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. 

    

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. 

Short Story 'Engine' published by Emerald City

My short story 'Engine' has been published by the nice folk at Emerald City, formerly Cow Creek Review. Check it out and the rest of the first issue published in December 2019 here

Make sure to follow Emerald City on facebook and twitter!

Drawing to a Close: The Best Comics that I've read in 2018

This isn't the 'best comics released 2018,' just the best comics that I have stumbled upon this year, which very well might include comics that were released this year. They range from classics to weird little discoveries, slim indie prints to pulp serials. These are the best comics that I got stuck into this year.

Will Eisner- A Contract with God

Often cited as the first graphic novel, this collection of stories about early twentieth century life in tenement blocks in New York, centering especially on the lives of immigrants and their descendants, is a great eye into a historic underbelly of turn-of-the-century modernisation. Eisner depicts a New York landscape that we could recognise today in its infancy. Eisner himself is a giant among cartoonists, with his style predating the formalisation of style that came with artists such as Jack Kirby and others working at Marvel. The 'William Eisner Comics Industry Award' is named after him.

Brecht Evans- The Making Of

A comic about art that is itself intensely aesthetically pleasing. The vibrant watercolours and toying with colours and light made this work feel refreshing in an era slowly moving out of late-twentieth century comics draped in monochrome and shades of grey. Many page spreads felt frameable, and I could see myself enjoying them outside of the context of the story.

Craig Thompson- Habibi

Thompson made strong waves in the graphic novel game with Blankets, a coming-of-age memoir about first love between teenage Christians. I read Blankets well after Habibi, and am still won over by this later work. Almost every page shows a dazzling amount of work while also paying homage to the Arabic and Islamic writing and artistic traditions that he emulates and shares with the reader. The story takes a bold and unexpected step into the twenty-first century whereas Blankets was more concerned with a late 20th century adolescence. Pollution, globalisation, gender fluidity and equality is part of the rippling story while still umbilically linked to an ancient and largely unchangeable world.

Joyce Farmer- Special Exits

This book made me scared and I think that's okay. It made me scared to grow old. It made me scared to die and leave family behind. It made me scared to lose my parents. It made me scared to grow old with someone I love and lose them. It also made me see how these fearful moments are barely blips in the warm pool of love and family that embroils us over a lifetime like a careful and unaware nest. This book about dying is about living. I still can't help feeling a familiar fondness for the father figure of the book, as if he was a elderly man I was neighbours with or chatted to in a pub or shop.

Tillie Walden- On A Sunbeam

On a Sunbeam rests on some solid paving stones; sci-fi, romance, teen-drama. What exists among the paving stones is pure imagination; spaceships are fish and worlds sprawl like canyons in the galaxy instead of being neat spheres. Walden casts a powerful defiance of masculine sci-fi that laboured to explain everything, sciences, cultures; Walden shows what a lived-in story might be like in a spacey otherworld; who will love who, what trials might someone face growing up, what otherworldly sports will they take interest in, what work will be available to them, what groundbreaking tribulations will they overcome. Oh yeah, spoiler!- there are no men in this book. It doesn't matter and shouldn't; it's never explained or made a big deal of.

Read On a Sunbeam by clicking here 

Daniel Clowes- David Boring

Despite all that happens, the steady pacing of David's narration and Clowes' aversion to lines demonstrating speed or motion creates a vacuum of a comic that you slowly fall through... Ironically noir in essence, David Boring, a skinny, strange looking ass-man with an unexplainable attractiveness for women- not in a spitzy, hollywood way, but a drifting, lulling manner, where his desires are met easily yet he lives as if in fugue- tumbles through a series of romantic and dramatic events, trying to make sense of his father through his comic creation just as we follow David's own life in earnest through Clowes' creation.

Ben Katchor- Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of Urban Decay, with Julian Knipl, Real Estate Photographer

It doesn't matter that they're fictional, you are still being let in on secrets, you are being shown the details that hold up the very nature of the urban that have been hidden under your nose this whole time. In foggy greys and twentieth century American nostalgia, Julius Knipl narrates his flaneuring as if half in a dream, floating through the streets lit by the melting pot of American immigration of his city home.

Katchor's latest work is a free online strip titled 'Our Mental Age', which you can read here and you should because it's hilarious.

