Haunting vignettes of alienation and paranoia and an ice-cold examination of the horrors of having a mental illness before people understood mental ilHaunting vignettes of alienation and paranoia and an ice-cold examination of the horrors of having a mental illness before people understood mental illness. Stunning, chilling prose. ...more
Murdo wasn’t so much the alter-ego of Hebridean poet and novelist Iain Crichton Smith, but a convenient repository for his literary trimmings. The novMurdo wasn’t so much the alter-ego of Hebridean poet and novelist Iain Crichton Smith, but a convenient repository for his literary trimmings. The novella ‘Murdo’ is a character study of a constipated poet manqué, a droll and mild-mannered variation on Burgess’s Enderby. The fragments in ‘Thoughts of Murdo’ are essentially leftover poems, parodies, and squibs from Smith at his most playful, the strongest bringing to mind the acidic whimsy of Myles’s Cruiskeen Lawn. ‘Life of Murdo’ is a memoir of Smith’s flourishing as an artist, with the ‘I’ substituted for ‘Murdo’ for the sake of plausible deniability. A breezy and evocative chronicle of the poet’s ordinary, semi-charmed life, the MS is sadly incomplete and ends abruptly after a sentimental trip to Canada....more
An underread Victorian-era Russian maestro. This collection contains six novellas, the longest among them the picaresque ‘The Enchanted Wanderer’, wheAn underread Victorian-era Russian maestro. This collection contains six novellas, the longest among them the picaresque ‘The Enchanted Wanderer’, where tenacious monk Ivan Flyagin narrates a sequence of adventures in and out of serfdom, the military, and the realm of funky monkery; the titular story concerning the bodacious lusts of Katerina Lvovna which laid the groundwork for many fine softcore 1970s romps; and ‘The Steel Flea’, which makes amusing use of malapropisms and wordplay in a strange tale about a mechanical flea that loves to microscopically boogie. The NYRB Classics edition also includes ‘The Unmercenary Engineers’, a bleak tale of an engineer ostracised from the bourgeoisie for his unwillingness to take kickbacks, ‘The Sealed Angel’, and ‘The Innocent Prudentius’, a tale of bloodthirsty piracy and lusting for your father’s murderer’s missus. The Penguin Classics edition contains the title story, ‘The Sealed Angel’, and three that are not present here, ‘The Musk Ox’, ‘Pamphalon the Entertainer’, and ‘A Winter’s Day’, while the Vintage Classics edition contains fourteen other stories not printed here or in the Penguin edition. For Leskov appreciators, it’s probably worth tolerating the repeated content to read the other work of this fine Russian maestro....more
An amuse-bouche of short fantastical tales depicting vaguely sensual encounters with gentlemen of various professions. The stories are all prefaced wiAn amuse-bouche of short fantastical tales depicting vaguely sensual encounters with gentlemen of various professions. The stories are all prefaced with or inspired by (more interesting) quotes from Baudelaire, Zola, and other Gallic Greats, and in tone are the very epitome of très charmant, mademoiselle. Bland and uninspired prose wrapped in an Oulipian kimono—this is super-lightweight fare from the once-peerless Dalkey Archive....more
Shot through with a lexicographer’s love of words, the stories in this collection veer from the playfully surreal to the poignantly poised to the overShot through with a lexicographer’s love of words, the stories in this collection veer from the playfully surreal to the poignantly poised to the overindulgently twee and/or smug. As someone similarly prone to caressing the cute carcasses of words to ludicrous lengths, any complaints I may have about the attention Williams draws to the words in her stories, and the delight with which she tantalises the reader with her unrelenting wordplay, are blatant hypocrisy. The strongest stories are those where Williams reins in the verbivoracity—too many read like someone mainlining the Britannica for 24 hours and heaving up factoids onto the page like a coked-up QI elf—while alluding to an ex-lover/ex-friend who has seemingly walked out in exasperation at the narrator’s irritating overeagerness. Also, the marvellous opening story ‘The Alphabet’ encapsulates her talent so perfectly that the other stories seem to sit in its shadow or strive to recreate its magic....more
