Black Vodka is an inexhaustible feast. Its richness can be ascribed in part to that style of weighted reticence we sense at work in Swimming Home. The recurring motifs and metaphors of the collection, which are each put down in such a way as to resist any singular interpretation, should also be considered instrumental. Levy records telephones, sirens and car alarms like others would record birdsong, while the grotesquely close attention she pays to wrists, thighs, skulls, bones, skin, meat, veins, blood and guts establishes an extremely rich, versatile symbolic code. Black Vodka sees Levy play surgeon, dermatologist and butcher all at once.

My review of Swimming Home and Black Vodka by Deborah Levy appears in The Stinging Fly (Issue 24, Vol. Two / Spring 2013 ).

Extreme Metaphors: J.G. Ballard Interviews

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 17:37:00 +0000

J.G. Ballard is one of only a few really interesting literary writers of post-war Britain, but his influence is felt as heavily upon popular culture as it is upon so-called ‘high’ culture. References to his work dot the landscape of popular music like so many wrecked cars of the apocalypse. Joy Division named a song after The Atrocity Exhibition, his early experimental collection of condensed novels. The Klaxon’s first album, ‘Myths of the Near Future’, borrows its title from a collection of Ballard’s short stories. Radiohead’s ‘OK Computer’ was heavily influenced by Ballard’s most controversial novel, Crash, and David Bowie’s ‘Always Crashing the Same Car’ was clearly influenced by it, too.

With all this in mind, one of the funniest moments in Extreme Metaphors, a collection of some forty-four excellent interviews with the great man, comes when Jon Savage, speaking to Ballard in 1978, enthuses at length about The Velvet Underground and punk rock. He notes the way both attack “media and technological conditioning” before pausing to allow Ballard to comment. “To be honest,” he says, “I don’t listen to music. It’s just a blank spot.” Speaking to The Paris Review four years later, he comments: “I think I’m the only person I know who doesn’t own a record player or a single record.”

Despite this, he listens to Savage with interest, and speaks with as much consideration and insight about the sociological aspects of contemporary music as he does elsewhere about his own personal obsessions – the suburbanisation of the soul, surrealist painting, his notion of ‘inner space’, consumerism, urban decay, the sexual fetishisation of car crashes, etc., etc.. He will return to these themes again and again and again over the course of these interviews. The fact that his doing so never once grows tiresome is a testament both to Ballard as a speaker, and to Simon Sellars and Dan O’Hara as editors. Ballard was a very generous subject, speaking a combined estimate of 650,000 words in interview, often to tiny fanzines that never came to be made digital. The editors of Extreme Metaphors immersed themselves so thoroughly in this discourse that they actually end up unconsciously borrowing from Ballard’s store of recurring metaphors. Sellars writes at one point about something serving “as a kind of grit”, a metaphor Ballard revisits several times throughout the collection.

Many assessing these interviews have focused – and will continue to focus – on Ballard’s success rate as a prophet of the near-future. In 1963, for instance, he predicted that Ronald Reagan would become president of the United States. In 1978, he predicted that homes would one day be transformed into mini-television studios. He even saw social media coming and, more obliquely, the destruction of the Twin Towers. And yet, impressive as such prescience no doubt is, there’s only so long we can sit gawping at a man speaking in the past describe our present condition before it comes to seem like a very limited, almost provincial, sort of reading. “Look everybody! Look! He’s talking about us!”

As Ballard’s predictions become our lived reality and, later, our past, it is important that we draw some sort of method from Ballard’s thinking, so that we, too, might see so clearly. His vision of the future seems to have come as a side-effect of the close attention he paid to his own present. “What I’m trying to do,” he said, “is to look at the present and to get away from the notion of yesterday, today, tomorrow.” He observed his present with a clinical eye, dissecting it like the corpse he worked on as a medical student in the early 1950s. In 1968, he noted how the media landscape of “advertising, TV, mass-merchandising, politics conducted as advertising” had made it almost impossible to distinguish between the real and the false. “It’s not necessary for the writer to invent fiction,” he concluded. “It’s the writer’s job to find the reality.”

A shorter version of this review appears in the February edition of Totally Dublin.

Lars Iyer Interview

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 01:10:40 +0000

Citing works by Enrique Vilas-Mata, Thomas Bernhard and Roberto Bolaño, you conclude your manifesto by suggesting that the only thing left for literature to do is to explore its own passing, to mourn itself. Could you speak about your own work in this context?