Maria Stoian- Take it as a Compliment

Each of the stories in this book are true, and that's what makes it the most terrifying. Abusive relationships, sexual assault, societally accepted harrassment; this book lays bare true tales from a wide range of voices, retelling in their own style and writ of what happened to them. I could slap the labels feminist and anti-sexist on the book, but socio-cultural-historical-politics aside these are just true stories and voices birthed in comic form that need to be listened to, showing events that need preventing and punishing and understanding.

Joe Sacco- The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo

I've previously read many of Sacco's comics such as his famous work Palestine, and Footnotes of Gaza both about current and historical events surrounding the plight of the Palestinian Arabs amid the Israeli occupation, and also Safe Area Goražde which, like The Fixer, is about the Bosnian War of the nineties. While I really enjoyed these works, The Fixer has a much less journalistic tone, and feels almost more like Sacco casting his memory back, or maybe sat next to you in a bar he says "Hey, back in the Balkans I met this guy..." I never expected a comic to make me think about the complexities of the 'war hero,' and how unheroic they actually are; each of the warlords and the titular fixer that Sacco mentions could be seen as bandits, war criminals- or war heroes.

Rutu Modan- Jamilti and Other Stories

I also read Modan's Exit Wounds and The Property this year, but have settled for this collection of comics by Israeli creator Rutu Modan because of the variation in styles; some styles have the tin-tinesque cartoon faces on realistic line drawings with block colour that Modan uses in her graphic novels, while others are sketchy, black and white and more abstract. These are heartfelt stories that peel away all the mish-mash, all the conflicts, fires, terror that happens everyday and lets the little loves, families and moments blossom.

Special Mentions in one line:

Jerome Ruiller- The Strange

The story of an immigrant through the eyes of those who meet him.

 Noah Van Sciver- Fante Bukowski Two

Fante Bukowski: the 'struggling writer' that all literature folks hate that they identify with.

Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima- Lone Wolf & Cub

Manga for people who don't like manga. Well-researched Japanese historical drama.

Jason Aaron & Jason Latour- Southern Bastards

Tales of a Southern U.S. county, stretching Southern stereotypes to their limits. Football.

Eric M Esquiel & Ramon Villalobos- Border Town

Preacher for woke kids. Mexican mythology finally gets some air time.

To make sure I remember, I've started a list of all the books I read. For whatever wierd reason this interests you, click here to check it out.

So That I Remember: All the Books I Have Read Since September 2018

If Art Garfunkel did it, why not me, a man from Gloucestershire you've never heard of?

September 2018: 
-George Orwell- Down and Out in Paris and London
-Cormac McCarthy- Outer Dark
-Sarah Glidden- Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria and Iraq 
-Brecht Evens- The Making Of
-Jim Harrison- Legends of the Fall
-Craig Thompson- Blankets
-Harvey Pekar, Ed Piskor & Others- The Beats: A Graphic History
-Riad Sattouf- The Arab of the Future 2
-Joyce Farmer- Special Exits
October 2018:
-Tillie Walden- On A Sunbeam (read it here)
-Jim Crumley- The Last Wolf 
-Jeff VanderMeer- Annihilation
November 2018:
-Jeff Vandermeer- Authority 
-Kate Beaton- Step Aside, Pops.
-John Wagner & John Ridgway- The Dead Man
-Karrie Fransman- The House that Groaned 
-Jeff Vandermeer- Acceptance
December 2018:
-Jean Giono- The Man Who Planted Trees
-Clarice Lispector- Daydreams and Drunkenness of a Young Lady 
-James Rebanks- The Shepherd's Life: a Tale of the Lake District
-Jérôme Ruillier- The Strange 


