Ed Tom Bell Gets to Grow Old.

Image from IMDB

Under that hat a late solemn mind cooking.

Taking them in. It seems from a glance,

an expression, shifting hands,

that they wish to eat the world whole.

No reason to it

just as certain as a turn in orbit

and the sun sets its heat off Texas 'til another day.

The things he sees in a lifetime

in no way helping with answers

and his fear finding only

the saint that he married

to protect him with love and light.

His daddy has passed on by on horseback.

He looks at the relics of his

Cousin's house amidst the mess;

he will inherit such a seat

an old man, an old country man,

to sit in a chair and hear out 

a worn-down sheriff yet to step up

and give answers 

that draw in a dark

and edge the boys dreams

afterwards.

Cormac McCarthy- The Crossing

The UK editions of Cormac McCarthy's work
are unfortunately very ugly

 I've been quite a McCarthy fan for a while now- I'd put my top three as The Road, Blood Meridian and Outer Dark. I found it rare so far (though I haven't read everything the late author wrote) to dislike one of his novels (though I didn't feel much of a spark with The Orchard Keeper.) This text, The Crossing, took me a long time to finish. I personally kept becoming detached from certain threads of the story and then at another attempt became swept up again.

    Despite being the second in the Border Trilogy it's stylistically and thematically very different from All the Pretty Horses, and felt like, despite great moments of violence and evil among the beatific wild countryside and romance in ATPH, a trek towards a lonesome mountain populated only with hidden darknesses and the philosophical grit of those who have had to bear witness.

    In these short reviews I attempt to give my honest take without spoiling much in the hopes you will be enticed to read- but at the same time, if you have read the text, that you will find something written here to compliment your own readings. 

   The first main section concerns Billy Parham taking a wolf he has trapped back into Mexico. I found this section really rubbed me the wrong way; the whole ordeal comes across as immensely uncomfortable, painful and maddening for the poor wolf, and we are never given much of a solid reason as to why Billy feels such a need to disappear for so long without telling anyone to take the wolf back to where it had just come from. America, the land across the border, then is the place where wolves can't be, where they cannot belong even though this wolf has made it, has naturally ranged into the territory. National borders mean nothing to such an animal. The permeability and nonsense of the border becomes more and more apparent as the text continues. Reading the story of the wolf, I thought many times of Aldo Leopold's book A Sand County Almanac, especially the essay 'Thinking Like a Mountain' in which Leopold comes to recognise the importance and wonder in every animal and how they fit into the natural world. 

    After the wolf's story, Billy wanders deep into Mexico, meeting proper wildernesses, human evils, and hearing of a nation racked by war and revolution. Everytime he re-emerges in the States, he finds that the border does not necessarily define a land where these things happen from one where they don't; on one of his later re-entries of the US, he learns after a time that America has joined WWII. I don't know how to explain it but in this book and also All the Pretty Horses I feel as though Mexico is portrayed as this older country, and the USA as younger, a whippersnapper. Perhaps in The Crossing it is in part because Billy meeting veterans of a previous war, only to emerge stateside and meet the young men newly enlisted; he has met their destinies in reverse.

    A random note, but, despite having grand moments of pain, anguish, hunger, and strife, generally when people meet Billy he is given extraordinary hospitality, often even from some of the most poverty-stricken people he meets, and in some cases even though he may not behave honestly back. Perhaps he appears as angelic, a very young white boy in rags on horseback- or, like the wolf met unto him through but a look in the eye, when they meet his own they can see the eye of the storm that sits within him. 

    

Don DeLillo- White Noise

Library copy from the university I work at now. I'd read DeLillo's Point Omega and The Body Artist for my Literature degree years ago, and liked them both, but especially The Body Artist. Both of these books are novellas really, and it took me a long time to finally break in to any of DeLillo's chunkier texts, even when the premises really caught me. 

I fell into a reading rhythm with White Noise as a text of episodes; of anecdote's and events that begin and end in chapters and that shuffle a main story along. These 'episodes' each feel like they're wrapping up an exaggerated occurrence or description of, for want of a better word, postmodern America. Ridiculous but believable events over and over. Straight from the off, with the convoy of gleaming station wagons of parents dropping their children off to university, like a herd or natural events not to be missed, described with hilarity and aptness; a favourite description is of the fathers as having "something about them suggesting massive insurance coverage."

The core of the book is a search for an avoidance or meaning in the fear of death, that I felt was such a burden for Jack Gladney and his partner Babette because in this era of American suburbiana, so much else has been taken care of or rendered obsolete that there are not other things to worry about. There is no feeling of impoverishment in their lives, despite their positions as multi-divorcees. The big catastrophic event in the second section is mostly void of worry about impending death, even though it could potentially be a cause; it almost happily fills the void Jack & Babette usually have empty for fear of death.