In my own work, I try to pose the questions I mentioned, concerning marginality and neoliberalism, not simply at the level of content, but at the level of form: in the unusual narrative structure of my trilogy that you mentioned earlier. W. is someone who believes in the power of philosophy, of literature, of politics, more than his frenemy Lars does. Lars satirizes W.’s hyperbole, his extravagant power of belief, but also celebrates it. Lars presents W.’s enthusiasms as derisory, laughable, but also as somehow admirable. My work mourns the passing of a certain conception of philosophy, literature and politics; the passing of a certain hope. But remembering what was once possible is itself a form of hope, and a writing which mourns is still a kind of writing.

My interview with Lars Iyer appears in February edition of Totally Dublin.

John Calder Interview

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 01:48:00 +0000

In nearly sixty years as the foremost British publisher of controversial and avant-garde literature, John Calder put out work by some twenty-three Nobel laureates, including Heinrich Boll, Ivo Andrić and Samuel Beckett, whose life and work he is still consumed by. He brought Burroughs, Miller and the nouveau romanists to a British audience, and took gambles closer to home as well with experimental writers such as Ann Quin. As a publisher, writes Aidan Higgins, “he was sometimes tight with royalties, though the last time he visited me he brought two bottles of wine.” Retired now, Calder is touring with the Godot Theatre Company giving post-show talks.

My interview with John Calder appears in Totally Dublin.

Gert Jonke: Awakening to the Great Sleep War

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 14:56:30 +0000

When a novel takes as its epigraph, as this one does, a quote by Flann O’Brien’s fictional philosopher, De Selby, the reader should have a fair idea about the road it plans to go down. Time will be derailed, objects usually considered inanimate will be brought to life, and there will be much confusion as to whether the described experiences of the protagonist are occurring on an interior or exterior level. No surprises, then, that in the opening pages of Awakening to the Great Sleep War, the protagonist, Burgmüller, befriends a group of “telamones”, those blocks of stone and marble supporting the city’s every structure, for whom days and years pass at an “infinitely slow pace”. As an acoustic interior designer, Burgmüller works to create spaces in which music, a temporal art, can exist and flourish. It is a job that resonates clearly with the themes of this, a fugal comedy whose every episode has at its core a question concerning the representation of time and space.

When Burgmüller goes in search of his lost girlfriend, he finds that maps are “unreliable aids to orientation” because “the landscape depicted on them was in the process of changing.” Worse still, “the land immediately imitates everything shown by its superiors, the maps.” In other words, representation is not descriptive, but prescriptive. Equally, when Burgmüller’s latest girlfriend sits down to write her Portrayal of the World, we find that her narrative takes charge of time and space as inhabited by Burgmüller. Here we come to the wider comment Jonke wants to make about how writing works. In life, narrative is a framing device clumsily imposed on time and space, the media in which we all exist. Fiction reverses these roles: time and space become framing devices, each clumsily imposed on the medium of narrative. In fiction, where nothing exists unless described, “the typewriter [is] a reality-producing machine”.

This review appears in the January edition of Totally Dublin. Photo by Marko Lipuš.

Anakana Schofield: Malarky

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Moving between the first- and third-person, Malarky is a novel told in twenty fragmented episodes about Philomena, a woman from Ballina attempting to come to terms with the infidelity of her husband, the onset of old age and, finally, the loss of Jimmy, her homosexual son who, upon having his college funding cut-off by his father, joins the American military and dies in Afghanistan.

The ‘malarky’ of the title refers to a sexual encounter Philomena witnesses in the barn between Jimmy and one of the neighbour’s sons. To better understand her dead son, Philomena seeks to put herself in his position. “She wanted to be both her son and the man who hupped him.” The ensuing scenes of awkwardly executed seduction are among the funniest in the book, but to my ear the Irish brogue, laid on especially thick in the first half of the book, sounds clichéd, patchy and at times a little patronising. (Nor does it translate particularly well to text-language.) When, in the second half of the book, the thick sheath of Irish cultural and commercial references comes loose, and the rate of brogue slows down, the novel comes into its own. Though there are definite shades of a deus ex machine at work in Jimmy’s death, Philomena’s breakdown is very well-captured, the non-linearity of the narrative putting paid to conventional notions of grief and its ‘stages’. “See how I went back and forth?” Philomena asks the reader.

This review originally appeared in the January edition of Totally Dublin.

Danilo Kis: New Translations

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 04:36:00 +0000

A text that accepts itself feels paradoxically grounded in reality. Whereas fictional accounts in the style of the nineteenth century novel have what Umberto Eco calls an “interior ontological legitimacy”, the fiction of Danilo Kiš is always striving to achieve an exterior ontological legitimacy—to be “unhistorical though no less real,” as Kiš says of a character in A Tomb for Boris Davidovich.