Carver’s work was famously carved up by that fiend Gordon Lish, shorn to the bone so the sentences are shorter and simpler than a primary school readiCarver’s work was famously carved up by that fiend Gordon Lish, shorn to the bone so the sentences are shorter and simpler than a primary school reading primer. This utter dilution of linguistic flourish makes reading Carver fairly uninspiring as the prose is mostly insipid, rescued only by the punchiness of the dialogue and the urgency of the scenes. ...more
Reviewing a work by Richard Wright has proven beyond my abilities so far, having read the masterpieces Native Son and Black Boy with nary a plop of diReviewing a work by Richard Wright has proven beyond my abilities so far, having read the masterpieces Native Son and Black Boy with nary a plop of digital ink plopped. Onto my third Wright, the same applies—I leave the books feeling stunned, in a state of stammering incomprehension, my skin burning with anger and sorrow at the suffering depicted in these books, the utterly inhumane viciousness, violence, and evil perpetrated towards a people freed as slaves and treated as less than slaves in their supposed freedom by their abductors for generations. It’s not something I was surprised or naïve about, but the stories in this collection are brutal depictions of the ease with which an entire family can be destroyed by merely passing into the orbit of a hostile white man—how the murder of a black man is essentially not considered a crime, the black still a slave in the eyes of the white. Wright’s work should feature prominently on every American school syllabus if it isn’t already (I suspect not, hence MAGA)....more
Cult feminist SF from Japan—strong dystopian concepts marred by the stroppy-teenagery narrators and incoherent storylines in the second half of the coCult feminist SF from Japan—strong dystopian concepts marred by the stroppy-teenagery narrators and incoherent storylines in the second half of the collection....more
I planned a less pithy review of this sensational feat of translation, until virus particles invaded my nasal passages and had a pathogen party for anI planned a less pithy review of this sensational feat of translation, until virus particles invaded my nasal passages and had a pathogen party for an entire week, ruining any post-Christmas relaxing or reading I might have savoured. Thank you, lads. In this brief version, let me praise this monumental feat of translation, where these ancient Arabic stories—themselves feats of proto-Oulipian brilliance—untranslatable into modern English, have been reinvented via a panoply of similarly-spirited styles by Michael Cooperson. From pastiches of Samuel Johnson, Mark Twain, and Charles Dickens, to a variety of vintage patois and slang, to more modern homages such as a lipogram in honour of Gilbert Adair’s take on George Perec’s La Disparation, these tales are vivid and linguistically orgiastic little wonders, and the world’s first crossover between ancient Arabic texts and the Oulipo. The only drawback to these tales are the frequently overabundant use of slang terms—requiring several pages of annotations for the shenanigans to make sense—and the insanely detailed cacademic annotations that follow each story. I’d recommend simply immersing yourself in the tales themselves, and taking each translatory feat on its own terms. That way bliss abounds....more
The latest in Tough Poets Press’s heroic unleashing of a lifetime’s worth of unpublished manuscripts finds Cape Cod’s premier sesquipedalian in typicaThe latest in Tough Poets Press’s heroic unleashing of a lifetime’s worth of unpublished manuscripts finds Cape Cod’s premier sesquipedalian in typically uncompromising form with a new collection that encapsulates the least appealing elements of his maximalist style.
Opening story ‘Rolf Vowels’ presents an uproarious caricature of a Cockernee villain—a racist, homophobic thug with an encyclopaedic command of street slang and a voice that is wildly inconsistent—one moment he’s using American terms (“freak crazy”), the next he’s using obscure words for cunnilingus (“gamahuching”), the next he’s coining portmanteau insults (“lunchbuckets”, “fudgemonkey”). In far-right Britain, where racist rhetoric is spewed frequently politicians’ mouths, the onslaught of hate speech from this little shit sticks awkwardly in one’s craw, likewise the excruciating path to redemption via Jesus that concludes the tale.