Despite this morbid preoccupation of the main characters, it's hard to mirror their philosophical dread as the world of the book is sodden, overloaded, infested, with stimuli. Radios and televisions are always on, overheard. Adverts and packaging instructions bleed into the text. Artificial habitats and occasions spawned from a docile consumer culture manifest into hypnotising tableaus, fit for a cosmic bird watcher distracted by human life for a moment.

Streams of information and data gathering stitch the book together; products promise more, Jack and Murray as academics endlessly look for meaning out in it; in Jack's case in Hitler studies, a field he discovered, and Murray in cultural niches, such as a seminar he runs on car crashes. The safe zones of the 'Airborne Toxic Event' are run by SIMUVAC, Simulated Evacuation, seeking more data rather than looking at the event head on. 

The world of White Noise, like our own, is a pastiche of headache-inducing stimuli, of searches for meaning and attempts at making it solid, of fear and confusion in a Western-bloc microcosm. I don't want to spoil anything, but readers of The Body Artist might enjoy one of DeLillo's spectres, the not-suggested supernatural presence, the figure who is the malady of the text in spirit, like a postmodern Dickensian ghost. 

Sjón- From the Mouth of the Whale

My parting gift to you, man, is this vision of yourself. p.7

Picked up on a whim from a charity shop (Tenovus in Easton- always a winner) as I read the blurb and realised i'd never read any Icelandic literature- turned out to be a signed copy! 

I personally found the experimental style a little hard to get through, but I also felt it did give a sense of how the story is intended to be received; the trailing remembrances of an old, exiled and isolated man who has spent a lifetime trying to unravel worldly mysteries, but seemingly left befuddled and perplexed by it all. 

I enjoyed the thread carried throughout of searching for, defining and solving the problem of monsters, which was lifted by the era chosen; a Christianized pagan land removed enough from it's continental colonizer for barbarism to go unchecked; the otherworldy, Norse/Icelandic feeling retelling of God creating man has this new creature portrayed as grotesque and unnatural. Throughout then, the immorality and monstrosity of man flourishes. The natural world blends seamlessly with mythologization. 

Compression, Uncertainty and the Screen in Roberto Bolaño's 'Antwerp.'

“The only novel that doesn’t embarrass me is Antwerp.”- Roberto Bolaño.

Roberto Bolaño in Blanes, where he wrote Antwerp.

            Bolaño may call Antwerp a novel, but many are left confused by its experimental form, calling it instead a collection of vignettes, instalments of prose/ poetry. It certainly is ‘novel,’ and, although Bolaño expresses a disdain for following trends in literature in Antwerp, (“tell that stupid Arnold Bennett that all his rules about plot only apply to novels that are copies of other novels”) breaking new ground in writing is something the novel has proved unusually capable for.

            Antwerp is made up of fifty-six instalments, not including the introduction piece “Total Anarchy: Twenty-Two Years Later,” which could still very well be part of the work. As far as I can tell, the title holds little relevance to the story or stories (or moments, scenes, poems, diaries?) found within. I personally get a sense instead that the title, like many of the writings within, and indeed much of Bolaño’s short stories wherein no discernable end is reached, is an escaped thought, a moment on the tip of the tongue that floats away forever, much like the jumbled speech that litters the end of many of the chapters or sections of Antwerp. Moments overheard on the street in moments of confusion? Memories? Poetic thoughts, ruminations?

            This haze-like style feels very David Lynch-esque (or, perhaps Lynch’s directorial work feels very Bolaño-esque) and we can almost picture the uneasy over-the-shoulder shots that can be seen in Mulholland Drive. Style aside, the content is at first baffling, then immediately entrancing. Each flash of a section leaves the reader unsure if they have woken up to reality or a dream; the narration ranges from the personal to the birds-eye-view, from the experienced to the omniscient. Much like reality, and also the stage and screen, we are offered shallow depths into characters, unless they are implicitly described by another characters; they have no names, simply roles; policeman, Englishman, South American, hunchback. Some of these characters do blossom and we get more depth through relations of their experiences and relationships, while others remain on the hazy edge of the story, as we remain unsure if a dream has been recounted or not. ‘Reality’ in the story is offered a new tone when the ‘character’ Roberto Bolaño is mentioned. Is he the writer, a diary entry perhaps? Or is this Bolaño the South American, previously nameless? The reader is frequently snatched from the writing to observe ‘the author,’ who is somehow within the story; “in this scene the author appears with his hands on his hips watching something offscreen.” The frequent observation of things on/off screen accentuates the flickering scenes and moments we are offered; try as we might to observe, it is up to the narration to present us with what we see. If our eyes stray off screen, who knows what we will see.