January 2019:
-Phillipa Perry & Junko Grant- Couch Fiction: a Graphic Tale of Psychotherapy
-Bastien Vivés- Polina 
-Cormac McCarthy- Blood Meridian 
-Alison Bechdel- Are You My Mother?
-Sebastian Barker- Monastery of Light
February 2019:
-John Fante- Ask the Dust
March 2019: 
-Laurie Lee- Cider With Rosie
-John Steinbeck- The Pearl 
-Adrian Tomine- Scenes From an Impending Marriage 
-Frank Herbert- Dune Messiah
April 2019:
-Cormac McCarthy- All the Pretty Horses
-Noah Van Sciver- Fante Bukowski Three: A Perfect Failure
-Chester Brown- The Playboy
May 2019:
-Lisa Hanawalt- Hotdog Taste Test
-Michela Wrong- I Didn't Do It For You
June 2019:
-Iain Banks- Song of Stone
July 2019: 
-A.G Street- Farmer's Glory
-Will Eisner- Minor Miracles
August 2019:
-Mark Twain- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
-P.J Harvey & Seamus Murphy- The Hollow of the Hand
-[re-read] Pat Grant- Blue (read it here)
September 2019:
-Michelle Obama- Becoming 
-Junji Ito- Uzumaki
-Junji Ito- Gyo
-John Porcellino- Perfect Example
-Raynor Winn- The Salt Path 
October 2019:
-Raymond Briggs- Ethel & Ernest: A True Story
-Jim Ottaviani & Leland Myrick- Feynman
-Patti Smith- Just Kids
-William Carlos Williams- Selected Poems 
November 2019:
-Ron Wimberly- Prince of Cats
-Scott McCloud- The Sculptor

January 2020:
-Winshluss- Pinocchio
-Evan Dorkin & Jill Thompson- Beasts of Burden
February 2020:
-Andrew Wood- The Word
-Isabella Tree- Wilding (used a quote as a prompt for this article)
-Ricardo Delgado- Age of Reptiles 
-Ezra Claytan Daniels- Upgrade Soul
April 2020:
-Seamus Heaney- Seeing Things 
May 2020:
-John Porcellino- From Lone Mountain
-Guy Delisle- Hostage
June 2020:
-Declan Shalvey & Gavin Fullerton- Bog Bodies
-Declan Shalvey, Phillip Barrett, Jordie Bellaire & Clayton Cowles- Savage Town
July 2020:
-Manu Larcenet- Blast
August 2020:

-Roberto Bolaño- 2666

September 2020:

-Junot Díaz- Drown

October 2020:

-Delia Owens- Where the Crawdads sing

November 2020:

-Alan Moore & Kevin O' Neill- The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Tempest

-Roy Dennis- Cottongrass Summer

December 2020:

-Gilbert Hernandez- Heartbreak Soup 

-Gilbert Hernandez- High, Soft Lisp

-Gilbert Hernandez- Luba 

-[Re-read] Raymond Briggs- When the Wind Blows 

January 2021:

-Brian 'Box' Brown- Andre the Giant: Life and Legend 

-Pat Mills & Kevin O'Neill- Marshal Law: The Deluxe Collection

-Daniel Clowes- Like A Velvet Glove Cast in Iron

-Paco Roca- The Lighthouse

February 2021:

-J.M Coetzee- The Death of Jesus

-Xinran- The Good Women of China

March 2021:

-David Aja & Ann Nocenti- The Seeds 

-Gilbert Hernandez- Bumperhead

-Gilbert Hernandez- Loverboys

-Eimear McBride- A Girl is A Half Formed Thing

April 2021:

-Bastien Vivès- A Sister

-Herr Seele & Kamagurka- Cowboy Henk: King of Dental Floss

-Daniel Clowes- Ice Haven

-Gene Yang- American Born Chinese 

-Carolyn Novak- Girl Town 

-Mariko Tamaki & Rosemary Valero-O'Connell- Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me

-[Re-read] Brian Ralph- Daybreak

-Benoit Peeters & Francois Schuiten- Samaris 

-Alys Fowler- Hidden Nature

-Joe Sacco- Paying the Land 

May 2021:

-Neil Gaiman & Eddie Campbell- The Truth is a Black Cave in the Mountains

-Anne Simon & Catherin Sauvat- Man In Furs

-Tillie Walden- A City Inside

-Shaun Tan- The Arrival

-Micah Stahl & Bram Algoed- Assholes

June 2021:

-George Orwell- Burmese Days

-Zeina Abirached- A Game for Swallows

July 2021:

-Inés Estrada- Alienation

-Cookie Kalkair & Ophélie Damblé- Guerilla Green: An Urban Gardening Survival Guide