My review of new Danilo Kiš translations is in The Quarterly Conversation.

Patrick Modiano

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 11:25:19 +0000

It has been nearly fifteen years since Patrick Modiano, one of France’s most important living authors, has had a book translated into English. Since the publication of The Search Warrant in 2000, he has written seven books, each one so of a piece with the preceding twenty-one that their narrators, who together have walked several marathons in prose, must by now have passed each other in the street. In Modiano’s work, the act of walking is almost synonymous with that of remembering. His narrators cover space in an attempt to re-cover time. It would be facile then to say that in L’Herbe des nuits, Modiano returns to the themes of memory, loss and identity. In truth, he has never left them.

The middle-aged narrator of L’Herbe des nuits, Jean, spends his time wandering around the Place d’Italie where, as a young man, he used to hang out in a hotel frequented by a shady group of Moroccans caught up in the Ben Barka affair of 1965. Jean dwells on the memory of a mysterious young woman named Dannie, who would one day disappear forever. He remembers he was the irretrievably mislaid manuscript of the first novel he wrote. Other details come back to him in (conveniently well-structured) disorder, but help is at hand in the shape of his old black notebook – in which, he reflects, he seems to have been casting Morse code signals out into the future. “It was as if I had wanted to leave traces that would allow me to understand, in some distant future, what it was I had experienced at that time without properly understanding.” Characters do a lot of shrugging, and a lost dog wanders in and out of the narrative.

If this sounds like everything else Modiano has ever put his name to, it’s because he is a writer as loyal to his form, plot and motifs as he is to his themes. It’s a formula he knows affords him a certain space to spin out sentences imbued with his very satisfying poetry of fate and duration. Time seems altogether more porous for his narrators than it does for everyone else. “On Sundays afternoons, if you are alone as the light begins to fade, a breach in time opens up. All you have to do is slip through it.” His loyalty extends right down to the sentences themselves. “You yourself have written that we live at the mercy of certain silences,” a retired investigator tells Jean, quoting from Dans le café de la jeunesse perdue (2009). (I wonder, incidentally, if the lyricism of the word ‘perdu’ hasn’t caused the history of French literature to show inordinate concern for the theme of loss and lost things?)

It’s all a little too safe at this stage, a little too satisfied, a little too loyal. One can’t help feeling disappointed that Modiano, whose talents were discovered by a writer as experimental of Raymond Queneau, hasn’t pushed the boat a little further out of late. In the final pages of L’Herbe des nuits, Jean says he has the impression of reproducing the manuscript he lost years ago. “That’s what I’m doing right now,” he says, but you get the sense that it’s what Modiano has been doing for quite some time. In his Lectures on Fine Art, Hegel defines ‘style’ and ‘manner’ as repetitive obsessions in the work of an author, the difference being that the author with style continues to outdo himself. I don’t think Modiano has outdone himself since 1997, when he published Dora Bruder, his meticulously researched, but ultimately speculative account of the life of a young Jewish girl who was deported from France and died anonymously at Auschwitz. Nor do I think it’s any coincidence that this very brave post-memorial account is the last book Modiano has had translated into English.

Opening L’Herbe des nuits, the narrator describes the pages of his old notebook, whose Morse code signals he will use to help him reproduce the manuscript he lost long ago. “There followed names, telephone numbers, appointment dates, as well as these short texts of a certain literary quality. But in what category could they be classed? Intimate journal entries? Fragments of memory?” Occasionally, the better manuscript to reproduce is not the one you lost, but the one you never knew you had. Until Modiano realises as much, we live at the mercy of certain translators’ silences.

A version of this review appears in the December edition of Totally Dublin.

Eduardo Halfon: The Polish Boxer

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 06:39:48 +0000

The title of this, Eduardo Halfon’s first book to be translated in English, refers to the man who saved the author’s grandfather from Auschwitz. When that story is later cast into doubt, we realise that the theme of fact and fiction had been introduced long before it became apparent. No surprise, then, that The Polish Boxer itself has been praised for the way it blurs the boundaries between fiction, memoir and meditation, a sentiment offered up to so many books in the last twenty years that it is now all but impotent as acclaim.