            Time is compressed within the novel; six waiters walk along a deserted beach on their way back from a night’s work early in the morning. Throughout all of the events of the novel, they are still walking, like a video on loop, or, more likely, a memory, a memory of a feeling, not an event, of tiredness, of being a witness on a quiet beach too early in the morning. Like most characters in the novel, we are mainly offered glimpses and witnessings of these characters, before a sudden, ‘close-up.’ Although other characters have days, nights, events that begin and end, their stories still feel as though existing in the same few moments wherein the waiters walk across a deserted beach in an unnamed city, away from work, back to the shack that they sleep in by the end of the novel. Perhaps it is their dreams we read, or they are the dreams of any of the other characters who make it to bed, in the haze of their unsure realities.

            Magnificently different, yet truly hitting the nail on the bizarrely jarring turns of style and mode that Bolaño expressed (although much more subtly) in his more popularly palatable works, notably his short story collections or shorter novels like By Night in Chile, we can understand how Antwerp is not embarrassing to Bolaño, being not a copy of any other novel, but novel.

The history-mining reader in J.M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus.

The fallabilities of recording and understanding history are not new field of J.M. Coetzee’s writings; “the Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee,” the latter story of his debut Dusklands presents us with a fractured yet whole history; fractured in the different reports and pieces of the narrative as a whole left out, but whole in its presentation; a first person narrative, an appendix from a fictitious descendant of Jacobus, and other add-ons (the use of J.M. Coetzee’s surname for the main character may also be seen as a conscious anchoring of the fictitious history in real history, forcing the reader to judge for themselves.) Later, in Waiting for the Barbarians, we are presented with an unlodged and nebulous environment, in an unnamed land populated by the denizens of ‘the Empire’ and also the mysterious ‘barbarians.’ Here history is a straining force; the barbarians alien approach to time and the importance of history can be unsettling.

            Coetzee’s 2013 novel The Childhood of Jesus has a similar unlodged setting, but on a much more drastic scale. I have read some reviews that glance over this, claiming that it is Coetzee simply moving aside the humdrum lynchings of story, setting and other extrapalative description to make room for philosophical waxing in the novel, and space for the reader’s interpretations to blossom upon unanswered and often unspoken questions presented throughout. I believe that this unlodging of history and environment, being unusual in texts, forces the reader, through their discomfort, to mine for histories that are not there.

            The Childhood of Jesus feels very open in terms of space, yet is populated with many characters. The space in question is an unnamed land, where Spanish is spoken, (a similar confusion created as when Coetzee used his own surname for Jacobus?) or, more accurately, the populace has to speak Spanish, as we learn that Simón and David had to learn Spanish on the boat to Novilla, the main city. We know that Simón and David came by boat, from a camp called ‘Belstar,’ and that is about as far back for either of them that we are given. We are allowed some insights into these journeys; David loses a document on the boat supposedly detailing who his parents are, which is how he meets Simón, and Simón comments that the portmaster at Belstar will only allow boats out, not back to Belstar.

            The main characters are the only two we ever really get even a shallow insight into. The other Stevedores that Simón works with at the docks at Novilla engage only in the present, to the extent that they are dubious of ‘moving with the times’ and using a crane to save their heavy lifting, or to acknowledge the accumulation of the days upon days of shipping grain to a store that is overflowing and infested with rats. The epitome of such misplacement of past or future thought is Senór Daga, who acts with no understanding of consequence; he robs and engages in violence, and generally seems to float through his life.

            As such, the reader latches onto the small details we are afforded. David’s history, at least for the most part, we get to witness being built, but Simón’s we have not witnessed. We know small details; he had to learn Spanish, he can drive, his father pushed him high on the swing but he never fell off as a child, we know his hands were soft before becoming a stevedore and we know he is middle aged. This is the most we ever really get to know about any character; Coetzee offers us a line into Inés’ past when Simón says of her past at the luxurious ‘La Residencia; “I have no idea what it was like. I have never understood La Residencia or how you landed up there.” Alas, Inés “does not hear the question, or does not think it worthy of reply.” (Coetzee, p.312) Although it is mainly stressed with Simón and David, it is suggested that every character met is not native to this land, that they too had a history elsewhere, but are now fixed into the present, somehow landing up wherever they landed up, Inés in La Residencia, and Simón and David in the blocks.

            The novel ends with a group of characters breaking free of Novilla and the small and barren satellite towns it grows, onward to the town of ‘Estrillata el Norte.’ (Even the place names appear unlodged from a past or hint at environment; “They strike a town name Laguna Verde (why?- there is no lagoon)”) (Coetzee, p.310) Where they will cut off the short history the reader has been allowed an insight to, namely the histories of the characters in Novilla, thus denying the reader even the relevance of this short record. However, Coetzee’s latest book is a sequel entitled The Schooldays of Jesus, and so we shall have to see what residue of history we can drag across the gap.

Cited:

Coetzee, J.M. The Childhood of Jesus. (London: Vintage, 2014)