-Graham Greene- Brighton Rock

-Marguerite Abouet & Clément Oubrerie- Aya

August 2021

-Jeff Lemire- Roughneck

-Noah Van Sciver & Paul Buhle- Johnny Appleseed

-Noah Van Sciver- Saint Cole 

-Seth- It's a Good Life if You Don't Weaken 

-J.G Ballard- High Rise

-Seth- Clyde Fans

-Guy Singh-Watson- Vegetables, Soil & Hope

-Adrian Tomine- The Intruder

-Adrian Tomine- Shortcomings

-Adrian Tomine- Killing and Dying 

September 2021

-Kseniya Melnik- Snow in May

-Noah Van Sciver- Disquiet

-Nick Drnaso- Beverly

-Eleanor Davis- How to be Happy

October 2021

-Nick Drnaso- Sabrina

-Jason- I Killed Adolf Hitler

-Jason- Werewolves of Montpelier

-Jason- Why are you Doing this?

-Jason- The Iron Wagon

-Fred Pearce- The New Wild

-Edward M. Hallowell M.D.- Driven to Distraction [audio]

-Robie Macauley- A Secret History of Time to Come (wrote a short review here)

-R. Kikuo Johnson- Night Fisher

November 2021

-Jason- On the Camino

-Frank Herbert- Children of Dune 

-Jason- O Josephine!

December 2021

-Max Porter- Lanny 

-Michael W. Conrad & Noah Bailey- Double Walker

-Various, Ed. Catherine Thornhill- Tamesis Street

-Chris Ware- Jimmy Corrigan The Smartest Kid on Earth

-Thomas Ott- Dead End

January 2022

-Adrian Tomine- The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist

March 2022

-Chuck Palahniuk- Damned

-Chester Brown- I Never Liked You

-Michael Chabon- The Yiddish Policemen's Union

-Cormac McCarthy- The Orchard Keeper

-Noah Van Sciver- Slow Grafitti

-Gabriel Garcia Marquez- Clandestine in Chile 

-James Albon- The Delicacy

-Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips- Bad Weekend

April 2022

-Ray Fawkes- One Soul

-Eleanor Davis- The Hard Tomorrow

-Frankie Boyle- The Prometheus Vol. II (an audiobook in Boyle's The Prometheus series that collects much of his written work) [audio]

Frankie Boyle- The Future of British Politics [audio]

May 2022

-Linnea Starte- Stages of Rot

-Robert MacFarlane- The Old Ways [audio]

June 2022

-Dave Goulson- Silent Earth [audio]

-Mark Boyle- The Way Home [audio]

-Durian Sukegawa- Sweet Bean Paste

July 2022

-Hal Herzog- Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat

-Tillie Walden- Clementine

-Cal Flyn- Islands of Abandonment [audio]

-Diego Agrimbau & Lucas Varela- Human 

August 2022

-Brian Ralph- Daybreak [re-read]

-Cormac McCarthy- The Road [re-read]

-Tillie Walden- On a Sunbeam [re-read]

-Bastien Vivés- The Blouse

-Merwan & Bastien Vivés- For the Empire

September 2022 

-Ali Smith- Autumn

-Derf Backderf- Trashed

-Adrian Tomine- 32 Stories

-Noah Van Sciver- Please Don't Step on my JNCO Jeans

-Apollo, Brüno, Laurence Croix- Tzee: An African Tragedy

October 2022

-Margaret Atwood- Year of the Flood

-Various- Granta 160: Conflict

-George Orwell- The Road to Wigan Pier

-Roberto Bolaño- The Romantic Dogs

-Jesse Jacobs- Safari Honeymoon

-Jesse Jacobs- Crawl Space 

November 2022

-Jordan Crane- Keeping Two

-Primo Levi- If This Is a Man

January 2023

-George Monbiot- Regenesis [audio]

-Tracey Williams- Adrift

-David Sedaris- Me Talk Pretty One Day [audio]

-William Goulding- Lord of the Flies

-Patti Smith- Year of the Monkey [audio]

-Koren Shadmi- The Abaddon

-Seth- Wimbledon Green

-Will Eisner- Last Day in Vietnam

-Patti Smith- M Train [audio]

-John Steinbeck- Cannery Row

-Will Eisner- Fagin the Jew

-David Sedaris- Naked [audio]