‘The Ratmansky Diamonds’ is flat-out antisemitic and at no risk of being misunderstood as satire, un-PC comedy, or anything approximating humorous. The story concerns a wealthy Jewish couple named Ratmansky (rat man—tee-hee!) besotted with precious diamonds, who secrete their spoils on a farm in bottles of garlic paste before fleeing to America at the start of the Second World War. While in America, they become incredibly fat, feeding their rapacious Jewish appetites with tucker and moolah (of course), all the while stressing over the safety of their prized minerals in war-torn France. An acrobatically kind reader of this abomination might argue Theroux is intentionally mining antisemitic stereotypes to create a wildly off-colour lark that wields the most outrageous and offensive tropes for the shock LOLs. Either Theroux is tone-deaf to the cultural sensitivity of a Christian man revelling in antisemitic tropes, or he’s merely interested in tickling his own funny bone—and there’s no denying a wild time was had writing these absurd caricatures and making them the fools of the piece—with no subtlety or knowing winks to hidden intentions behind the story. This is a catastrophically tin-eared misfire that honks of the writer’s weird unchecked bigotry and lack of any editor politely beseeching him to reconsidering letting this carbuncle ever leave the bottom drawer. (Later in the collection, Theroux address and discusses antisemitism, making the purpose behind this oddity more baffling).
Although accusations of misogyny are routinely lobbed at Theroux, the female character skewered in ‘An Interview with the Poet Cora Wheatears’ is a worthy hate-sponge—an arch, absurdly condescending lady poet who patronises and corrects everyone with whom she comes into contact, a vintage Dickensian grotesque who dismisses Marianne Moore as “cuckoo”, Ezra Pound as “twaddle”, and categorises John Ashbery, Stanley Kunitz and Jorie Graham as “comb jellies—lower than ctenophores.” Successfully managing to plant trivia on poets such as Wallace Stevens into the story in a way that is unbothersome and woven into the comedic tapestry of the tale, this is a classic character portrait-cum-assassination in the manner of ‘A Wordstress in Williamsburg’ from Early Stories, where Theroux perfected this form.
As the collection continues, Theroux struggles to suppress the part of him that is perpetually perched over an encyclopaedia, beaverishly hunting for novel factoids and even more beaverishly eager to share those factoids to anyone who will listen. ‘The Corot Lecture’ is a lecture on French landscape painter Jean-Baptiste-Camile Corot with fictional baubles included where the lecturer admonishes his students and alludes to his divorce—flimsy contrivances to pass this lecture off as a legit story. (The lecture itself is typically erudite and interesting—should have been plopped in a trivia volume, though). Similarly, ‘Revelation Hall’ features a young girl oppressed by her religious tyrant of a father who retreats into a private realm of reading and factoid-hunting, allowing Theroux to blitz the pages with random trivia, slowing down and strangling the momentum of the fairly bleak and unremitting story which comes to an abrupt end when he runs out of ways to crowbar in the nous. As one of the few admirers of his trivia volumes (even superfan Steven Moore who wrote A Fan’s Notes has little patience for those) Einstein’s Beets or The Grammar of Rock et al, keeping the two forms separate would make for a less irritating reading experience, especially when the stories in this monstrous volume average over sixty to seventy pages each.
‘The Brawn of Diggory Priest’ retells the early days of the Mayflower settlers—a more narratively appealing way in which Theroux imparts learning into the fabric of a historical yarn. ‘Envenoming Junior’ is the collection’s stand-alone WTAF moment, an acerbic rant in which thinly veiled versions of his long-loathed brother Paul Theroux and nephew Marcel Theroux are savaged in an epic litany of beef and qualm, an exhausting roster of everything that has upset Theroux about the other Theroux over the years, leaving him the most isolated of the Theroux dynasty. As a sustained piece of fictional familial evisceration, the story is pretty impressive in its unburdening of grievance, and deserves some kudos for the audacity of its assault, but the tone of the tale is much too bitter and arrogant to scale any artistic heights, and represents the worst of this tendency toward unfiltered spleen-venting that is funnier in other works.