A more interesting aspect of The Polish Boxer is the way it blurs the boundaries between the novel and the short story. Billed as a novel, the first six of its ten supposed chapters are well-wrought, satisfyingly concluded stories set in a variety of different countries and linked by what their narrator, speaking about the music of Thelonious Monk, calls the ‘syncopated rhythms’ of their recurring motifs – small moments of reticence, a starry sky, Donald Duck and a fascination with hands. There is an elliptical charm to this technique, which resonates in the actions of Milan, the Serbian pianist who sends the narrator mysterious postcards with no return address. This charm is lost, however, when, from ‘Ghosts’ onwards, the narrative assumes a more assuredly novelistic structure in an attempt, it seems, to impose meaning on the text. Much earlier, Milan tells the narrator: “some things signify nothing and are beautiful all the same.” He doesn’t seem to have listened.

This review originally appeared in the November edition of Totally Dublin.

Bernard Comment: The Shadow of Memory

Sat, 03 Nov 2012 08:18:18 +0000

The Shadow of Memory is Bernard Comment’s short, elusive novel about a studious young man who, troubled by his own porous memory, brings his computer to the Bibliothèque Nationale everyday in order to “stuff the machine full, stockpiling data, filling in the blanks, one after the other, with knowledge, with history, until I’m back in the present.” At the library, he meets Robert, a disagreeable old man with a memory he is intensely jealous of. Robert seems to know everything, at times resembling the man in Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil “who has lost forgetting”. The narrator befriends Robert, eventually becoming a sort of live-in secretary in the hope of inheriting the old man’s memory. The terms of his employment closely resemble those of enslavement, however, and it isn’t long before the narrator loses Mathilda, his imaginative girlfriend so alive to the possibilities of the future.

As his guide, Robert explains to the narrator that his conception of memory is all wrong. Memory is not an archive, he says. “Memory has to swim, it has to dance”. He uses the analogy of Brunelleschi’s dome to illustrate. “It was constructed according to an extremely complex principle, a specific placement of the bricks and stones counterbalancing one another, spinning, creating sufficient centrifugal force to keep it all up, marvelously, unaided, unsupported.” Partaking in subtle conversation with Joyce’s Portrait and Gide’s early récits, The Shadow of Memory is a novel with a fairly predictable plot, ending in somewhat inevitable fashion — yet somehow it never lags. The example of Brunelleschi is once again instructive in this respect. Here is a novel whose narrative arc is constructed on a foundational metaphor – Robert as History – whose meaning is constantly shifting, spinning. History charms. History lies. History manipulates. History enslaves. History forgets. And the arc unaided stands.

This review originally appeared in the November edition of Totally Dublin.

Auster & Knausgaard

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 13:36:06 +0000

It isn’t until his father’s later alcoholism is revealed that these remembrances of binges past take on any major significance. The story is framed in such a way that the father seems to inherit his son’s alcoholism, something the narrator has known all along. The ‘I’ sees and is seen – and it is in the space and time between those two roles that the very best memoirs are charged. This is not somewhere I think a second-person narrative can access – certainly not the type Auster has used, in any case. ‘You’ is seen, but it’s not clear that ‘you’ sees.

My review of Winter Journal by Paul Auster and A Death in the Family by Karl Ove Knausgaard appears in The Stinging Fly (Issue 23).

Nicholson Baker: The Way The World Works

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 11:11:00 +0100

Despite being the author of such playfully filthy novels as Vox and House of Holes, Nicholson Baker has provoked more controversy as a writer of non-fiction than of fiction. In 2008, he published Human Smoke, a 576-page account of the pacifist case against World War II that was accused of “reproducing Nazi language uncritically” and judged to be “a self-important, hand-wringing, moral mess of a book”. In this collection of personal essays, Baker takes time to respond to critics of that book – though his argument is again unconvincing. Thankfully, he is more engaging elsewhere.

Most of these essays deal with quotidian aspects of contemporary life. He hails Wikipedia as “a shrine to altruism – a place for shy, learned people to deposit their trawls”. He despairs of the Kindle: “This was what they were calling e-paper? This four-by-five window onto an overcast afternoon?” His approach is hands-on. He writes about Wikipedia as a formerly active editor of the site. He castigates US military aggression through the prism of a protest he attended against it. He underlines the importance of newspaper archives having himself raised funds to buy and house thousands of old American newspapers that the British Library would not keep. It seems as if Baker would write about nothing from the vantage of his own armchair – with the exception, perhaps, of armchairs.

Unlike some essayists of the quotidian, though, Baker has no interest in deconstructing his subject or showing what function it serves in society; as a result, his praise for goods like the iPhone, Modern Warfare 2 and the New York Times is not nearly as qualified as it should to be. Some of the essays feel like consumer advice columns. But then, Baker is a thoroughly democratic writer, a citizen essayist with a spirit as generous as the proportions of his own ridiculous beard. He recommends Uncharted 2 for Playstation 3.

This review originally appeared in the October edition of Totally Dublin.