-Olga Ravn- The Employees

February 2023

-Olga Tokarczuk- Drive your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead [audio]

-Dash Shaw- Doctors

-Joff Winterhart- Days of the Bagnold Summer

-Brecht Evens- The Wrong Place

March 2023

-Manuele Fior- Hypericum

-J.G Ballard- The Drowned World

-Wasil Bolverton (Basil Wolverton)- Meating People: A Beginner's Guide

-Will Eisner- Dropsie Avenue: A Neighbourhood

April 2023

-Dash Shaw- The New School

-Spike Milligan- Puckoon

-Chris Gooch- Under Earth

-Cormac McCarthy- Child of God

May 2023

-David Sedaris- Happy-Go-Lucky [audio]

June 2023

-Primo Levi- The Truce

-Roger Deakin- Waterlog [audio]

-Amy Krouse Rosenthal- Textbook Amy Krouse Rosenthal [audio]

July 2023

-Brian ‘Limmy’ Limmond- Incredibly Down to Earth and Very Funny [audio]

-Wendell Berry- Nathan Coulter [audio]

August 2023 

-David Graeber- Bullshit Jobs: A Theory [audio] 

-Sjón- From the Mouth of the Whale (read my short review here)

September 2023

-J.M Coetzee- Life & Times of Michael K

October 2023

-B.S Johnson- Christie Malry's Own Double Entry 

-Luis Alberto Urrea- The Devil's Highway: A True Story [audio]

November 2023

-Claudia Rankine- Citizen: An American Lyric [audio]

-Paul Lynch- Prophet Song [audio]

December 2023

-Justin Madsen- Breathers

-Don DeLillo- White Noise

January 2024

-Blindboy Boatclub- Topographia Hibernica [audio]

February 2024

-Miriam Toews- Fight Night [audio]

-Derek Walcott- White Egrets

March 2024

-Claire Keegan- Antarctica [audio]

-Cormac McCarthy- The Crossing

April 2024

-Jennifer Egan- A Visit from the Goon Squad [audio]

May 2024

-Jennifer Egan- The Candy House [audio]

June 2024

-Various- In the Garden: Essays on Nature and Growing

July 2024

-Vladimir Nabokov- Pale Fire

Nov 2024

-James Joyce- Dubliners

-Manchán Magan- Thirty-Two Words for Field

-The Gentle Author- The Life and Times of Mr. Pussy

February 2025

-Joe Sacco- Paying the Land [re-read]

-Mark Z Danielewski- House of Leaves [this book has taken me 5 years to finish]

April 2025 

-Russell Hoban- Riddley Walker 

June 2025 

-David Zane Mairowitz & Robert Crumb- Introducing Kafka

-Colson Whitehead- The Intuitionist

July 2025

-Daniil Kharms & Alexander Vvedensky, selected & edited by George Gibian- Russia's Lost Literature of the Absurd

-John Porcellino- From Lone Mountain [re-read]

-Bastien Vivés- A Taste of Chlorine 

August 2025

-Daniel Clowes- Monica

-Michael DeForge- Familiar Faces

-Joseph W. Cotter- Nod Away 

-Joseph W. Cotter- Nod Away 2

-Mary Talbot & Bryan Talbot- Rain

September 2025

-Peter Wollheben- The Hidden Life of Trees 

-Cormac McCarthy- Cities of the Plain

October 2025

-Adrian Tomine- The Intruder [re-read]

November 2025

-Various- GRANTA 108: The New Nature Writing

December 2025

-Zadie Smith- Intimations

-Claire Keegan- Small Things Like These

January 2026 

-John Darnielle- Devil House

February 2026

-Jamaica Kincaid- The Autobiography of my Mother

Here are more lists of my recommended books, click them to go to the article:

Drawing to a Close: The Best Comics that I've read in 2018

Rewilder’s Toolkit: some texts that got me thinking critically about a radical new future for human life and the planet.

Best Nature Writing I read in 2018

The Environment of Nation, City and Country in Roberto Bolaño's 'The Insufferable Gaucho.'

'The Insufferable Gaucho' is available to read online at the New Yorker

“The cemetery I’m talking about, said Pereda, is an exact copy of eternity.” (26)

The Patagonian Mara.