Limping onward through the volume, this reader eventually fled in sheer exasperation. ‘Madonna Pica’, a story about teens pranking in a seminary has some of the most subpar prose on a sentence level in the collection, forcing me to bail early and skip ‘The Missing Angel’ and ‘The Nemesis of Jawdat Dub’, stories that at a glance repeat this tired formula of outlining a character solely for the purposes of flaunting erudition. The final two shorter stories ‘Acknowledgments’ and ‘A Note on the Type’ are whimsical canapés more lighter in tone, where Theroux flexes his lexical bicep in brief. While this collection is disappointing and the poorest of the three short fiction reissues from Tough Poets Press, it’s worth reiterating the breadth of Theroux’s knowledge, and the power of his prose style where the possibilities of language are boldly exploited like no other writer out there today. As a prose artist, Theroux crafts stories that are passionately in love with words and their potential to thrill and excite the reader. Alas, his previous peaks of prose mastery mean these lesser forays stick out in a canon of uniformly astonishing work, and so are deserving of the serial whipping that this reviewer has performed—entirely out of love and admiration.
For those eager to explore Theroux’s fictive world beyond the novels, I’d recommend Early Stories as the most essential of his story collections. ...more
Kelman’s second story collection, published ten years after his early debut An Old Pub Near the Angel, lays the groundwork for the excellent novels onKelman’s second story collection, published ten years after his early debut An Old Pub Near the Angel, lays the groundwork for the excellent novels on gamblers and ramblers A Chancer and Busconductor Hines, and cuts a path toward the signature stream-of-consciousness style that would become his calling card for the ol’ Booker. Admittedly, I have been feasting on Kelman with the rapacity of a starved grizzly coming upon a meaty backpacker in Yellowstone NP, so my tolerance for the more monotonous, opaque, and flatter aspects of his prose prick my sensitivity more than the new reader. That aside, this isn’t his strongest collection—anyone wanting warm feelings of lust towards the Glasgow GOAT must start with The Burn....more
Kelman’s story collections often contain reheated matter from previous novels (either abandoned or published), and can suffer from too many abstruse BKelman’s story collections often contain reheated matter from previous novels (either abandoned or published), and can suffer from too many abstruse Beckettish stories that spiral on and on indefinitely, which can frustrate the reader, as they are not the most artistically robust part of his literary arsenal, in spite of their calculated difficulty. Kelman is at his best when mining the obsessive, darker depths of the human consciousness, capturing long digressive transmissions from inside the minds of (mainly) men, a perfect example being the title story in this volume (dedicated to Glasgow poet Tom Leonard), an elegiac snapshot inside the mind of an ageing hardman, browsing the stalls at the Barrowlands (a well-known public market in Glasgow), a tremendously touching story that captures the ache of ageing and no longer being seen. Other highlights are ‘Did the Pixie Speak?’, a comedic tale of an arrogant artist provoking a young printer’s assistant, and ‘Oh the Days Ahead’, where the subtleties of intimacy are explored in a story that is mostly dialogue. The curious, exploratory nature of Kelman’s art mean the reader will either engage with his more obscure work, or long for the writer to write to his strengths. Either way, there’s no denying Kelman’s unquenchable thirst for mining more of the vast mysteries of the human mind....more
These are very fine stories—scabrously funny and wonderfully surreal tales narrated by Kelman’s stock-in-trade narrators: ageing men who are politicalThese are very fine stories—scabrously funny and wonderfully surreal tales narrated by Kelman’s stock-in-trade narrators: ageing men who are politically savvy, cynical, and permanently in the huff about being Scottish. On a par with the vintage collections The Burn and Greyhound for Breakfast....more
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