Manuel Pereda, the titular insufferable gaucho, is not a gaucho. He is a lawyer and an ex-judge, but also a wearer of environment; he breaks the borders between environs and wears their characteristic like a veneer. The environments at hand are simple; nation (Argentina), country (the Pampas) and city (Buenos Aires.) Pereda outlines the three accordingly:

Argentina’s like a novel, he said, a lie, or make-believe at best. Buenos Aires is full of Crooks and loudmouths, a hellish place, with nothing to recommend it except the women, and some of the writers, but only a few. Ah, but the Pampas- the Pampas are eternal. A limitless cemetery, that’s what they’re like. (26)

City and country are aliens to each other, but both share a bond with the nation; Pereda’s Buenos Aires is the hub of the political uprising of General Perón and the collapse of the Argentinian economy, while the country shoulders the image of nation, the hardened and skilled gaucho’s of an idyllic Argentinian widerness. Much to Pereda’s lament, images are static, while reality is transitional.

            The wasteland feel of the story has strong similarities with works of J.M Coetzee that are purposefully displaced, with certainties and realities kept well away from the reader, most notably in Waiting for the Barbarians and The Childhood of Jesus. But Bolaño’s story is set in a real place, in Argentina, but Bolaño lets the reader witness displacement and dislocation occur. All of the gauchos, and Pereda for that matter, are elderly, suggesting a decay, added to by the aimlessness and lack of skill the gauchos show. The train that reaches the wasteland sometimes doesn’t even come, “as if that part of Argentina had been erased from memory as well as from the map.” (28)

As a result of hardships, the gaucho’s of the Pampas have sold their cattle and horses for slaughter, giving up the action (ranching & horse-riding) that made them gauchos, leaving them with the image; everyone in Capitán Jourdan wears bombachas, the baggy trousers typical of a gaucho. Pereda adopts this style on arriving in the Pampas, and slowly builds up a ‘gauchoness’; he buys a horse that he rides everywhere, even into stores, and daydreams of riding into Buenos Aires on it. He eventually buys two cattle. As the hardships of the nation forced the country dwellers to give up their cattle and horses, the environment reacted, and, free of large herbivores, is now rampant with rabbits (more likely Patagonian mara) which add to the homogeneity that the country seems to suffer from. The food and work that this monocultural environment offers do not fit with Pereda’s image of the valiant gaucho, leading him much anguish (“Rabbit hunting! What sort of job is that for a gaucho?”) (24) Pereda thinks that “the shame of the nation or the continent had turned them into tame cats. That’s why the cattle have been replace by rabbits, he thought.”(35) Here he sees the environment as a reflection of people and nation, not something that can be viscerally imprinted upon by occurences from both forces. Pereda’s wearing of the environment veneers eventually leads to the ending farcical confrontation, wherein he, as the countryside gaucho, pricks the groin of an over-excited literary socialite in a café in Buenos Aires. Pereda’s affinity for and desire to use his knife and to start a fight is a residual machoism from gaucho culture, which is alien both to the people of the Pampas and the people of Buenos Aires, apparently to Pereda’s lament.

He is confronted with a final choice about his visit to Buenos Aires; “stay in Buenos Aires and become a champion of justice, or go back to the Pampas, where I don’t belong, and try to do something useful… [with the locals and the gauchos.]” (40-41) The fact that Pereda chooses the less appealing of the two, the Pampas, shows him heading back to an environment where he can live in fantasy as a macho countryside gaucho, instead of engaging with the reality of the times in Buenos Aires. The story ends in signature Bolaño style; a non-ending, a middle of a story, but understandable in some way. In some way, this is the end of Pereda’s story for his colleagues in Buenos Aires, as he returns to the Pampas, dislocated from national time & space, while a real political emergency emerges before them, widening the trifecta between city, country and nation out of view. Although, it is not clearly stated which path Pereda chooses; does he go ‘back’ to the Pampas, or ‘back’ to his life in Buenos Aires? The final line can be understood casually as the former, as a narrational direction; he is leaving Buenos Aires to go back to the Pampas; or deeper as the latter; he is in Buenos Aires, but is giving it up, this farce of being a swaggering gaucho, to resume his previous life in Buenos Aires.

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.